Encore Provence completes Peter Mayle's triology of life in Provence which began with A Year In Provence and Toujours Provence. There are still many curiosities in this area of France, as you might expect: a school for noses in Haute Provence, a gardner who grows black tomatoes, a connoisseur of funerals, a crime passionel perpetrated on an oversexed butcher, and an assortment of eccentric characters who lie in wait in bars and on boule courts...

Catherine Cookson
A House Devided

Invalided out of the army at the end of the Second World War, Matthew Wallingham wonders what place there is in a new social order for a blind man- even if he is a decorated war hero. He has the sympathy of family and friends, but it seems the only person who can help him is his nurse, Liz. When he arrives home, he realises that his family have their problems too and it soon dawns on him that his plans are not going to work. He starts to look for Liz. But Liz herself has a shadow hanging over her...

On a fateful winter's day in 1937, eighteen-year-old Cassie Thornton boarded the Queen Mary and set sail for England. Her mission: to find the mysterious Scarlet Pengally, the mother who abandoned her many years ago. Her search leads her to the dark, forbidding edifice of Greystone house, where Scarlet was born, and home to generations of Pengallys. Yet it is also home to an unspeakable dread...