Tony Hawks
A Piano In The Pyrenees

The house wasn't quite the stuff of my dreams. It wasn't an old tumbledown farmhouse ready for loving restoration, but a twenty-year-old property which looked ready for immediate habitation. Three things made it special - location, location, location. `That is the Pic du Midi,' said Monsieur LAgent, pointing to a mountain in the distance, and possibly sensing from my open mouth that a quick sale was far from out of the question. `You can ski in this place: `Yes. It's quite a nice view,' I said, trying not to look too enthusiastic. Inside it had all the features that you look for in a house - windows, doors, ceilings, floors, bedrooms, a bathroom, radiators, all in excellent condition. The kitchen was a little small but that was more than compensated for by the view. The fabulous view. Did I mention that at all?

Carol Birch
The Naming Of Eliza Quinn

Cork, 1969. In the hollow of an ancient tree, beyond Darby's house, Beatrice Conrad finds some tiny bones. A thirty-something American, she has come to claim the derelict cottage left to her by her Granma Lizzie. She finds a low grey cottage, a door and two windows like a picture a child might draw. There was a stone wall at the front, and the ghosts of old potato ridges running up the hill behind. Beatrice's discovery harks back to the great potato famine of the mid-1800s and that is where this extraordinary story leads. To the Quinns. And to the verseys. And to a feud that begins in the time of the famine, and has repercussions that will affect generations to come.

`Carol Birch writes beautifully'- Sunday Telegraph

`She has a deeply rooted humanity and highly intelligent understanding of the simultaneous complexity and simplicity o f individual lives'- Times Literary Supplement

On a bitterly cold day in 1904, the Deravenel family's future changes for ever. When Cecily DeRavenel tells her 18-year-old son Edward of the death of his father, brother and cousins in a fire, a part of him dies as well. Edward is comforted by his cousin Neville Watkins, who is suspicious of the deaths. They vow to seek the truth, avenge the deaths and take control of the business empire usurped sixty years before. The house of Deravenel is fatally rocked when betrayal comes from within. Soon, catastrophe threatens to destroy the family and the business... Power and money, passion and adultery, ambition and treachery-all illuminate a dramatic saga set against the backdrop of the Edwardian Era and the Belle Epoque, just before the First World War.