Kirjahaku

Amelia was an exceptional young woman. She had a grandmother whom she loved, a mother whom she bore with patient fortitude and Gerald - her boyfriend. When Amelia's life starts to collapse around her she finds herself capable of plots, diversions and friendships she had never before encountered.

By the time Grace is eighteen, she has been orphaned, moved countries and lost touch with her only brother. Talented, awkward and a little fierce, she can't help thinking that she's managed to lose anything she's ever loved. So she decides to revisit her past in America, and she's brought her camera - she's going to catch these memories and pin them down to keep. What she isn't expecting that summer in New Hampshire is to meet the love of her life. Some years later, now divorced and flourishing as a controversial photographer, Grace lives alone - she likes the fact that everything will be exactly where she left it. Until Grace finds that she is, quite literally, being haunted by the past...

Rebecca Finch is a highly successful romantic novelist who has fallen out of love with love. When she heads off for a weekend in Paris and doesn't care that she has absent-mindedly left her boyfriend on the platform in Waterloo, things look bad. But when her god-daughter, struck with pre-wedding jitters, asks Rebecca if marriage is a good idea, and she can't think of a single reason to reply 'yes', she realises it's serious. The 'High Priestess of Romance' is having a crisis of faith. On Mount Olympus, things aren't any easier. Aphrodite is stressed because divorce rates are rocketing and nobody is taking her seriously any more, and Eros, going through a difficult phase, seems to be carelessly shooting arrows without even a thought for the basic compatibility of his victims. So with even her favourite earth-bound acolyte, Rebecca Finch, showing signs of disillusionment, Aphrodite resolves to take drastic action

'No one writes about life quite like Marika Cobbold; no one combines light and dark, humorous and profound, joyous and sorrowful quite so expertly' Guardian, Readers' Books of the Year'Cobbold handles profound and delicate themes with a ceramicist's lightness of touch' Daily MailIt is winter in London. Eliza Cummings, a ceramics restorer at the V&A Museum, is leaving work when she receives an unexpected phone call. Standing in the haze of the Christmas lights she hears a voice which draws her back twenty-five years - to the tragic death of her best friend.But why does Rose's father want her to visit him? Why now? And why is he killing her with kindness when they both know that he blames her for what happened to his daughter?Grief and guilt cast terrible shadows, but as this beautifully wrought story unfolds and the scene shifts from London to the fairy tale landscape of the Swedish countryside - and back in time to Eliza's school days - we learn that generosity, humour and friendship can smooth over and restore even the most broken lives, and that some secrets just can't be kept hidden...

At thirty-nine, Liberty Turner, mother of an illegitimate and nearly grown-up son, and daughter of a flamboyant father who had never grown up, realised that she had no talent. Once, in more prosperous times, her books had been published. Now, as relentless rejections pulverised her every effort, she faced up to the whimsical truth that while she was absolutely bursting with the creative urge, the talent just wasn't there.But as she began to observe her friends and neighbours in the village of Tollymead (not quite the idyllic community that everyone wished it was) she noticed that there were different kinds of creations. Evelyn Brooke, her eccentric and idealistic neighbour, chained herself to condemned oak trees and fought against polluters of the countryside. The vicar, resenting his congregation of middle-class - apparently - well adjusted parishioners, sought longingly for a real social problem to deal with. Even Nancy Sanderson, magistrate and secretary of the Women's League, was eventually to revolt against her life style and create something of her own.As Liberty stoically continued her progress through harvest lunches and creative writing classes, she waited for a rival creation of her own to emerge, and when Oscar Brooke moved into the village, she thought perhaps she might have found it.

'Pride and Prejudice, Scandinavian style' Sunday Express_____'My name is Esther Fisher and I'm about to walk out on the only man I've ever loved...'Esther has been angry all her life - angry with her impossible parents, and at a world that just won't play by the rules. Now working as a tabloid journalist, she takes up the fight once more - this time on behalf of a couple who are being evicted from their home to make room for an opera house.The architect on the project is Swedish-born Linus, a successful, yet dreamy man who is also trying to put his childhood anxieties behind him. When Esther's professional integrity comes head to head with her growing friendship with Linus she begins to wonder if ultimately this is a fight with no winners..._____'A warm, funny novel' Daily Mail'Deliciously descriptive ... beneath its charm lie serious truths' She'Dreamy yet dextrous' Observer

'A life lived in fear is a life half lived,' Clementine Hope's sister, Ophelia, is fond of quoting to her.Clementine, thirty-something and newly divorced, lives in a small Hampshire town, teaching music and working on a collection of fairy tales left to her by her Great Aunt Elvira. But mostly she worries. She worries about the rising crime rate. She worries about disease and illness, about offending God and, in the rare moments when she is at peace with Him, about upsetting the man in the carpet shop or Mrs Challis who runs the café where she meets with her friend Jessica.Clementine enjoys as little of the life around her as any Sleeping Beauty, Just as she thinks she has found love with Nathaniel Scott, the son of her next-door neighbour, her fears cause her to lose him.Then, at a moment of a real crisis, Clementine sees the destructive quality of her life and resolves to change and make amends. To do so she must turn from victim to heroine, slay her personal dragon of fears and phobias, and rescue her own Prince Charming.

"A mystery and an elegy for the death of old-fashioned journalism, it's a book that will warm your heart." The Observer "Splendid . . . Funny, poignant, perceptive and plenty of sharp elbows along the way." Val McDermid Thorn Marsh was raised in a house of whispers, of meaningful glances and half- finished sentences. Now she's a journalist with a passion for truth, more devoted to her work at the London Journal than she ever was to her ex-husband. When the newspaper is bought by media giant The Goring Group, who value sales figures over fact-checking, Thorn openly questions their methods, and promptly finds herself moved from the news desk to the midweek supplement, reporting heart-warming stories for their new segment, The Bright Side, a job to which she is spectacularly unsuited. On a final warning and with no heart-warming news in sight, a desperate Thorn fabricates a good-news story of her own. The story, centred on an angelic apparition on Hampstead Heath, goes viral. Caught between her principles and her ambitions, Thorn goes in search of the truth behind her creation, only to find the answers locked away in the unconscious mind of a stranger.Marika Cobbold returns with her eighth novel, On Hampstead Heath. Sharp, poignant, and infused with dark humour, On Hampstead Heath is an homage to storytelling and to truth; to the tales we tell ourselves, and the stories that save us.

"A mystery and an elegy for the death of old-fashioned journalism, it's a book that will warm your heart" The Observer "Splendid . . . Funny, poignant, perceptive and plenty of sharp elbows along the way" Val McDermid Thorn Marsh was raised in a house of whispers, of meaningful glances and half- finished sentences. Now she's a journalist with a passion for truth, more devoted to her work at the London Journal than she ever was to her ex-husband. When the newspaper is bought by media giant The Goring Group, who value sales figures over fact-checking, Thorn openly questions their methods, and promptly finds herself moved from the news desk to the midweek supplement, reporting heart-warming stories for their new segment, The Bright Side, a job to which she is spectacularly unsuited. On a final warning and with no heart-warming news in sight, a desperate Thorn fabricates a good-news story of her own. The story, centred on an angelic apparition on Hampstead Heath, goes viral. Caught between her principles and her ambitions, Thorn goes in search of the truth behind her creation, only to find the answers locked away in the unconscious mind of a stranger.Marika Cobbold returns with her eighth novel, On Hampstead Heath. Sharp, poignant, and infused with dark humour, On Hampstead Heath is an homage to storytelling and to truth; to the tales we tell ourselves, and the stories that save us.