A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives. Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their...

"Forty years ago, Steven Smith found a copy of a famous children's book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. Severely dyslexic and wanting to know more, he took it to his remedial English teacher Miss Iles, not realising the chain of events that he was setting in motion. Miss Iles became convinced that the book was the key to solving a puzzle, and that a message in secret code ran through all Twyford's...

Fifteen years ago Vida Avery arrived alone and pregnant at elite Fayer Academy. By living on campus, on an island off the New England coast, Vida has cocooned herself and her son, Peter, from the outside world and from an inside secret. For years she has lived largely through the books she teaches, but when she accepts the impulsive marriage proposal of ardent widower Tom Belou, the prescribed life Vida has constructed is swiftly dismantled. As Vida...

Irresistibly attracted to the theater from an early age, Theodore Ryan, a brilliant yet unknown playwright, concocts a daring scheme that will propel him into the world's spotlight and satisfy his need for recognition.

"From the #1 international bestselling author of The Lost Wife and The Velvet Hours comes an emotionally charged story about a mothers love, a teachers promise, and a child's heart. Katya, a rising ballerina, and Sasha, a graduate student, are young and in love when an unexpected tragedy befalls their native Kiev. Years later, after the couple has safely emigrated to America the consequences of this incident cause their son, Yuri, to be born with...

English professor Allison Bergeron has left the chaos of Manhattan for a small college in the Bronx when her car is stolen. The police drop by with news that they found her beat-up Volvo ... with the body of one of her students in the trunk.

It is October 1940 and Gervase Fen, Oxford don and part-time sleuth--is preparing for the new term. Trouble is in store when Robert Warner, up and coming playwright, chooses Oxford for the premiere of his latest play, Metromania. Together with his cast he comes to Oxford to rehearse a week before the opening, but Warner's motley troupe includes the beautiful but dangerous Yseut Haskell. When she is found shot dead in the college room of a young man...

A satirical comedy of manners featuring the morbidly obese Norman Laney, an unorthodox, inspirational English teacher and college counselor for an elite private school in Mountain Brook, a privileged community outside of Birmingham. A natural wonder from blue-collar Alabama, Laney has barged into the exclusive world of Mountain Brook on the strength of his sensational figure and its several-hundred-pound commitment to art and culture. His mission...

"Ryder Copeland is an accomplished architect and one heck of a father...not to mention tall and sexy. He's everything a hero should be, and Lord knows, Maisy Kelly has read enough of her great-aunt Eloise's romance novels to recognize one when she sees one. But like all fairy tales, Maisy can't help but wonder if this Prince Charming is too good to be true...Ryder is drawn to the shy, curly haired professor who hires him to convert the Victorian house...

The tumultuous events in this tale of a brilliant, eccentric and fatefully divided family begin with the staging of a play about Elizabeth I and come to a shattering climax sure to keep Byatt fans spellbound.