Clare Francis

The Amazing Power of Activism is the perfect way for young readers to get to grips with the principles of the subject and its terminology. With a clear and entertaining explanation, coupled with comic strips, photographs, and illustrations, it explains what activism is, how it has changed the world, and what people are campaigning for today

During the annual Sherlock Holmes festival in Meiringen, Switzerland, novelist Gustav Slavorigin is murdered. None of the festival guests are above suspicion. Even amateur sleuth Evadne Mount is unprepared for the twists and turns of the investigation which climaxes at Meiringen’s principal tourist attraction, the Reichenbach Falls.

Across the foldyard from Sally Coulthard's North Yorkshire farmhouse, stands an old stone barn. When she discovered a set of witches' marks on one of its internal walls, she began to wonder about the lives of the people who had once lived and worked there.

Both the intimate story of a building and its hinterland, and a wider social history, The Barn explores a hidden corner of rural Britain that has witnessed remarkable changes. From the eighteenth-century Enclosures to the Second World War, the fortunes of the Barn have been blown, like a leaf in a gale, by the unstoppable forces of new agriculture and industry. Seismic shifts in almost every area of society were all played out here in miniature - against a backdrop of scattered limestone villages and the softly rolling Howardian Hills.

On the eve of an unusual voyage, a young woman reviews her life. Her story begins with a 'beautiful visit' to friends in the country which serves as an awakening experience. What follows is an account of her struggle to retain the mood of her visit.

Anna Feldman is born in Vienna just as war breaks out; war will come to shape her entire life. But as Anna moves from Austria to Palestine, England to Germany, one thing will remain a constant: the weight of the secret she keeps.

This is the story of Anna, the people she loved and the people she lost - and a heartbreaking choice which changed the course of her life forever.

Judith Lane is the young widow of the war hero Anthony Lane, and an editor at the successful if rather rakish publisher. But one evening the harmonious routine of Judith's life is interrupted when she receives her first visit from Baldwin Reeves, who reveals that Anthony's wartime adventures were not quite as glorious as the newspaper reports would have her believe. To protect Anthony's family from the scandal, Judith reluctantly acquiesces to the repellent but attractive Reeves's demands - but both blackmailer and blackmailee soon find themselves out of their depth in ways they could not have anticipated.

For Emily Pool, India is a magical place where she has the freedom to escape her mother's suffocating influence. But as the cracks in Emily's family home are papered over, and the Pools strive to maintain an outward impression of respectability, it is through the Nikolides that Emily discovers that nothing in the town is quite as it seems . . .

Adeline, an impulsive bride with an Irish temper, and her husband, Captain Whiteoak, select Lake Ontario as the site of their new home. With the trials and tribulations of the building of the house, the swimming and skating parties, and the jealousies and humourous events that arise, Jalna not only becomes a symbol of their love, but a heritage for generations to come.  Book 9 of series.

David Levy was orphaned in a disaster in Safed in 1837. Thirty years later he is in England hosting a society ball when his granddaughter, Anna, finds notebooks showing glimpses of a hundred years of family life. But behind the apparent calm lies a story of deception and betrayal. This tale is based on a true story of four generations, and woven round the roots of the author's family.

Cecily Bonville-Grey was one of the richest women of her time, inheriting the Harington and Bonville fortunes as a young child.

In 1474, at the age of fifteen, she married Thomas Grey, the eldest son of Elizabeth Woodville from her first marriage to Sir John Grey. When Thomas was created Marquis of Dorset a year later, Cecily became the Marchioness of Dorset alongside him.

During the Wars of the Roses and the emergence of the new Tudor dynasty, Cecily was witness to many of the events that unfolded and her own story is intertwined with many of these events. Yet she remains relatively unknown. This is Cecily's story.

Set in New York City at the beginning of the American Revolution, this is the story of Isabel and her five-year-old sister sold as slaves to a cruel Loyalist family. Isabel hopes to gain her freedom and becomes a spy for the rebels.

Tracy Quinn, daughter of a screen star and raised on film sets around the world, returns to her adored family home, a country house named China Court. Her grandmother's recent death has set in motion events that threaten Tracy's future and the very existence of China Court.

The story of a quiet cathedral town, of an orphan who finds a new home, of two people who fight to separate themselves from the ghost of a man whose mystery has cast a spell that only his return can break, and of a dream that can only end with a new dawn.

Clara is a hairdresser at Cindy Coiffure, a sleepy French salon with an identity crisis. Her relationship is fizzling out. Her tanoholic boss Madame Habib worships Jacques Chirac and talks longingly of her days in Paris. And now Madame Lévy-Leroyer wants to go blonde. Clara can't help but wonder if there's more to life than this...

Everything changes when a customer leaves behind the first volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. As Clara reads, she discovers a new world. And slowly but surely, she will work out who she wants to be.

The poems of Emily Jane Brontë are passionate and powerful works that convey the vitality of the human spirit and of the natural world. Only twenty-one of her poems were published during her lifetime - this volume contains those and all others attributed to her. Many poems describe the mythic country of Gondal and its citizens that she imagined with Anne, and remain the only surviving record of their joint creation. Other visionary works, including 'Remembrance' and 'No coward soul is mine', boldly confront mortality and anticipate life after death. And poems such as 'Redbreast early in the morning' and 'The blue bell is the sweetest flower' evoke the wild beauties of nature she observed on the Yorkshire moors, while also examining the state of her psyche.

Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during the First World War, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, cunningly join forces. To stave off boredom, Jones makes a handmade Ouija board and holds fake séances for fellow prisoners. One day, an Ottoman official approaches him with a query: could Jones contact the spirits to find a vast treasure rumoured to be buried nearby? Jones, a lawyer, and Hill, a magician, use the Ouija board - and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception-to build a trap for their captors that will lead them to freedom. 

Fran may be old but she's not going without a fight. So she dyes her hair, enjoys a glass of red wine, drives restlessly around the country and lives in an insalubrious tower block that her loved ones disapprove of. And as each of them seeks happiness in their own way, will they be waving or drowning when the end comes?

Catherine LeVendeur is a young scholar come to conquer her sin of pride at the Convent of the Paraclete, famous for learning, prayer, and its abbess, the fabled Heloise. When a manuscript the convent produced for the great Abbe Suger disappears, rumors surface saying the book contains sacrilegious passages and will be used to condemn Heloise's famous lover, Peter Abelard.

To save her Order, and protect all she holds dear, Catherine must find the manuscript and discover who altered the text. She will risk disgrace, the wrath of her family and the Church, and confront an evil older than Time itself--and, if she isn't careful, lose her immortal soul.

Malcolm Hardy, the new partner at Taviscombe's veterinary practice, is not a popular man; but without his money the surgery would have to close. Within a few weeks of starting his new job he seems to have upset most of the town: firing one of his long-serving colleagues; installing his girlfriend as veterinary assistant at the surgery; refusing to treat stray animals for free; accusing another colleague of malpractice as well as being seen out with a married woman. As far as Sheila Malory is concerned there is little to like about the new vet. But despite his unpopularity it is still a shock when Hardy collapses and dies at the surgery. And when the post-mortem reveals that his death was unnatural, suspicion instantly falls on his former colleagues. Could somebody at the practice be a killer? Or might the thoroughly unpleasant Malcolm Hardy have other enemies with murder in mind?

In July 1914 a family gathers at a holiday hotel in Devon. There is a dominant father and a socially ambitious mother who adores her son Dennis. When he arrives it is clear why he does not fit in with his smugly conventional family. With the outbreak of war, the story focusses on Dennis’s refusal to fight and his falling in love with Alan.

A lyrical and compassionate collection of short stories in which the characters are united by a quest for lasting value, as they ask how we should treat our world, our work, our selves, and each other. A vainglorious mine owner dreams of harnessing all of nature to the machinery of commerce. Two ladies of a certain age hunt rare butterflies in a pre-First World War Europe already experiencing the first bites of biodiversity loss. A climate campaigner must choose between personal happiness and political action. A rural Welsh community is fascinated and angered by glimpses of its invisible, wealthy neighbours.

Emily the spider seems exactly the same as all her brothers and sisters, until she races for the Spider Sports, when they discover she has ten legs instead of eight. They accuse her of being a cheat, and she is catapulted from the web. After being swallowed by a vacuum cleaner, she meets another spider, James, who befriends her.

Abducted by slave traders from her home in Ruthenia – modern-day Ukraine – around 1515, Roxelana was brought to Istanbul as a concubine for Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, ruler of the Ottoman Empire and one of the world’s most powerful men. Until now Roxelana has been seen by historians as a seductress who brought ruin to the empire, but historian Leslie Peirce reveals the compelling story of an elusive woman who transformed the Ottoman harem into an institution of imperial rule.

Orphaned at a young age, Eva Trout has found a home of sorts with her former schoolteacher, Iseult Arbles. From a safe distance in London, her legal guardian, Constantine, assumes that all's well. But Eva's flighty, romantic nature hasn't entirely clicked with the Arbles household, and Eva is plotting to escape. When she sets out to disappear without a trace, she unwittingly leaves a paper trail for her various custodians–and all kinds of trouble–to follow.

Driven from their homes by danger and cruelty, two teenagers take refuge in a neighbouring friary and convent, only to find new danger when a series of grisly murders occur. Set in 14th century Italy.

At the age of fifteen, Fanny Burney made a bonfire of all her works, ‘with the sincere intention to extinguish for ever in their ashes her scribbling propensity’. She was anxious that she might turn into an author, a fate incompatible - for a woman - with respectability. This portrait of the eighteenth-century author and satirist chronicles her literary career, her adventure-filled life, and her influence on the work of later writers.

Without Churchill’s inspiring leadership Britain could not have survived its darkest hour and repelled the Nazi menace. Without his wife Clementine, however, he might never have become Prime Minister. This is the inspiring but often ignored story of one of the most important women in modern history.

Here we meet the lovable Caroline Smith and glimpse the stages of her life through the gardens in which she digs. There's the lavish abandoned one in which she has no right to dig; the tiny one in which she has no time to dig; the extravagant one, complete with stubborn gardener, in which she's not allowed to dig; and one final garden, hers and hers alone, in which she finds quiet, wise contentment.

As we follow Caroline through the vicissitudes of life, we meet her adoring husband Henry, her shockingly modern children Leon and Lily, and friends and neighbours from the self-righteous Ellen Taylor to the posh but hilariously down-to-earth Lady Tregartha.

The author recounts the severities and pleasures of her school days in Victorian London.

Photographer Lucy Cardwell is sifting through the papers of her late father when she finds he'd been researching an uncle she never knew he had. Intrigued, she visits her father's childhood home, the once beautiful Carlyon Manor. She meets an old woman named Beatrice who has an extraordinary story to tell. And, as Lucy listens to the tales of the past, she learns a secret that will change everything she has ever known …

Summer, 1915. Young Englishwoman Vivian Rose Spencer and twenty-year-old Pathan, Qayyum Gul meet on a train to Peshawar, unaware that a connection is about to be forged between their lives - one that will reveal itself fifteen years later when anti-colonial resistance, an ancient artefact and a mysterious woman will bring them together again.

First book of the Balkan Trilogy. Newly married Guy and Harriet Pringle arrive in Bucharest in the autumn of 1939, where Guy is to teach English at the university. They find a city of contrasts, peopled with a cast of sometimes eccentric characters and overshadowed by the tension of war.

Elisabeth is a picture restorer. This gives her the solitude and independence she needs - living and working alone in her flat. But when a mysterious, wealthy man commissions her to restore his fabulous collection, a combination of curiosity and financial need prompts her to accept his offer. Elisabeth soon realises her error, as the past and the present combine to make privacy her nemesis.

Wendy Cope set out to prove that misery doesn't have all the best lines, and in this anthology she proved it. These poems are about love, life, places, the natural world, food, drink, books, music, company and solitude, but they are all unashamedly happy.

Successful lady novelist Laura Morland and her young son Tony set off to spend Christmas at her country home in the sleepy surrounds of High Rising. But Laura's wealthy neighbour George Knox has taken on a scheming secretary whose designs on marriage to her employer threaten the delicate social fabric of the village.

A long holiday is just what Izzy Jordan needs. So when she's invited to spend the summer on Corfu and is offered the chance of a no-strings holiday romance with the irresistible Theo, what should she do? Go for it, or listen to the voice of Modern Woman and tell him to sling his hook? Just as she thinks she's made up her mind, along comes Mark, whose turbulent past sets in motion a series of dramatic events...