Books

Unconvinced that a former convict and millionaire philanthropist has been murdered by his suicide-victim ex-wife, detective inspector Jack Spratt and his assistant, Mary Mary, uncover a plot involving money laundering and asylum-seeking titans.

A sequel to the "classic"

The year is 1348 and the Black Plague grips the England. In a world ruled by faith and fear, nine desperate strangers, brought together by chance, attempt to outrun the certain death that is moving inexorably toward them. A reinterpretation of Chaucer's "CanterburyTales".

The author creates a complete narrative around the twenty pages of unfinished manuscript by Charlotte Bronte about a mysterious young student, the child of an apparently wealthy father, who turns a provincial Victorian school upside down.

Married at a tender age to the Spartan king Menelaus, the beautiful Helen bears him a daughter and anticipates a passionless marriage before falling in love with the Trojan prince Paris, with whom she flees to Troy with devastating consequences.

Virginia Woolf is brought back to life in an intertwining of her story with those of two more contemporary women. In Woolf's life, she awakens one morning in London in 1923 with a dream that will become Mrs. Dalloway. In the present, Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party in Greenwich Village for her oldest love, a poet dying from AIDS. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown is pregnant and unsettled, trying to prepare for her husband's birthday, but wanting nothing more than to sit and read Woolf.

In April 1811, while staying with her brother in London to await the publication of her first novel, Jane Austen finds herself deep in the heart of a conspiracy when she investigates the murder of a disgraced woman rumoured to be the mistress of Lord Castlereagh.

The Darcys begin their married life as one of the happiest, most in-love couples imaginable. The "Pride & Prejudice" story picks up after their wedding, but flashes back to the days after the courtship, when Elizabeth and Darcy's passion for each other grew stronger.

In a story inspired by the father character in "Little Women" and drawn from the journals and letters of Louisa May Alcott's father, a man leaves behind his family to serve in the Civil War and finds his beliefs challenged by his experiences.

Two families, the American liberal Belseys and the British right-wing Kipps, battle in the halls of Academe - a reworking of E.M. Forster's Howard's End transferred to America.

A witty and wry retelling of the myth of Penelope and Odysseus - from Penelope's very definite point of view and through the eyes of her twelve maids hanged for disloyalty to Odysseus in his absence.

In a sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O'Hara encounters Rhett before going to Ireland to find her family's heritage.

With the Greek fleet trapped in the straits of Aulis by storms, Iphigeneia, the daughter of Agamemnon, is brought to the coast under false pretences in order to sacrifice her to appease the gods and allow the ships to continue their voyage to Troy.

Set in an Oz where a morose Wizard battles suicidal thoughts, the story of the green-skinned Elphaba, otherwise known as the Wicked Witch of the West, profiles her as an animal rights activist striving to avenge her dear sister's death. Plot twists include a dystopian land of Oz and a rather bad Wizard.

In a prequel to Jane Eyre, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway lives in Dominica and Jamaica in the 1830s before she travels to England, becomes Mrs. Rochester, and goes mad.