The 1920s: a time of hope, promise - and parties. But not all the men came home, after The War. Meet the spare brides. Young, gorgeous - and unexpectedly alone. Ava relishes the freedom of being single. Sarah fears no one can replace her hero husband. Beatrice finds it hard to shine, next to her dazzling friends. And Lydia is married, rich, privileged: so isn't she one of the lucky ones? Then a chance encounter changes everything. Angry, damaged and dangerously attractive, Edgar Trent is an irresistible temptation. And the old rules no longer apply...

The 1920s: a time of hope, promise - and parties. But not all the men came home, after The War. Meet the spare brides. Young, gorgeous - and unexpectedly alone. Ava relishes the freedom of being single. Sarah fears no one can replace her hero husband. Beatrice finds it hard to shine, next to her dazzling friends. And Lydia is married, rich, privileged: so isn't she one of the lucky ones? Then a chance encounter changes everything. Angry, damaged and dangerously attractive, Edgar Trent is an irresistible temptation. And the old rules no longer apply...

Adele Parks, the Sunday Times bestselling author of THE STATE WE'RE IN and WHATEVER IT TAKES, draws together some of her most popular short stories in a collection that will delight existing and new fans alike, and appeal to readers of Lisa Jewell and Jojo Moyes. Whether you're falling in love, staying in love or realising it's time to move on, Adele Parks, with her trademark, up-front, tell-it-as-it-is style, gets right to the heart of the dilemmas real women - and men - face in their lives. LOVE IS COMPLICATED is the final instalment of four deliciously insightful e-short story collections about the changing face of love - and living the life you want.

Award-winning author Iona Grey's next unforgettable historical about true love found and lost and the secrets we keep from one another Selina Lennox is a Bright Young Thing. Her life is a whirl of parties and drinking, pursued by the press and staying on just the right side of scandal, all while running from the life her parents would choose for her. Lawrence Weston is a penniless painter who stumbles into Selina's orbit one night and can never let her go even while knowing someone of her stature could never end up with someone of his. Except Selina falls hard for Lawrence, envisioning a life of true happiness. But when tragedy strikes, Selina finds herself choosing what's safe over what's right. Spanning two decades and a seismic shift in British history as World War II approaches, Iona Grey's The Glittering Hour is an epic novel of passion, heartache and loss. "An absorbing tale of love, loss, and the ties that bind... A sweeping historical saga that captures the desires and dilemmas of the heart." — Booklist

A planet with more cats than people... Grimalkin needs brides. Leo has been dreaming of getting married his entire life and having someone he can love in spite of everything that's gone wrong. He was never supposed to be a doctor.His plan had been to become a warrior or a fighter, but when he lost his tail in a freak accident, he knew he needed to choose a career path where he could hide. Being a doctor means he gets to focus on everyone else - no one looks twice at him. Tamara has been worried about her friends ever since they left Earth. Holly and Amena were both supposed to contact her, but they didn't. Now it's up to Tamara to make her way to Grimalkin and find out what's happened to her best friends. She lost her leg years ago, so she knows she's not going to be eligible for the bridal exchange, but there are other ways of getting to Grimalkin. When Tamara is caught stowing away on a bridal transport to Grimalkin, she's given an impossible choice. Then she sees Leo, and she realizes that all bets are off. She wants him. Like, really wants him. But is Leo ready to love a human like Tamara? And is she willing to open her heart to the one person who could crush it?

Cross-cultural encounters in Europe and Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought the potential for bafflement, hostility, and admiration. The court was the crucial site where expanding Eurasian states and empires met and were forced to make sense of one another. By looking at these interactions, Courtly Encounters provides a fresh cross-cultural perspective on the worlds of early modern Islam, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, Protestantism, and a newly emergent Hindu sphere. Both individual agents and objects such as texts and paintings helped mediate encounters between courts, which possessed rules and conventions that required decipherment and translation, whether in words or in pictures. Sanjay Subrahmanyam gives special attention to the depiction of South Asian empires in European visual representations, finding a complex history of cultural exchange: the Mughal paintings that influenced Rembrandt and other seventeenth-century Dutch painters had themselves been earlier influenced by Dutch naturalism. Courtly Encounters provides a rich array of images from Europe, the Islamic world, India, and Southeast Asia as aids for understanding the reciprocal nature of cross-cultural exchanges. It also looks closely at how insults and strategic use of martyrdom figured in courtly encounters. As he sifts through the historical record, Subrahmanyam finds little evidence for the cultural incommensurability many ethnohistorians have insisted on. Most often, he discovers negotiated ways of understanding one another that led to mutual improvisation, borrowing, and eventually change.

With an ever increasing number of men and women taking up teaching as a career, it is fitting that Pook should reveal his own startling college experiences for the benefit of students about to join and for the delight of teachers whose college days are among their most vivid memories. The excellent work being done by our Colleges of Education is so well known both here and abroad that Pook decided to dwell chiefly on the lighter side of scholastic life, displaying the humour of lecturers, students and those unwitting guinea-pigs of our educational sorties—the school-children, who have to bear the brunt of the student’s endeavours in his new world of Teaching Practice. Against his customary accurate background of the profession, Pook stumbles through the whole range of college activities with characteristic enthusiasm, undaunted by the novel circumstance of being the only man among the six hundred girls who attend Dame May Boyle College of Education for Women. Understandably, he has to seek psychiatric treatment to face such a task, the results of which lead to one of the funniest books in the celebrated Pook series.