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.

A new year has just begun, and for the staff and boys of the school, a wind of unwelcome change is blowing. Suits, paperwork and Information Technology rule the world and Roy Straitley, Latin master, eccentric, and veteran of St Oswald's, is reluctantly contemplating retirement. But beneath the little rivalries, a darker undercurrent stirs.

Forced by circumstance to seek refuge with her daughter, in the abbey of Sainte Marie-de-la-Mer, Juliette reinvents herself as Soeur Auguste under the tutelage of the Abbess. But times are changing: the murder of Henri IV becomes the catalyst for massive upheaval in France. A new appointment is made, and Juliette's new life begins to unravel.

When Grosjean's estranged daughter Mado returns to Le Devin, a tiny island caught like a crab in the seas of northern France, she brings with her an air of energy and change that ruffles the crusty local fisherman. More menacing is the Brismand, whose ruthless interests threaten the survival of Les Salants, the community to which Mado belongs.

A book of short stories from the author of Chocolat .

Henry Chester, a domineering and puritanical Victorian artist, is in search of the perfect model. In nine-year-old Effie he finds her. Ten years later, lovely, childlike and sedated, Effie seems the ideal wife. But something inside her is about to awaken.