An intellectual thriller set in the Oxford of the 1660s, a time of great ferment - intellectual, religious and political. The action takes place around the suspicious death of Robert Grove, a Fellow of New College.

Charles Highway, a precociously intelligent and highly sexed teenager, is determined to sleep with an older woman before he turns twenty. Rachel fits the bill perfectly and Charles plans his seduction meticulously, sets the scene with infinite care - but it doesn't come off quite as Charles expects.

In this novel the light and the dark sides of 19th-century London flow into each other, attracting the attention of famous names such as Marx and Gissing, but also of less well-known characters, who play a significant role in a tale that is a mixture of fable, adventure and Gothic comedy.

Charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginnings as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. This novel enables readers to follow her experience in marriage, her questioning of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China.

Like all good medieval coaching inns, the Green Man boasts a resident ghost: Dr Thomas Underhill. Led by curiosity, the landlord, Maurice Allington, uncovers the key to Underhill's satanic secrets. But the skeletons in the cupboard of Allington's own domestic affairs are rattling to get out too.

Presents a story of different loves; and of how a man may need two women in such a way that he can be happy with neither.