Moving from the industrial riots of discontented millworkers through to the unsought passions of a middle-class woman, and from religious crises of conscience to the ethics of naval mutiny, it poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Through the story of Margaret Hale, the middle-class southerner who moves to the northern industrial town of Milton, Gaskell skilfully explores issues of class and gender in the...

In this Booker Prize–nominated “dream of a novel,” ordinary middle-class lives converge and collide one summer day in England (The Times).
 
In delicate, intricately observed close-up, this novel makes us privy to the private lives of residents of a quiet street over the course of a single day, to the hopes, fears, and unspoken despairs of a diverse community: a single father with painfully scarred...

Kate Hannigan's eldest daughter, Annie, grows into a young woman loving the elusive boy next door.

"In the early days of WWII, American Claire Stewart smuggles five French Jewish children across the channel before the Nazis storm Paris, and brings them to her estranged aunt's Lake District estate as refugees. Lady Miranda Langford agrees to take them in, but only if Claire stays to help care for them. Though desperate to return to France and the man she loves, Claire agrees, and soon fellow American David Campbell challenges her notions of love....

As World War I approaches, Foreshaw Park, the run-down estate of the once-wealthy Thorman family, is the setting for the burgeoning romance between the Thormans' elder daughter, Agnes, and hired-hand Robert Bradley.

A Girl in Winter is the moving and enigmatic story of Katherine LInd, a European woman in wartime England. The vicious winter weather has paralyzed the countryside; the emotions of Katherine are frozen as well, as fear and loneliness increase her sense of isolation. By splicing the story of Katherine's sunlit 16th summer in between the halves of a single winter day on which the suitor of her youth returns to her present life, Larkin illuminates the...

The New York Times bestselling author takes a riveting new direction with this richly textured, multi-layered novel of friendship, murder, revenge, and class conflict set in an upper-crust English school-as enthralling and haunting as Ian McKewan's Atonement and Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley Audere, agere, auferre. To dare, to strive, to conquer. For generations, elite young men have attended St. Oswald's School for Boys, groomed...

The Whitbread Award-winning author of the Old Filth trilogy captures a moment in time for three young women on the cusp of adulthood. Yorkshire, 1946. The end of the war has changed the world again, and, emboldened by this new dawning, Hetty Fallows, Una Vane, and Lieselotte Klein seize the opportunities with enthusiasm. Hetty, desperate to escape the grasp of her critical mother, books a solo holiday to the Lake District under the pretext of completing...

An English country woman manages to overcome difficult circumstances to find her just reward in the healing power of love.