"Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning...

Chronicles the lives of a middle-class family whose values are constantly at war with its passions and love affairs.

"The deepest secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves in this richly atmospheric, compellingly written, and expertly constructed crime debut from an emerging talent. Derbyshire, 1978: a small town in the idyllic English countryside is traumatized by the kidnapping of two young schoolgirls, Rachel Jones and Sophie Jenkins. Within hours, Rachel is found wandering alone near the roadside, unharmed yet unable to remember anything, except that her abductor...

Fifteen-year-old Lizzie takes a job as a junior nurse at a ramshackle refuge for the elderly, where she encounters a colorful host of characters and begins to experience the first sense of belonging in her young life.

The Official Downton Abbey Cookbook presents over 100 recipes that showcase the cookery and customs of the Crawley household-from upstairs dinner party centerpieces to downstairs puddings and pies--and bring an authentic slice of Downton Abbey to modern kitchens and Downton fans. Whether adapted from original recipes of the period, replicated as seen or alluded to on screen, or typical of the time, all the recipes reflect the influences found on the...

One of Britian's best loved writers chooses her best short stories from her career at the forefront of contemporary fiction.

As a wave casually laps onto the Cornwall beach, the Ramsay family and friends settle in for an enjoyable warm Edwardian summer. Presided over by the gentle power and irresistible charisma of their mother, their story evolves with the textures, romance and conflicting dreams that draw a family together and simultaneously pull it apart.

In 1918 the Great War has taken so much from so many and it threatens to take even more still from the Hunters, their friends and their servants. Edward, in a bid to run away from problems at home, decides not to resist conscription and ends up at the Front. Sadie's hopes for love are unrequited, and Laura has to flee Artemis House when it is shelled and she finds herself in London driving an ambulance. Ethel, the nursery maid, masks her own pain...