Helen Keeley

Connie McCabe longs for the summer where she spends the days leading tours across the continent. But it's on the glamorous shores of Lake Como where she is truly swept away, when Jared, a much younger man, falls for her. Despite resisting his advances Connie finds that he's got under her skin. And so begins a long, hot, intoxicating summer where Connie succumbs and breaks her marriage vows. At the end of the season Connie returns home to her husband, wanting to put this affair behind her.

A couple drive from London to coastal Provence. Anya is preoccupied with what she feels is a relationship on the verge; unequal, precarious. Luke, reserved, stoic, gives away nothing. As the sun sets one evening, he proposes, and they return to London engaged. But planning a wedding does little to settle Anya's unease. As a child, she escaped from Sarajevo, and the idea of security is as alien now as it was then. When social convention forces Anya to return, she begins to change. The past she sought to contain for as long as she can remember resurfaces, and the hot summer builds to a startling climax.

Lean, sly and unsettling, Asylum Road is about the many borders governing our lives: between men and women, assimilation and otherness, nations, families, order and chaos. What happens, and who do we become, when they break down?

When Alex pulls up to meet 'Max', he expects everything but a ninety-year-old lady who has her heart set on getting to Brussels by carpool.

As for 'Max', who is actually called Maxine, she could not be more ill at ease when settling into the seat next to this young man with bloodshot eyes. God help her if he turned out to be a drug addict who hasn't slept in days!

When it becomes clear that Maxine is suffering from Alzheimer's and wants to take matters into her own hands while she still can, and that Alex battles severe depression, a wonderful friendship starts to form between the unlikely pair. Before long, their travel plans take an unexpected turn...

On a boat heading out into the North Sea, Ellen Brooke steels herself to spend almost a month locked inside a hyperbaric chamber with five other divers. They are all being paid handsomely for this work - to be lowered each day inside a diving bell to the sea bed, taking it in turns to dive down and repair oil pipes that lie in the dark waters. It is a close knit team and it has to be: any error or loss of trust could be catastrophic.

All is going to plan until one of the divers is found unresponsive in his bunk. He hadn't left the chamber. It will take four more days of decompression, locked away together, before the hatch can be opened. Four more days of bare steel, intrusive thoughts, and the constant struggle not to give way to panic. Mind games, exhaustion, suspicion, and, most of all, pressure. And if someone does unlock the door, everyone dies...

What happens when the person closest to you has led a life of deception?

After the funeral of her mother, Sally, Alice Kent is approached by a man named Angus Tweedy. He claims to be her father and tells her that he served time in prison for marrying Sally bigamously.

What does he hope to gain telling her this now, thirty years on? How can her adored dad Ralph not be her true father? And why did her mother betray her so badly?

She had accepted Sally's many faults, and her reluctance to never speak of the past. But faced with this staggering deception, Alice knows she must uncover the whole truth about her mother.

Whatever the cost.

Alice's journey into her mother's past is one of incredulity as she discovers a woman shaped by a truly traumatic childhood . . .

On the last night in October 1999 the clocks went back, and Ella and Will's love began. A teenage Ella sat around a bonfire drinking with her future husband and her oldest friend Cole. As Ella wandered away from the group, she found herself leaning against a derelict archway before passing out. The next day, Ella remembered fractured images of a conversation with a woman 
in a green coat and red scarf but dismissed it as a drunken dream. Twenty-three years later, with her marriage to Will in trouble, and Cole spiralling out of control, Ella opens a gift which turns her life upside down: a green coat and red scarf. When she looks in the mirror, the woman from the archway is reflected back at her. As the last Sunday in October arrives, Ella is faced with a choice. Would she choose a different life, if she could do it again?

1348: The Black Death enters England and people start to die in their thousands. In the demesne of Develish, Lady Anne takes control of her people's future. Along with her slave, Thaddeus Thurkell, they decide to quarantine Develish by bringing the serfs inside the walls. With this sudden overturning of the accepted social order, where serfs exist only to serve their lords, conflicts soon arise…

Jen Garner tries her best to be ‘wife and mother of the year’. She helps organise school plays and accompanies her husband to company dinners, all with a big smile on her face. But Jen has started to receive strange gifts in the post...first flowers, then a sympathy card. It could just be a joke; that’s what she tells herself. But then the final ‘gift’ arrives, and Jen has to question why somebody is so intent on shattering her life into pieces....

The morning after a terrible storm, a woman turns up in a remote Cornish village. She calls herself Charlie, but it's a name she's only had for a few days. She keeps herself to herself, reluctant to integrate with the locals. Because Charlie has a secret. Charlie was in prison for providing a false alibi for a murderer. But Lee Fisher wasn't a murderer to her; he was the man she loved. Convinced of his innocence, Charlie said she was with him the night a young woman was killed. This sacrifice cost her everything. And now she has a chance to start again. But someone is watching her, waiting for her, wondering if she's really paid the price for what she did.

Summer, 2021. Nell has come home at her family's insistence to celebrate an anniversary. Fifty years ago, her father wrote The Golden Bones. Part picture book, part treasure hunt, Sir Frank Churcher created a fairy story about Elinore, a murdered woman whose skeleton was scattered all over England. Clues and puzzles in the pages of The Golden Bones led readers to seven sites where jewels were buried - gold and precious stones, each a different part of a skeleton. One by one, the tiny golden bones were dug up until only Elinore's pelvis remained hidden. The book was a sensation. A community of treasure hunters called the Bonehunters formed, in frenzied competition, obsessed to a dangerous degree. The book made Frank a rich man. His daughter, Nell, became a recluse. But now the Churchers must be reunited. The book is being reissued along with a new treasure hunt and a documentary crew are charting everything that follows. Nell is appalled, and terrified. During the filming, Frank finally reveals the whereabouts of the missing golden bone. And then all hell breaks loose.

As the year 1349 approaches, the Black Death continues its devastating course across England. In Dorsetshire, the quarantined people of Develish question whether they are the only survivors. When Lady Anne and Thaddeus conceive an audacious plan to secure her people's independence, neither foresees the life-threatening struggle over power, money and religion will follow...

Anna Robinson hasn't been seen since she went on a night out with her four closest friends. She has a loving husband and a son she adores. Surely she wouldn't abandon them and her perfect life...But what has happened to her? At the school gates, it's not long before the rumours start. Anna's oldest friend Grace is beside herself with worry - desperately searching for answers, and certain that someone is hiding the truth. With each day that passes, Anna's life is under increasing threat. And a the pressure mounts, it won't be long before something cracks...