Juliet Aubrey

As senior MI6 officer Kate Henderson arrives for a weekend away in Venice, a Russian spy enters the city with plans to kidnap her… But it's not all it seems. The defector offers her conclusive evidence that the British Prime Minister is a live agent working for Moscow. Kate's holiday quickly becomes the start of her next mission. With proof of the PM involved in a sordid scandal and a financial paper trail that undeniably links him to the Russians, the evidence seems bulletproof.

But is anything in the dark world of espionage ever that simple? The motives of the defector are anything but clear and, more worryingly, it seems that there are key people at the heart of the British Establishment who refuse to acknowledge the reality in front of them.

Venice, 1486. Across the lagoon lies Murano. Time flows differently here - like the glass the island's maestros spend their lives perfecting.

In secret, Orsola Rosso learns to craft glass. As a woman, she must flout convention to save her family from ruin. We follow her through hundreds of years of war and plague, tragedy and triumph, love and loss.

Skipping like a stone across the centuries, The Glassmaker is a virtuoso portrait of a woman, a family and a city that are as everlasting as glass.

When Bill Mor falls in love with Rain Carter he discovers a new way of being and a new joy in the world and his surroundings. To be with Rain he must abandon his prosaic life as a schoolmaster, his domineering wife Nan and his troubled teenaged children. He must draw on the powers of selfishness, hatred and anger in order to make the final break. But what love could survive all that violence?