Christabel Woodward is the darling of her prosperous, mill-owning father until one day he has a sudden and bewildering change of heart. He has read her mother's story, written in three exercise books and usually kept well hidden, and he knows her secret: Christabel is not his own child, but the illegitimate daughter of Branwell Bronte.Branwell died at thirty-one, an obsessive and tormented wreck of a man who was ruined by drinking, drug addiction and bouts of depression. All Christabel's mother has left of her secret love are a lock of auburn hair and Branwell's daughter, whom he has never known.Daughter of the Northern Fields is Christabel's story. It is the story of a girl who loses all those whom she loves most dearly and is forced to leave the wild Yorkshire moorland which is her home. A girl who is abused by a shattering rape which leaves her feeling she can never again love or be loved. But Christabel is destined to experience a joy that...

'I didn't realise that for want of one person the world could be meaningless.' Blissfully in love for the first time, seventeen-year-old Polly thus confides to her grandmother, Muff. And these words could equally well have been spoken by Muff, or Polly's mother, Tessie. Muff can never forget her beloved brother Con, killed in the First World War, and Tessie has never recovered from the loss of her great childhood friend, Mike. Both women have married, but their lives are unfulfilled and haunted by cherished memories - Muff looks back longingly to her youth when she was a great beauty and mourns the frailty of old age, and Tessie sadly contemplates her failures: as wife, mother and woman. This sensitive story of women and love across three generations moves in time between the early part of the century, the Second World War and the Seventies. An elegantly written novel, it is both funny and sad, remarkable for its perceptive treatment of human weakness.

Dick Grainger is growing up in Yorkshire and Maria Verzotto is in her far-off home in Monteleone in Sicily when they first hear the story of the Golden Lion - the story of a hero, a prince who wins his princess. Later, Helen Connors, the child whom Maria adopts, and Guy, her painfully-loved son, will read it too... But there is another Lion: the Lion of Monteleone, who rules his village kingdom through extortion, kidnapping, murder. This is the Lion Maria remembers from early childhood days when, hidden in a linen chest, she hears what has become of her missing cousin - a knowledge so terrible that it haunts her all her life. Through Maria the two are linked, just as through Maria two worlds are linked: a world of poverty and power in Sicily; of privilege and pain in Yorkshire. The Golden Lion reveals the savage reality of human life which lies beneath the glorious childhood dreams - the reality which includes as well as love, infidelity and betrayal, revenge and loss....

Is at the heart of village life, and marks the beginning of the Squire's land. It is the rescue of Squire Ingham's son by the Irish servant-girl which creates the uneasy bond between Sarah, the respectable family into which she marries, and the Squire's family. But it is Kate, the foundling Sarah adopts, whose doomed, forbidden love for the young Squire forces the families into explosive confrontation. A grand saga, set in all the beauty and pride of Yorkshire, amid the power and excitement of the Victorian era.

The outstanding novel of romance and grief in the aftermath of the Great War From a comfortable childhood in Edwardian Yorkshire, through the pain and grief of theFirst World War, Edwina dreamed of Men on White Horses. But the Age of Chivalry was dead. After the cataclysm, nothing could ever be the same again - and even Italy in the twenties, with its promise of romance and fulfilment, seemed to proclaim an end of hope. Redolent of a lost era, rich in drama and characterization, the fabulous new novel by the award-winning author of A Kind Of War.

Once upon a time Lucy would have agreed with her father. But now, won over by her mother's memories - of Patmore, the family estate; of Gervase, her first love; of a past never less than perfect - she wouldn't dream of criticising the yearly ritual of tea at Gunter's. For it is there that her mother still meets Gervase; there that she can talk endlessly of the golden days before 1914, of the great might-have-been. But perhaps Lucy's mother can recreate the past through her daughter? Tea at Gunter's is an excellent novel, highly sensitive, delicate, and moving.

The Sparkling Cascade of diamonds was designed to adorn the women who married into one of England's most prominent families - a symbol of the wealth and privilege enjoyed by the Firths of Yorkshire. Instead the magnificent necklace would come to burden the women who wore it, becoming for them an emblem of bondage and inherited tragedy. Pamela Haines's enthralling new saga tells of three generations whose lives and destinies are linked through blood and inheritance of this priceless heirloom. There is Lily Greene, star of the London stage, who in 1898 weds the enigmatic sir Robert Firth, and for whom the diamond waterfall comes to symbolize a state of degradation and humiliation she never imagined possible. There is Lily's daughter, Sylvia, who is married for this fabulous legacy and leads a life of love and torment. And finally, there is Willow Gilmartin, who in the spring of 1945 removes the diamond waterfall from its bed of ivory satin-and at last claims a heritage that has...