Cirrus@Austlit

'An incomparable beauty. A promise to a king. A portrait that can never be completed.

'In the seventeenth-century court of King Charles II, Anne Hyde, the Duchess of York has commissioned a series of ten paintings of the most beautiful women in the entourage. She hopes her series will capture something much more than mere likenesses: they will capture beauty itself. But when the exquisite Emilia Lennox arrives at court, the duchess’s mission takes an unexpected turn.

'Emilia is set on convincing the king to restore her husband’s estate, taken from him over his family’s treason. The king is willing to grant her request – but only if she becomes his mistress. To keep him at bay, Emilia adds a condition of her own: she will consent to the arrangement, but not until her portrait hangs among the duchess’s famed Windsor Beauties.

'When Henry Greenhill – the ambitious principal assistant to court painter Peter Lely – is charged with painting Emilia’s portrait, he sees it as a chance to step out of his master’s shadow and make his name. But Henry’s sitter proves strangely evasive, and he will need more than creative talent to capture this incomparable beauty on canvas …' (Publication summary)

'Two women separated by centuries but connected by one beautiful silk dress. A captivating novel based on a real-life shipwreck discovered off Texel Island by the bestselling author of Gulliver's Wife, Lauren Chater.

'Jo Baaker, a textiles historian and Dutch ex-pat is drawn back to the island where she was born to investigate the provenance of a 17th century silk dress. Retrieved by local divers from a sunken shipwreck, the dress offers tantalising clues about the way people lived and died during Holland's famous Golden Age.

'Jo's research leads her to Anna Tesseltje, a poor Amsterdam laundress turned ladies companion who served the artist Catharina van Shurman for one season at her property outside the Hague. The two women were said to be close, so why did Anna abandon Catharina at the height of her misfortune? And was the dress a gift or did Anna come by it through less honest means? Jo is determined to find out, but as she delves deeper into Anna's history, troubling details about her own past begin to emerge, disrupting the personal narrative she has trusted for sixteen years.

'On the small Dutch island of Texel where fortunes are lost and secrets lie buried for centuries, Jo will finally discover the truth about herself and her connection to the woman who wore the Winter Dress.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'London, 1702. When her husband is lost at sea, Mary Burton Gulliver, midwife and herbalist, is forced to rebuild her life without him. But three years later when Lemuel Gulliver is brought home, fevered and communicating only in riddles, her ordered world is turned upside down.

'In a climate of desperate poverty and violence, Mary is caught in a crossfire of suspicion and fear driven by her husband’s outlandish claims, and it is up to her to navigate a passage to safety for herself and her daughter, and the vulnerable women in her care.

'When a fellow sailor, a dangerous man with nothing to lose, appears to hold sway over her husband, Mary’s world descends deeper into chaos, and she must set out on her own journey to discover the truth of Gulliver’s travels . . . and the landscape of her own heart.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Each lace shawl begins and ends the same way – with a circle. Everything is connected with a thread as fine as gossamer, each life affected by what has come before it and what will come after.

'1941, Estonia. As Stalin’s brutal Red Army crushes everything in its path, Katarina and her family survive only because their precious farm produce is needed to feed the occupying forces.

'Fiercely partisan, Katarina battles to protect her grandmother’s precious legacy – the weaving of gossamer lace shawls stitched with intricate patterns that tell the stories passed down through generations.

'While Katarina struggles to survive the daily oppression, another young woman is suffocating in her prison of privilege in Moscow. Yearning for freedom and to discover her beloved mother’s Baltic heritage, Lydia escapes to Estonia.

'Facing the threat of invasion by Hitler’s encroaching Third Reich, Katarina and Lydia and two idealistic young soldiers, insurgents in the battle for their homeland, find themselves in a fight for life, liberty and love.'

Source: Publlisher's blurb.