Cirrus@Austlit

'Secrets and lies throw three lives into chaos in the last days of the nineteenth century

Colonial Sydney in the final weeks of the 19th century: a city striving for union and nationhood but dogged by divisions so deep they threaten to derail, not just the Federation, but the colony itself. There are chasms opening too when a clandestine note reaches the wrong hands in the well-to-do household of aspiring politician Alasdair Dunleavy and his wife Eleanor. Below stairs, their maid Alice faces a desperate situation with her wayward sister.

Colourful, immediate and involving, this is the sweeping story of three people, their passions and ambitions, and the far-flung ripples their choices will cause. Despite sharing a house, Eleanor, Alice and Alasdair are each alone in their torment and must each find some solution, but at what cost to themselves and those they love?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Two frightened children. Two very different mothers. One night in a tube station during the Blitz...On a frozen January evening in 1944 young wife and mother, Nancy Levin, and her three-year-old child, Emily, flee their impoverished East London terrace as an air raid siren sounds. Not far away 39-year-old Diana Meadows, a middle-class woman from the comfortable Home Counties and her own child, three-year-old Abigail, have got on the wrong bus and, disastrously, now find themselves lost in the black-out as the air raid begins. Joining the other shelterers they hurry to the safety of the tube station. Mrs Meadows, the wife of a stockbroker who has managed so far to sit out the war in the distant suburbs, is terrified - as much by the prospect of sheltering in an Eastend tube station as of experiencing a bombing raid first hand...Far away Diana's husband, Gerald Meadows finds himself in a tank regiment in North Africa while Nancy's husband, Joe Levin has narrowly survived a torpedo in the Atlantic and is about to re-join his ship. Both men have their own wars to fight but take comfort in the knowledge that their wives, at least, are safe...But wartime is a time of extremes where ordinary people find themselves doing things they would never dream of doing in peacetime, risking everything to secure their own and their family's survival, even at the expense of others. Sheltering in the underground station the two mothers and their terrified children find themselves positioned next to each on the platform as the first bombs fall. It will be a night that changes all their lives forever...' (Publication summary)

'It is London, 1880, and nine-year-old Sofia Jarmyn is dead in a horrific domestic accident in the drawing room of the family home. Six months later a fatal train accident in a provincial town results in the death of another little girl.

'In the days following Alice’s death, her distraught father, Thomas Brinklow, journeys to the capital seeking answers to the terrible accident that has seen his own daughter taken from him. He wants justice or revenge. Amid growing public outcry against the railway he owns, wealthy industrialist, Lucas Jarmyn, struggles to make sense of the cruel death of his beloved youngest daughter. His wife, Aurora, seeks solace in the rigid social routines that rule their lives and attempts to reconnect with a husband who now appears to shun her. Her eldest daughter, eighteen-year old Dinah, searches for meaning in the endless round of social calls and charitable work that once filled her days but now seem futile. Only the housekeeper, the stalwart and estimable Mrs Logan, seems able to carry on – but then she is an expert on tragic and sudden deaths.

'In a house where the cook has a morbid fear of pigeons and both the maids have quit, events hinge on an ill-fated trip to a spiritualist, an errant chicken bone and a broken vase. Half the World in Winter is a captivating and atmospheric story of accidental deaths and changing times.' (Publication summary)

'In London's South Kensington, in the austere years immediately following the end of the war, Mrs Harriet Wallis is convicted of the murder of her husband, Cecil, and is sentenced to death by hanging. Leading a pampered if conventional existence, the Wallises appear to have a contented life. However, when the police turn up at the front door on the day the new nanny arrives, the first of a chain of events that will culminate in Cecil's murder is begun.

'Set in a post-War period when a well-to-do British family's existence - both outside and inside the house - is ruled by a strict set of conventions, The Second-last Woman in England explores the depth of emotions that are always there in every family but rarely surface. And what happens when they do.' (From the publisher's website.)

At the height of Britain's General Strike in 1926 a red double-decker bus driven by a volunteer crashes into a low bridge in West London.

Almost eighty years later Jennifer Denzel reveals on daytime television that as a teenager she'd found her sister Charlotte hanging by a school tie in their bedroom. But Charlotte can't believe her ears - it was, she protests, Jennifer who tried to commit suicide all those years ago.

Their grandmother Bertha dreams of a distant time: of a young man she met at a Socialist rally, an unexpected wedding and of a sister, long dead. Meanwhile her daughter, Deirdre, remembers a night during the War forty years earlier, when a V-2 rocket destroyed an entire street, and when she made a shocking discovery.

Brimming with vivid detail of London past and present, The Past and Other Lies is full of warmth atmosphere, subtle wit and exquisite surprises.' (Publisher's blurb)