Katharine Swartz

Lonely and stagnating in a soulless job, thirty-seven-year-old Marin Ellis is in need of a new start - but she is not prepared for the one she is given, when, after her estranged father and his second wife die in a car accident, she is made guardian of her fifteen-year-old half-sister Rebecca.

The half-sisters are practically strangers, and their life in Hampshire is stilted and strange. At Rebecca's pleading they move to the picturesque village of Goswell on the Cumbrian coast, settling into the charming Bower House on the edge of church property. When a door to a walled garden captures Rebecca's interest, Marin becomes determined to open it and discover what is hidden beneath the brambles. She enlists the help of local gardener Joss Fowler, and together they begin to uncover the garden's surprising secrets.

In 1919, nineteen-year-old Eleanor Sanderson, daughter of Goswell's vicar, is grieving the loss of her beloved brother Walter, killed just days before the Armistice was signed. As winter passes into spring, her mood remains bleak despite her attempts to alleviate the emptiness she feels. When her father decides to hire someone to help Eleanor restore the once beloved, but now neglected, vicarage gardens, she is enchanted by the possibility of a new garden-and the gardener her father hires, Yorkshireman Jack Taylor. Jack understands the nature of Eleanor's grief more than anyone else seems to, and as they spend time together, a surprising-and unsuitable-friendship unfolds...

The Lost Garden is a luminous novel about tragic secrets, the chance for forgiveness, and the healing that can come from a new start.

Ellen Tyson is living the perfect village life in Goswell. But when her stepdaughter moves in, her fragile idyll is fractured.

At seventeen, Annabelle is surly, withdrawn, and adamant that she isn't, and never will be, part of her father's second family. As Ellen battles with Annabelle, new tensions arise with her husband Alex, shattering the happiness she'd once so carelessly enjoyed. Then Ellen finds a death certificate from the 1870s hidden under the floorboards, and its few stark lines awaken a curiosity in her. Ellen tries to involve Annabelle in her search for answers. But as they dig deeper into the circumstances of Sarah Mills' untimely death, truths both poignant and shocking come to light - about the present as well as the past.

Interlacing the lives of Ellen Tyson and Sarah Mills, The Second Bride is a captivating and moving story about what it means to be a family, and the lengths we will go to for the people we love.

Marine archaeologist Rachel Gardener is thrilled to be summoned to the coast of Cumbria to investigate a newly discovered shipwreck. She is also relieved to escape the tensions of her troubled marriage, and to be closer to her ailing mother.

But when a mysteriously sunken ship is discovered to be a slaving ship from the 1700s, Rachel is determined to explore the town of Whitehaven's link to the slave trade and soon she learns of Abigail Fenton, the young wife of a slave trader, who has a surprising secret of her own. The more Rachel learns about Abigail, the more she wonders if the past can inform the present… Can Rachel learn from Abigail and break free from her troubled history and embrace the future she longs to claim for her own?