In the final novel of her stunning trilogy, Mary Renault vividly imagines the life of Alexander the Great, the charismatic leader whose drive and ambition created a legend. Alexander the Great died at the age of thirty-three, leaving behind an empire that stretched from Greece and Egypt to India. After Alexander\"s death in 323 B.C....

In the first novel of her stunning trilogy, Mary Renault vividly imagines the life of Alexander the Great, the charismatic leader whose drive and ambition created a legend. Alexander\"s beauty, strength and defiance were apparent from birth, but his boyhood honed those gifts into the makings of a king....

\"This crazy world whirled around her, men and women dwarfed by toys and puppets, where even the birds are mechanical and the few human figures went masked . . . She was in the night once again, and the doll was herself.\" One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother\"s wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered....

The basis for Powell & Pressburger\"s Academy Award-winning 1947 film, Rumer Godden\"s much-admired classic novel tells the story of a sisterhood of nuns on a mission in Himalayan India. High in the Himalayas near Darjeeling, the old mountaintop palace shines like a jewel....

A.L. Barker dissects the unnerving emotions of everyday life with the sly humour and exquisite feel for language that prompted Auberon Waugh to declare that she \"writes like an angel and I love her\". In this, her tenth collection of stories, she unfolds tales of cunning, fancy, and shifting alliances....

Caro, gallant and adventurous, is one of two Australian sisters who have come to post-war England to seek their fortunes. Courted long and hopelessly by young scientist, Ted Tice, she is to find that love brings passion, sorrow, betrayal and finally hope. The milder Grace seeks fulfilment in an apparently happy marriage....

The scene is Naples, against whose ancient and fantastic background the modern action takes place. Among the protagonists is Jenny, young and pretty, who has come to Naples in flight from a sombre drama, unaware that a larger drama waits her there. She has an introduction to a Neapolitan woman, and one day she idly follows it up....

When the beautiful, ambitious actress Regina takes Fosca into her life and learns his amazing truth, she is obsessed with the thought that in his memory her performances will live for ever....

Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It\"s the 1950s, she\"s young, and she\"s in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink, she wears evening dresses in the daytime and vows to go native in a way not even the natives can manage....

Shortly before the Second World War, a column by \"Mrs Miniver\" appeared in THE TIMES, the first of many recounting the everyday events of a middle-class Chelsea family: Mrs Miniver\"s thrill at the sight of October chrysanthemums; her sense of doom when the faithful but rackety car is replaced; the escapades of Vin, Toby and Judy, her unpredictable ...

To his parents\" dismay, Colin Keith - out of the noble but misplaced sense of duty peculiar to high-minded young university graduates - chooses to quit his training for the Bar and take a teaching job at Southbridge School....

Annabel Christopher is every inch the star: a glamorous actress with a devoted, handsome husband. To keep the paparazzi and her adoring public under her spell, her perfect image must be carefully cultivated, whatever the cost. Beneath the facade, though, her husband cannot bear her or their vapid existence....

It\"s August in the Barsetshire village of Worsted, and Richard Tebben, just down from Oxford, is contemplating the gloomy prospect of a long summer in the parental home....

When Barbara Vaughan\"s fiance joins an archaeological excursion to the Dead Sea Scrolls, she takes the opportunity to explore the Holy Land. It is 1961, and the nation of Israel is still in its infancy....

On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently eccentric and endlessly curious, living off crumbs of affection and snippets of gossip....