Julie Teal

Marie-Laure has been blind since the age of six. Her father builds a miniature version of their Paris neighbourhood so she can memorise it. But when the Nazis invade, they flee with a dangerous secret to St Malo. Werner is a German orphan destined to labour in the mines, until he discovers a knack for engineering. As Europe is engulfed by war their lives collide unpredictably.

Berlin, 1933. Aspiring actress Clara Vine arrives in Berlin to find work. Through a chance meeting, she is drawn into a circle of Nazi wives, led by Magda Goebbels. British Intelligence officer Leo Quinn sees Clara as the perfect recruit to spy on her new elite friends. But then Magda reveals to Clara a dramatic secret and entrusts her with an extraordinary mission. Book 1 of series.

We follow the story of Stella from her childhood, as the daughter of a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the mysterious shallows of her middle age. The story is full of drama – violent deaths, an abrupt end to Stella’s schooldays, and two sons by different fathers who aren’t around to see the boys grow up.

London, 1939. Eighteen-year-old Ada Vaughan, a beautiful and ambitious seamstress, has just started work for a modiste in Dover Street. A chance meeting with the enigmatic Stanislaus von Lieben catapults Ada into a world of glamour and romance. When he suggests a trip to Paris, it is a decision which will haunt her during the war and its devastating aftermath.

Mary O'Connor has been keeping a vigil for her first love for the past seven years. Every evening without fail, Mary arrives at Ealing Broadway station and sets herself up among the commuters. In her hands Mary holds a sign which bears the words 'Come Home Jim'. Call her mad, call her a nuisance, call her a drain on society - Mary isn't going anywhere. That is, until an unexpected call turns her world on its head. In spite of all her efforts, Mary can no longer find the strength to hold herself together. She must finally face what happened all those years ago, and answer the question - where on earth is Jim?

Berlin, on the eve of war. When Clara Vine, Anglo-German actress and spy, investigates the death of a young woman from the ‘Faith and Beauty Society’ - the elite finishing school for Nazi girls, what she uncovers is something of infinite value to the Nazi regime - and now she herself is in danger. Book 4 of series.

All families have their myths and historian Juliet Nicolson’s is no different. Here she takes us through seven generations of women, from the nineteenth-century slums of Malaga, the salons of fin-de-siècle Washington DC, an English boarding school during the Second World War, to Chelsea in the 1960s, these women emerge for Juliet as people in their own right, but also as part of who she is and where she has come from.

In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends changed the world. Disappointed by the French Revolution's rapid collapse into tyranny, what they wanted was nothing less than a revolution of the mind. The rulers of Europe had ordered their peoples how to think and act for too long. Based in the small German town of Jena, through poetry, drama, philosophy and science, they transformed the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. They were the first Romantics. Their way of understanding the world still frames our lives and being. This extraordinary group of friends changed our world. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and understanding without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.

As the Second World War draws to a close, Intelligence Officer Gus Clifton surprises his sisters when he introduces Krista - the German wife whom he has married secretly in Berlin. But Gus's sisters can only see the enemy he has brought under their roof. Haunted by passion and betrayal these damaged souls are propelled towards a spectacular resolution.

After the death of her mother, Nell travels from rural Cornwall to the chaos of Marrakech. It's there she meets Amy - a young photographer trying to unravel the story behind her family's involvement in the Vietnam War. The two women develop a close friendship and discover a surprising connection between their own pasts.

In 1933, as Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger hatched a daring and courageous plan: to smuggle her entire school out of Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler's hate-fuelled ideologies posed to her pupils. She knew that to protect them she had to get her pupils to the safety of England.

But the safe haven that Anna struggled to create in a rundown manor house in Kent would test her to the limit. As the news from Europe continued to darken, Anna rescued successive waves of fleeing children and, when war broke out, she and her pupils faced a second exodus.

Featuring moving first-hand testimony, and drawn from letters, diaries and present-day interviews, The School That Escaped the Nazis is a dramatic human tale that offers a unique child's-eye perspective on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust.

Berlin, June 1940: The Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, decides that Clara Vine should adopt a new role as his spy, and so she must go to Paris. Clara realises this might be her chance to escape to England. But Goebbels has other ideas and soon Clara is drawn into a web that threatens to destroy her. Book 6 of series.

When Joe and Christy Davenport step into their new home, they believe their dreams have come true. But Christy becomes obsessed with the previous occupant, Amber Fraser, whose departure is shrouded in mystery. What happened to her? And why are their neighbourly attempts at friendship met with an unnerving silence?

August, 1938. British actress, Clara Vine, is in Paris, mingling with society and passing snippets of information to her contacts in the British embassy. When Clara is approached by a British operative who asks her to befriend Eva Braun, Hitler's girlfriend, she knows that she is putting herself in danger. But Clara will do everything in her power to protect her country. Book 3 of series.

Berlin in 1937 radiates glamour and ambition. Anna Hansen, a bride-to-be, is at one of Hitler's notorious Nazi Bride Schools. When she is brutally murdered Clara Vine, an undercover British Intelligence agent and Anna’s friend, decides to find the truth and send it back to London. It is a dangerous path she treads, and it will take everything she has to survive… Book 2 of series.