In late-nineteenth-century Chicago, visionary retail tycoon Marshall Field made his fortune wooing women customers with his famous motto: “Give the lady what she wants.” His legendary charm also won the heart of socialite Delia Spencer and led to an...

In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the wakaresaseya (literally “breaker-upper”), a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings. When Sato hires Kaitaro, a wakaresaseya agent,...

Peter Godwin grew up in Zimbabwe and he returns to the country when his Father passes away. The picture of modern day Zimbabwe, the political and economic failings, the terror, all have a part in his personal observations, with...

England, 1943. Lost in fog, pilot Vee Katchatourian is forced to make an emergency landing where she meets enigmatic RAF airman Stefan Bergel, and then can’t get him out of her mind. In occupied Poland, Ewa Hartman hosts German...

Five friends. One deadly obsession. The salt-scented quadrangles of St Andrews University greet misfit first-year student Finn Nethercott with indifference. This is a place where only privilege counts, and those from the right backgrounds can get away with murder....

My Mother. At night my mother creaks, the house creaks along with her …’ Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent bed-bound mother is the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about. Aoileann desperately wants...

September 1977. Mette Misvær, a three-year-old girl disappears without trace from the sandpit outside her home. Her tiny, close middle-class community in the tranquil suburb of Nordas is devastated, but their enquiries and the police produce nothing. Curtains twitch,...

Korea, 1943. Hana has lived her entire life under Japanese occupation. As a haenyeo, a female diver of the sea, she enjoys an independence that few other Koreans can still claim. Until the day Hana saves her younger sister...

The narrator, the reticent Kate, who is 12, and her teenage sister, the boisterous Frankie, are American girls living in Hong Kong in the summer of 1967. Their father, Michael, a photographer for Time magazine, spends most of each...

Two days before Christmas, a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted village of Kálfshamarvík. Did she jump, or did something more sinister take place beneath the lighthouse and the abandoned old house on the...