'Utterly beguiling' Joanna Trollope

On a Monday night in October in a seaside town in Suffolk, a woman is brutally murdered. She was not an obvious victim. She just wasn't, thinks her grieving, bewildered friend Tess, the type to have something happen to her. As the police go about their routine investigation, Tess' world of nappies, school runs and baked beans begin to unravel.

Jennifer is in solitary confinement. Through the world of memory and imagination she lives in, two stories emerge; her romantic relationship with a jazz musician and the link this has with her imprisonment, and the experiences she imagines her ancestor has whilst bound for Botany Bay.

From the author of Me and the Fat Man and Home comes a gripping historical novel set in Victorian London. This is a tale of murder and love -- and the tragic extremes of loss and need.

Alice Keppel was a manipulative woman, whose relationship with Edward VII placed her at the centre of high society. Her daughter, Violet, was fascinated with her mother's power. Yet when she fell in love with Vita Sackville-West, she threatened to break all the moral rules of her mothers world.

It's the middle of the 21st century, and the next Ice Age has suddenly sent global warming into reverse. Saul is one of the Ice People, the threatened peoples of the northern hemisphere, who, watching their world freeze over, try to move south towards the equator.