Antonia Beamish

'The coaching room can sometimes become its own theatre. A marriage unravels right in front of you. A shaming confession is made. A secret hugged for many years is disclosed. Tears of wrenching anger and despair can take up the whole session. These are times where you and the client hold your breath because nothing is ever going to be the same again.' 

It is very rare as an adult to find a place where you are not judged, where you can be open, honest and vulnerable: that is exactly what coaching provides. This book brings together twenty different stories which represent the very human dilemmas a coach can encounter. Coaching is not therapy but it is closely related, and while many people seek (or are assigned) executive coaching for work problems, just like therapy each person brings their whole self to the conversation.

Exploring Jenny's beautifully written and moving stories will offer the reader a chance for deep reflection on the meaning of modern relationships.

The murder of a promising footballer, son of Brighton’s highest-ranking police officer, means Detective Superintendent Jo Howe has a complicated and sensitive case on her hands. The situation becomes yet more desperate following devastating blackmail threats.

Howe can trust no one as she tracks the brutal killer in a city balanced on a knife edge of vigilante action and a police force riven with corruption.

Book 1 in the Jo Howe mystery series.

Promises only last if you trust each other, but what if one of you is hiding something? A secret no one could ever guess. Someone is living a lie. Is it Lisa? Maybe it’s her daughter, Ava. Or could it be her best friend, Marilyn?

Despite past heartache, Sarah Yates is finally marrying her true love, John Needler. But Sarah and John can’t pretend they’re an ordinary couple. They’re time travellers and where time travel is involved, nothing runs smoothly, and when the past and the present collide, that’s when the real problems start … Sequel to 'A Stitch in Time' (009903)

Hamish Wolfe is charming, magnetic and very persuasive. He receives adoring letters every day from his countless admirers. He's also a convicted murderer, facing life in prison. Maggie Rosie is a successful lawyer. Reclusive and enigmatic, she only takes on cases she can win. Hamish is convinced that Maggie can change his fate. Maggie is determined not to get involved. She thinks she's immune to the charms of such a man. But maybe not this time...

1987: One morning, fifteen year old Tania Mills kisses her mother, walks out of her front door and disappears. 2014: When a new lead comes in for Tania’s case, DS Sarah Collins is asked to investigate. PC Lizzie Griffiths, the subject of Collins’ last investigation, is back on the job and working at a domestic violence unit. When a quirk of fate brings Lizzie and Collins back into contact, each must try to reconcile the claims of the past with the demands of the present.

When a firebomb attack at a Brighton travellers’ site kills women and children, Chief Superintendent Jo Howe has strong reason to believe the new, far-right council leader is behind the murders.

Howe digs deeper into the case and uncovers a criminal ring of human trafficking and euthanasia leading to a devastating plot threatening thousands of lives and from which the murderous politician will walk away scot-free.

Book 2 in the Jo Howe mystery series.

A radical look at Jane Austen as you've never seen her - as a lover of farce, comic theatre and juvenilia. Paula Byrne celebrates Britain's favourite novelist 200 years after her death and explores why her books make such awesome movies time after time.

8-year-old Carmel Wakeford becomes separated from her mother at a local children's festival, and is found by a man who claims to be her estranged grandfather. He tells her that her mother has had an accident and that she is to live with him for now. While her mother desperately tries to find her, Carmel embarks on an extraordinary journey, one that will make her question who she is - and who she might become.

Dawn, mist clearing over rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, and a young photographer takes the shot that might make his career. The image, of a staring soldier in the midst of mayhem, will become one of the great photographs of the war. But what Jonathan has seen in that village is more than he can bear...

He flees to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, and to take different kinds of pictures: of streets and crowds and cherry blossom - and of a girl with whom he is no longer lost. Yet even here his history will catch up with him: that photograph and his responsibility in taking it; his responsibility as a witness to war, and to other events buried deep in his past.

A farm in Norfolk in the 1970s. A Japanese girl comes to visit her English lover in the house where he was born. She arrives on a day of perfect summer, stands with his mother in a garden filled with roses, watches as his brother walks fields of ripening wheat. But between the two brothers lies the shadow of their father's violent death almost twenty years before, the unresolved narrative of their childhood - a story that has gone untold, a story that began in the last war. In the presence of the girl, the old trauma begins to surface as the work of the harvest begins.

In a compelling addition to Harding's cycle of acclaimed novels, Harvest tells how a family reaps the consequences of its past.

Angie Watts had the perfect ordinary family. But Angie’s happy life is shattered when her son Liam falls in with the wrong crowd. And when her son’s bad choices lead to the murder of her husband, it’s up to Angie to hold what’s left of her family together. Her son is missing. Her daughter is looking for help in dangerous places. And Angie is fighting just to keep a roof over their heads. But Angie is a mother. And a mother does anything to protect her children - even when the world is falling apart....

The bestselling prizewinning author of How to Live and At the Existentialist CafA brings us a celebration of 700 years of human endeavour and achievement in which dozens of philosophers scientists classicists architects educationalists and others explore the art of being human Humanly Possible is a wide-ranging personal thought-provoking and entertaining journey through the battle of ideas over some 700 years of history - mostly but not exclusively in Europe. Through a mixture of biography and philosophy Bakewell seeks to understand what humanism is why it has continued to flourish despite opposition from fanatics mystics tyrants and cultural pessimists of all kinds and exactly why we should value and defend it in the 21st century.

Alice finds a man on the beach outside her house. He has no name, no jacket, no idea what he is doing there. Against her better judgement, she invites him into her home. But who is he, and how can she trust a man who has lost his memory?

Charlie's experiences at the Battle of Kohima and the months he spent lost in the remote jungles of Nagaland during the Second World War are now history. Home and settled on a farm in Norfolk and newly married to Claire, he is one of the lucky survivors. But a chasm exists between them.

Memories flood Charlie's mind; at night, on rain-slicked roads and misty mornings in the fields, the past can feel more real than the present. Though hidden even to himself, the darkest secrets of Charlie's adventures in the strange and shadowy ridges of the Nagaland mountains, his dream-like encounters with the mysterious and ancient tribesmen, leak and bleed through his consciousness. What should be said and what left unsaid? Is it possible to forge a new life in the wake of unfathomable horror?

Abigail Jex never expected to see any of the Radley household again. 

The Radley's were extraordinary, captivating creatures transplanted from a bohemian corner of North London to outer suburbia, and the young Abigail found herself drawn into their magic circle: the eccentric Frances, her new best friend; Frances' mother, the liberated, headstrong Lexi; and of course the brilliant, beautiful Rad. Abigail thought she'd banished the ghost of her life with them and the catastrophe that ended it, but thirteen years later a chance encounter forces her to acknowledge that the spell is far from broken...

After her number-one single, she was never heard of again... Fifteen years later, Bee Bearhorn is found dead in her flat. Shiver in fear when Pandora opens her jar of evil torments. Ana Willis always day-dreamed about the exotic half-sister she hadn't seen in years. When she comes to London to sort through Bee's possessions, she uncovers a life more surprising and mysterious than even she imagined. Along with Bee's closest friends, Ana sets out to discover exactly what happened to her half-sister, Bee Bearhorn, the one-hit wonder...

Orlando King is a trilogy about a beautiful young man, raised in a remote and eccentric wilderness, arriving in 1930s London and setting the world of politics ablaze. In a time of bread riots and hunger marches, with the spectre of Fascism casting an ever lengthening shadow over Europe, Orlando glidingly cuts a swathe through the thickets of business, the corridors of politics, the pleasure gardens of the Cliveden set, acquiring wealth, adulation, a beautiful wife, and a seat in Parliament. But the advent of war brings with it Orlando's downfall; and his daughter Agatha, cloistered with him in his banishment, is left to pick through the rubble of his smoking, ruined legacy.

In 1942, French chef Sylvie Dubois is sent to Paris to spy on the enemy, while German soldier Christoph Baumann has sold his soul to save his sister.

When they meet the world stops turning. But in a city consumed by war, love is a dangerous affair, and the star-crossed lovers will pay the ultimate price...

Decades later, with Christoph's health declining and his memory fading, his young protégé, Julia Clarke, sets out to discover what happened to the woman he never stopped loving.

Can they find the woman who disappeared, or will it be too late?

Three sisters and a brother meet up in their grandparents’ old house one summer. The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past, but now they may have to sell it. Secrets are uncovered and passions erupt as a way of life – bourgeois, literate, ritualised – winds down to its inevitable end.

Claire Wilcox has been a curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum for most of her working life. In Patch Work, she steps into the archive of memory, deftly stitching together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes.

From her mother's black wedding suit to the swirling patterns of her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in spare, luminous prose the spellbinding power of the things we wear. Through the eye of a curator, we see how the stories and the secrets of clothes measure out the passage of time, our gains and losses, and the way we use them to unravel and write our histories.

A long-serving beat cop in the Met and a teenage girl fall to their deaths from a tower block in London's East End. Left alive on the roof are a five-year-old boy and rookie police officer Lizzie Griffiths. Within hours Lizzie has disappeared, and DPS officer Sarah Collins sets out to uncover the truth around the grisly deaths in an investigation which takes her into the dark heart of policing in London.

When war photographer Jo returns from her latest assignment in Afghanistan and moves into the Brighton flat she's just inherited, she hopes to restore equilibrium to her chaotic life. But images of her recent past and the reading of her great-grandmother Elizabeth's diary haunt her, forcing Jo to come to terms with demons she thought she could leave behind.

When Rosie Milford inherits a house in an old silk factory after her mother’s death, the discovery of a shocking truth about her childhood fills her with distrust and fearfulness. Then she starts seeing a strange child, wandering in the garden, who seems as lost as she is..

What are the odds that the stranger sitting next to you on a plane is destined to change your life? Especially when they appear to be your opposite in every way. She's a life-long optimist, looking for her soul mate in every man she meets; he's a resolute cynic - cruel experience has taught him never to put his faith in anyone.

Lake Como - beautiful, enchanting... For Floriana, it is the place where the love of her life is getting married to another woman. For Esme, it is where, over sixty years ago, she fell in love for the first time. Now it's time for both Esme and Floriana to face the past - and the future - on the shores of this romantic lake.

D. H. Lawrence is dying. Exiled in the Mediterranean, he dreams of the past. There are the years early in his marriage during the war, where his desperation drives him to commit a terrible betrayal. And there is a woman in an Italian courtyard, her chestnut hair red with summer.

Jacqueline and her husband have already been marked out for greatness. Passing through New York, she slips into a hearing where a book, not a man, is brought to trial. A young woman and a young man meet amid the restricted section of a famous library, and make love.

Scattered and blown by the winds of history, their stories are bound together, and brought before the jury. On both sides of the Atlantic, society is asking, and continues to ask: is it obscenity - or is it tenderness?

Five-year-old Jimmy Higgins is brazenly snatched from the middle of a busy airport. Jimmy’s mother is a reality TV star who, dying of cancer, entrusted the boy to her friend Stephanie Harker. Stephanie, reaching into the past to discover the motive, encounters a shocking tale of murder and conspiracy, and is faced by the most difficult choice of her life. X rated, contains graphic violence.

Sold by her mother. Enslaved in Pompeii's brothel. Determined to survive. Her name is Amara. Welcome to the Wolf Den... Amara was once a beloved daughter, until her father's death plunged her family into penury. Now she is a slave in Pompeii's infamous brothel, owned by a man she despises. Sharp, clever and resourceful, Amara is forced to hide her talents. For as a she-wolf, her only value lies in the desire she can stir in others. But Amara's spirit is far from broken. By day, she walks the streets with her fellow she-wolves, finding comfort in the laughter and dreams they share. For the streets of Pompeii are alive with opportunity. Out here, even the lowest slave can secure a reversal in fortune. Amara has learnt that everything in this city has its price. But how much is her freedom going to cost her? Set in Pompeii's lupanar, The Wolf Den reimagines the lives of women who have long been overlooked.

It's New Year's Eve, and three women bond over dodgy cocktails and fortune cookies, vowing to make this year their best one yet. As the months unfold, Gemma, Saffron and Caitlin find themselves tested to their limits. Under pressure, they are each forced to rethink their lives, but dare they take a chance on something new?