The Restoration Court knows Lady Dona St Columb to be ripe for any folly, anything to alter the tedium of her days. But there is another Dona who longs for a life of honest love - even if it is spiced with danger. It is this Dona who flees London for remote Navron, finding there a hunted pirate.

When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation.

Philip Ashley is orphaned at an early age and raised by his bachelor uncle Ambrose, who falls in love and marries while travelling in Italy and dies there in suspicious circumstances. When Ambrose's widow turns up in England, Philip is drawn to her, but might she have had a hand in Ambrose's death.

Flory, a white timber merchant, befriends Dr Veraswami, a black enthusiast for Empire. The doctor needs help. U Po Kyin, Sub-divisional Magistrate of Kyauktada, is plotting his downfall. The only thing that can save him is European patronage: membership of the hitherto all-white Club.

Travelling backwards in time, the narrator tells the story of a love affair that had taken place before his own birth.

For years now, the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever. This novel captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting complexity of adult relationships.

A fresh contemporary design for A. S. Byatt's celebrated anthology of English short stories The Oxford Book of English Short Stories.The 37 stories featured here are selected from the 19th and 20th centuries, by authors ranging from Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy to J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan.

Dick Young is lent a house in Cornwall by his friend Professor Magnus Lane. During his stay he agrees to serve as guinea pig for a new drug Magnus has discovered in his biochemical research; the effect of which is to transport Dick from the house at Kilmarth to the Cornwall of the 14th century.

Behind this rather prim and proper title lies the hilarious fictional diary of a long-suffering, disaster-prone Devon lady of the 1930s, and her attempts to keep her somewhat ramshackle household from falling into chaos.

A collection of sinister short stories including 'The Birds' which was famously adapted for film by Alfred Hitchcock.

This romance is Daphne du Maurier's first novel.

Muriel Spark's stunning debut novel

A classic tale of fantasy and self-delusion from one of the most acclaimed British novelists of the twentieth century

A humorous and compassionate look at the blossoming friendship between an old woman and a young man.

A collection of stories of the author whose stories - whether they are set in Italy, Greece, India, or in England itself - contrast the freedom of paganism with the restraints of English civilization, the personal, sensual delights of the body with the impersonal, inhibiting rules imposed by society.

'Hungry Hill' is a passionate story told with du Maurier's unique gift for drama. It follows five generations of an Irish family and the copper mine on Hungry Hill to which their fortunes and fates are so closely bound.