Genres: Commercial Fiction, Historical Fiction, Magical Realism
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+

A sweeping saga spanning over two centuries of a house and the generations who leave their mark upon it." In the tradition of Pemberley, Manderley, Brideshead and Howard's End, The Talbot Saga introduces a house that is as much a character as those who inhabit its walls." "I love a good saga and this is a good saga. The book is well written. I found it hard to put down!..." "I enjoy books which have a house as a character and this is a great example. Tall Chimneys seems to have a life of its own." "Wow! Outstanding! Well written, interesting history, emotional, amazingly descriptive, compelling." "I’ve always had a strong interest in historic homes and estates in England, and now feel like I know this house inside and out now. I've fallen in love with it!" "I loved all the books in this series. God! I hope there will...

Genres: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance
Formats: E-Book, Paperback
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+

"This one felt lke coming home to a place I was already familiar with." "The beauty of Allie Cresswell's book is the way she has woven social commentary seamlessly into a compelling narrative." "This really should be made into a film." "I lived with them, laughed and cried with them, became friends with them." Yorkshire, 1845. Folklore whispers that they used to burn witches at the standing stone on the moor. When the wind is easterly, it wails a strange lament. History declares it was placed as a marker, visible for miles—a signpost for the lost, directing them towards home. Forced from their homeland by the potato famine, a group of itinerant Irish refugees sets up camp by the stone. They are met with suspicion by the locals, branded as ‘thieves and ne’er-do-wells.’ Only Beth Harlish takes pity on them, and finds herself instantly attracted to Ruairi, their charismatic leader....

Genres: Historical Fiction, Romance, Women's Fiction
Formats: E-Book, Paperback, Large print
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+

The Talbots are wealthy. But their wealth is from ‘trade’. With neither ancient lineage nor title, they struggle for entrance into elite Regency society. Finally, aided by an impecunious viscount, they gain access to the drawing rooms of England’s most illustrious houses. Mrs Talbot intends her daughter Jocelyn to marry well, to eliminate the stain of the family’s ignoble beginnings. But the young men Jocelyn meets are vacuous, seeing Jocelyn as merely a substantial dowry. Only Lieutenant Barnaby Willow sees the real Jocelyn, but he is deployed to war. The hypocrisy of fashionable society repulses Jocelyn—beneath the courtly manners she finds deceit, dissipation and vice. She stumbles upon and then is embroiled in a sordid scandal which threatens utter disgrace for the Talbot family. Humiliated and dishonoured, she is sent to a remote house hidden in a hollow of the Yorkshire moors, irrevocably separated from family, friends and any hope...

Genres: Cosy Mystery, Literary Fiction, Suspense
Formats: E-Book, Paperback
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+

“My earliest memory is of you, Arthur. We were children, running across the garden at Granny’s house. The sun on your hair made it look like copper wire. Then you stopped, and I cannoned into you. We both went headlong into the rockery. It was 1964, the summer before I started school, so I was nearly five. You would have been just three. It’s strange, isn’t it? That my first memory is of you. Or maybe it isn’t very strange at all.” Prudence and Arthur take a nostalgic trip down memory lane to the sixties and seventies; turbulent, changeful years that contrasted with their idyllic childhood at ‘Salad Days,’ the market garden run by Prue’s extended family. But was it idyllic? Tragedy makes uneasy waypoints in their journey of recollection, and Arthur’s overbearing father casts a dark pall. How did he inveigle himself into Prue’s close-knit family circle? What was...

Genres: Advice & How To, Manuals and Workbooks, Writing & Publishing
Formats: E-Book, Paperback, Hardback
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+

You have a story to tell. But how should you begin? Or maybe you’ve written your book already; what should you do now? What choices do you have for getting published? They say everyone has at least one book in them, and thousands of people like you are exploring the possibility of getting their book written and published. Sixteen years ago I was in the same boat. But in the process of successfully self-publishing fourteen novels I’ve honed a protocol that I want to share. Here you’ll learn about The importance of writing an original, compelling fiction or nonfiction book When to source input from peers and expertise from professionals—and how to find them A step-by-step procedure for formatting and uploading your book to various platforms including the biggest: Amazon How to plan and execute a successful book launch and What the terminology really means, using my jargon-busting glossary of...

Genres: Commercial Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Women's Fiction
Formats: E-Book, Paperback
Age Groups: 18+

"The worlds created and the characters are so realistic, vivid and relatable that you care about what happens." "Allie Cresswell is a gifted observer of character and place as well as having a sensitive touch when writing about deeply disturbing subject matter." "Gently paced but hard hitting, this it is a book that will stay with you." "Lives are in turmoil, but it is the saving grace of friendship and hope that wins out in the end." One evening, Viola goes missing. The explanation—a visit to her son—seems doubtful, and her women friends’ messages go unanswered. A spiky, caustic woman, Viola’s heavy drinking makes her tiresome company, but they know nothing of her troubled past. Yet, Maisie misses Viola. Recently, their shared love of gardening has almost blunted Viola’s barbs, and Maisie is much in need of a close friend. Her house is a building site, her daughter’s wedding is...

Genres: Commercial Fiction, Literary Fiction, Suspense
Formats: E-Book, Paperback
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+

Burned-out author Dee needs fresh inspiration. Impetuously, she abandons London and her good-for-nothing boyfriend to go wherever her literary quest takes her. Journey’s end is a remote village on the shores of a wild estuary, overshadowed by a ruined pele tower. She rents Winter Cottage and waits for a story to emerge. The bleak beauty of the whispering dunes, the jacquard of colour and texture of the marsh and a romantic tree in a secluded glade—The Trysting Tree—all seduce Dee. Nevertheless, the secretive behaviour of a handsome neighbour, lights across the marsh, a spurious squire and a bizarre, moonlit encounter all suggest there is something odd afoot. Local gossip and crumbling graveyard inscriptions give Dee the opening she needs. She begins to weave hints about the tragic history of a local family, feuding brothers and a fatal fire into a sweeping historical saga. Her characters clamour for a voice as...

Genres: Historical Fiction, Romance
Formats: E-Book, Paperback, Large print
Age Groups: 12-15, 16-18, 18+

What secrets hide beneath the veil? When her mother departs for a tour of the continent, Georgina is sent from the rural backwaters to stay with her cousin, George Talbot, in London. The 1835 season is at its height, but Georgina is determined to attend neither balls nor plays, and to eschew Society. She hides her face beneath an impenetrable veil. Her extraordinary appearance only sets off gossip and speculation as to her identity. Who is the mysterious lady beneath the veil?

Genres: Literary Fiction, Short/Flash Fiction Collection, Speculative Fiction
Formats: E-Book, Paperback
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+

Previously published as Lost Boys, this quartet of over-layering stories introduces four strangers. The only thing they have in common is their dull English town and the unusual heatwave that broils its lack-lustre streets and wilting parks. They and their separate stories are drawn violently together when a young boy pulls them into the maelstrom of his fate. Each is at a crossroads. Matt must leap the gulf between adolescence and adulthood. Megan needs to find her way out of troubled waters. A family crisis propels Jade to set her foot on a tenuous path of faith. Mrs Fairlie knows the bridge she faces but refuses to cross without knowing the fate of her son.A pivotal event connects their narratives and their lives to demonstrate how fates intertwine and how the consequences of our choices can affect people we don’t even know.

Genres: Commercial Fiction, Historical Fiction, Romance
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 12-15, 16-18, 18+

"Lovingly-crafted and brilliantly executed... the Highbury Trilogy is an outstanding companion and tribute to Jane Austen’s Emma. Rich with comprehensive detail, thoughtful developments, and emotive prose." Austenesque Reviews. The collected Highbury novels comprising 'Mrs Bates of Highbury', 'The Other Miss Bates' and the Readers' Favorite Award-Winning 'Dear Jane.' The books trace the pre-history of Jane Austen’s Emma and then run in parallel to it.

Genres: Commercial Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Women's Fiction
Formats: E-Book, Paperback

Minnie Price married late in life. Now she is widowed. And starving. No one suspects this respectable church-goer can barely keep body and soul together. Why would they, while she resides in the magnificent home she shared with Peter? Her friends and neighbours are oblivious to her plight and her adult step-children have their own reasons to make things worse rather than better. But she is thrown a lifeline when an associate of her late husband arrives with news of an investment about which her step-children know nothing. Can she release the funds before she finds herself homeless and destitute?

Genres: Commercial Fiction, Historical Fiction, Romance
Formats: E-Book, Paperback, Large print
Age Groups: 12-15, 16-18, 18+

The final instalment of the Highbury trilogy, Dear Jane recounts events hinted at but never actually described in Jane Austen’s Emma; the formative childhood years of Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, their meeting in Weymouth and the agony of their secret engagement. Orphaned Jane seems likely to be brought up in parochial Highbury until adoption by her papa’s old friend Colonel Campbell opens to her all the excitement and opportunities of London. Frank Weston is also transplanted from Highbury, adopted as heir to the wealthy Churchills and taken to their drear and inhospitable Yorkshire estate. Readers of Emma will be familiar with the conclusion of Jane and Frank’s story, but Dear Jane pulls back the veil which Jane Austen drew over its remainder.

Genres: Commercial Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction
Formats: E-Book, Audio, Paperback, Large print
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+

Considered a troublesome burden, Evelyn Talbot is banished by her family to their remote country house. Tall Chimneys is hidden in a damp and gloomy hollow. It is outmoded and inconvenient but Evelyn is determined to save it from the fate of so many stately homes at the time - abandonment or demolition. Occasional echoes of tumult in the wider world reach their sequestered backwater - the strident cries of political extremists, a furore of royal scandal, rumblings of the European war machine. But their isolated spot seems largely untouched. At times life is hard - little more than survival. At times it feels enchanted, almost outside of time itself. The woman and the house shore each other up - until love comes calling, threatening to pull them asunder. Her desertion will spell its demise, but saving Tall Chimneys could mean sacrificing her hope for happiness, even sacrificing herself. A...

Genres: Commercial Fiction, Historical Fiction, Romance
Formats: E-Book, Paperback, Large print
Age Groups: 12-15, 16-18, 18+

Jane Bates has left Highbury to become the companion of the invalid widow Mrs Sealy in Brighton. Life in the new, fashionable seaside resort is exciting indeed. A wide circle of interesting acquaintance and a rich tapestry of new experiences make her new life all Jane had hoped for. While Jane’s sister Hetty can be a tiresome conversationalist she proves to be a surprisingly good correspondent and Jane is kept minutely up-to-date with developments in Highbury, particularly the tragic news from Donwell Abbey. When the handsome Lieutenant Weston returns to Brighton Jane expects their attachment to pick up where it left off in Highbury the previous Christmas, but the determined Miss Louisa Churchill, newly arrived with her brother and sister-in-law from Enscombe in Yorkshire, seems to have a different plan in mind.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Romance
Formats: E-Book, Paperback, Large print
Age Groups: 12-15, 16-18, 18+

Thirty years before the beginning of 'Emma' Mrs Bates is entirely different from the elderly, silent figure familiar to fans of Jane Austen’s fourth novel. She is comparatively young and beautiful, widowed - but ready to love again. She is the lynch-pin of Highbury society until the appalling Mrs Winwood arrives, very determined to hold sway over that ordered little town. Miss Bates is as talkative aged twenty nine as she is in her later iteration, with a ghoulish fancy, seeing disaster in every cloud. When young Mr Woodhouse arrives looking for a plot for his new house, the two strike up a relationship characterised by their shared hypochondria, personal chariness and horror of draughts. Jane, the other Miss Bates, is just seventeen and eager to leave the parochialism of Highbury behind her until handsome Lieutenant Weston comes home on furlough from the militia and sweeps her - quite literally...

Genres: Commercial Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Women's Fiction
Formats: E-Book, Paperback
Age Groups: 18+

Suddenly-widowed Maisie sets out to clear her late husband’s collection; wonky furniture and balding rugs, bolts of material for upholstery projects he never got round to, gloomy pictures and outmoded electronics, other people’s trash brought home from car boot sales and rescued from the tip. The hoard is endless, all part of Clifford’s waste-not way of thinking in which everything, no matter how broken or obscure, can be re-cycled or re-purposed into something useful. Now, it appears to Maisie more grimly than ever as what it is: junk. As Maisie disassembles his stash she is forced to confront the issues that drove her husband to squirrel away other people’s rubbish. Finally, in the last bastion of his accumulation, she discovers the key to his hoarding and understands – much too late – the man she married.

Genres: Commercial Fiction, Women's Fiction
Formats: E-Book, Paperback
Age Groups: 18+

Who knows what secrets are trapped, like caged tigers, behind our neighbours' doors? When Molly and Stan move into a new housing development, Molly becomes a one-woman social committee, throwing herself into a frantic round of communal do-gooding and pot-luck suppers. She is blinded to what goes on behind those respectable facades by her desire to make the neighbourhood, and the neighbours, into all she has dreamed, all she needs them to be. Twenty years later, Molly looks back on the ruin of the Combe Close years, at the waste and destruction wrought by the escaping tigers: adultery, betrayal, tragedy, desertion, death. But now Molly has her own guilty secret, her own pet tiger, and it is all she can do to keep it in its cage.

Genres: Commercial Fiction, Women's Fiction, Suspense
Formats: E-Book, Audio, Paperback
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+

The McKay family gathers for a week-long holiday at a rambling old house to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Robert and Mary. In recent years only funerals and sudden, severe illnesses have been able to draw them together and as they gather in the splendid rooms of Hunting Manor, their differences are soon uncomfortably apparent. For all their history, their traditions, the connective strands of DNA, they are relative strangers. The family holiday mushrooms, drawing in sundry relatives both estranged and deranged. The machinations of an appalling, uninvited aunt threaten the holiday – and the family – with irreparable damage. This book will make you question your own family situation. What does it really mean to be 'family'?