An intimate, intense and beautifully realised novel of possession, power and the liberating loss of innocence, this will delight fans of MISTER PIP and THE POISONWOOD BIBLE. Oceania, 1879. For two years the Peacocks, a determined family of settlers, have struggled to make a remote volcanic island their home. At last, a ship appears. The six Pacific Islanders on board have travelled over eight hundred miles in search of new horizons. Hopes are high, until a vulnerable boy vanishes. In their search for the lost child, settlers and newcomers together uncover far more than they were looking for. The island's secrets force young Lizzie Peacock to question her deepest convictions, and slowly this tiny, fragile community begins to fracture . . . 'Intelligent, beautifully written' The Times 'Historical fiction fans, meet your new favourite author' Stella Magazine 'Beautifully written, immaculately researched and powerfully imagined' Lancashire Evening Post

Full of passion, this wartime coming of age story is about a girl, a boy and a crash-landing Romney Marsh, July 1940. When invasion threatens, you have to grow up quickly. Sixteen-year-old Peggy has been putting on a brave face since the fall of France, but now the enemy is overhead, and the rules are changing all the time. Staying on the right side of the law proves harder than she expects when a plane crash-lands in the Marsh: it's Peggy who finds its pathetic, broken pilot; a young Polish man, Henryk, who stays hidden in a remote church, secretly cared for by Peggy. As something more blossoms between the two, Peggy's brother Ernest's curiosity peaks and other secrets come to light, forcing Peggy and Henryk to question all the loyalties and beliefs they thought they held dear. In one extraordinary summer the lives of two young people will change forever, in a tense and gripping historical drama from Lydia Syson, the author of the acclaimed A WORLD BETWEEN US.

Until Flynn’s neighbor in North Carolina offered him one, he had never considered whether he wanted a peacock. His family became the owners of not one but three charming yet fickle birds: Carl, Ethel, and Mr. Pickle. Here he chronicles their first year as peacock owners, from struggling to build a pen to assisting the local bird doctor in surgery to triumphantly watching a peahen lay her first egg. He also examines the history of peacocks, from their appearance in the Garden of Eden. And Flynn travels across the globe to learn more about the birds firsthand. His book offers surprising lessons about love, grief, fatherhood, and family. -- adapted from jacket.

An epic romance set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War Spain, 1936. Felix, a spirited young nurse, has travelled to Spain to help the cause of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. But she is also following Nat, a passionate young man who has joined the International Brigades fighting Franco. And George - familiar George from home - is not far behind, in pursuit of Felix ... As Spain fights for its freedom against tyranny, Felix battles a conflict of the heart. With the civil war raging around her, Felix must make choices that will change her life forever. An epic and moving historical adventure from debut author Lydia Syson.

"A treasure of a book."—David McCullough The harrowing story of a pathbreaking naval expedition that set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean, dwarfing Lewis and Clark with its discoveries, from the New York Times bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricane's Eye. A New York Times Notable Book America's first frontier was not the West; it was the sea, and no one writes more eloquently about that watery wilderness than Nathaniel Philbrick. In his bestselling In the Heart of the Sea Philbrick probed the nightmarish dangers of the vast Pacific. Now, in an epic sea adventure, he writes about one of the most ambitious voyages of discovery the Western world has ever seen—the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842. On a scale that dwarfed the journey of Lewis and Clark, six magnificent sailing vessels and a crew of hundreds set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean and ended up naming the newly discovered continent of Antarctica, collecting what would become the basis of the Smithsonian Institution. Combining spellbinding human drama and meticulous research, Philbrick reconstructs the dark saga of the voyage to show why, instead of being celebrated and revered as that of Lewis and Clark, it has—until now—been relegated to a footnote in the national memory. Winner of the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize

Widely accepted as the world's first sex therapist, Dr. James Graham was devoted to the research of the effect of physical stimuli on the psyche, and more specifically on sexual activity. It was this that led him to invent his infamous Celestial Bed, a contraption akin to a torture rack, yet built with the intent to impart exquisite sexual pleasure rather than excruciating physical pain. Medicine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was generally more prone to inflict pain than to relieve it. Patients were bled, blistered, lanced, poked, and chopped up, all with little or no anesthesia, and it was the hurt administered by these methods which caused Graham to concern himself with the more gentle side of the profession. Unsurprisingly, such a concern was met with both outrage and controversy. Syson's biography is a truly emotive depiction of both the man himself and 19th-century society. By following him from his native Edinburgh to America and back again, Doctor of Loveachieves a breadth not commonly found in biography, and renders an unforgettable portrait of a truly remarkable man.

Here is a new collection of twelve absorbing, deeply compassionate tales that reveal the subtle revenges of love and indifference, the deep wells of affection, and the strange, breathtaking tricks of chance that make up the texture of our lives. In the rain-washed Italian hills, a forgotten artist's Annunciation brings light to a heartbroken woman; insidiously, in her struggle for love, the second wife of a blind piano tuner distorts his memories of the first; two children, survivors of divorce, mimic their parents' dramas and passions; a mother, tied through love and fear to her son, watches with helpless dread as she realizes the monster he has become.