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  Love can be a tricky emotion as it can so easily drift into a desire for possession.  Love may be blind to start with, but after a while we seek commitment and a return of our invested feelings, otherwise that love can morph into something destructive.  Very few people could agree to share the object of their affections but what if that was the only way to keep them? This story begins in the 1950s and could only ever exist in that period of time.  A time when women were expected to marry in their late teens or early twenties and single men were treated with suspicion.  Companies and organisations chose family men for promotion and homosexuality was very rarely referred to.   Marion is a schoolteacher besotted by her friend's handsome brother Tom and, at 22, she now sees him as her only chance to be rescued from a life 'on the shelf'.  She and Tom are friends, and meet regularly, but there are no outward signs of romantic love and he seems conten...

  Set in the same period as Jane Austen's novels, this book tells the story of two women who were not part of the Assembly Room crowd.   Two women with dirty hands and ruined gloves who spend their days grubbing about on the beach at Lyme Regis looking for fossils. Not a suitable way for a gentle lady to spend her days, but Elizabeth Philpot is resigned to her fate of being a life-long spinster and has long since given up on doing the social rounds looking for a suitable husband.  At the start of the book, Mary Anning is a young girl who pushes her way into Elizabeth's life after she discovers that Elizabeth has started to collect fossils.  Mary and her brother spend their days picking up ammonites and 'devil's toenails' (gryphaea) from the beach and selling them to passing tourists to try and earn enough to keep the family from the workhouse, and she has never met a woman of Elizabeth's standing who was prepared to do such a thing.  Under any other circums...

  Here are two people, who were destined to meet, but circumstances allow them only a short time together before they must part and never meet again.  They don't know each other's histories and won't know what will happen to the other after they walk away in different directions, but that brief connection is key to both their lives. The book begins in the years leading up to the Second World War and the story follows two children; Marie-Laure who is blind and lives with her father in France and Werner who is an orphan living with a kindly woman in Germany.  The chapters are short and the story flips between the two characters until we know who they are and how they learnt their moral values. When the war comes they are swept up into the conflict and policy dictates they must be enemies, but in peacetime they would have shared a common interest and become friends.  Choices are taken away from them and each finds themselves tested both morally and physically.  I t...