When Ravi Kapoor, an over-worked London doctor, is driven beyond endurance by his disgusting and difficult father-in-law, he asks his wife: 'Can't we just send him away somewhere?' His prayer seems to have been answered when his entrepreneurial cousin, Sonny, sets up a retirement home, recreating a lost corner of England in a converted guesthouse.

Returning to Belfast, to attend her father's funeral. Catherine McKenna - a young composer - remembers why she left: the claustrophobic intimacies of the Catholic enclave, her fastidious, nagging mother, and the pervading tensions of a city at war with itself. This is a novel, about coming to terms with the past and the healing power of music.

Property is theft, so they say, and in this novel, the property is both an abundant sugar plantation and the former slave who is now the owner's mistress and the mother of his only child.

An investigation of why so many people deliberately hurt themselves and what can be done to help them. There are powerful stories, in which cutters describe their ritualistic methods and somewhat addictive cravings for seeing their own blood. The author reveals what the afflicted and those close to them can do to start a process of healing.

With the death of a mother and the abduction of a young girl, Susan Fletcher has written a vividly beautiful novel about the innocence and terror of childhood.