Susan Breen
The Fiction Class

On paper, Arabella Hicks seems more than qualified to teach her fiction class: she's a writer herself and she's passionate about books. On the other hand, she's 38, single, and has been writing the same book for the last seven years. And she has been distracted recently: on the same day that Arabella teaches her class she also visits her mother in a nursing home outside the city. When her class takes a surprising turn and her lessons start to spill over into her weekly visits, she suddenly finds she might be holding the key to her mother's love and, dare she say it, her own inspiration. After all, as a lifelong lover of books, she knows the power of a good story.

Lorna Byrne
Angels in my Hair

The autobiography of a modern day mystic, an Irish woman with powers of the saints of old. As a child, Lorna remembers seeing not just the world around her but seeing equally vividly angels and spirits. For years she assumed everyone saw the same. As Lorna tells the story of her life, growing up in a poor family, working in Dublin and marrying, the listener meets, as she did, the creatures from spirit worlds who also inhabit our own, including the prophet Elijah and an Archangel - but also the spirits of people who have died. Today, it is not only the sick and troubled who visit Lorna, looking for healing and consolation, but theologians of different faiths and the head of a religious order in Rome are also asking her for guidance.

Flora Chapman is in her fifties when her husband Edward dies in a bizarre ballooning accident. Seizing upon her new found freedom, she decides to finish the history of their village that Edward had begun. A reference to Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII's fourth wife who he rejected for being ugly, captures her imagination as she begins to delve deeper into the life of this neglected figure. Meanwhile, in the Louvre, Holbein's portrait of Anne of C1eves senses the tug of a connection and she begins to tell the story of the injustices she suffered and just how she survived her marriage.