Maggie Ollerenshaw

Liverpool, 1914. Martha Rossi lives with her husband and their five children. Despite working all the hours she can, the family don't have much. When Martha's 14-year-old son, Joe, enlists to fight for his country, Martha is horrified.

Eve is on her way with a sprig of plum blossom to the abandoned church across the meadow. Tommy does not come. He has said nothing, but she knows that the sight of the grave and, later, of Jeannie Eliza, on the headstone is unbearable to him. Originally published: London: Chatto & Windus, 2011

In the tiny front parlour fourteen-year-old Laura Blake watches her father die. But not before he tells her she will make something of her life. Yet her path to success proves to be a rocky one.

Hana is just 17 when her husband goes to war, leaving her alone and vulnerable. When enemy soldiers attack her house she flees for her life across the shattered city of Tokyo and takes refuge in the Yoshiwara, its famous pleasure quarter. There she is sold into a brothel and forced to train as a courtesan.

Emily Murphy wonders if she's lost her plug. She doesn't seem to be connected to life's electricity anymore as she wanders about her enormous, empty home. Then into her life comes Mae McNulty, the cleaner, and life changes.

On a freezing night in February, a woman wades into the waters of Morecambe Bay in a drunken bid to commit suicide. Braced for death, she finds herself instead saving a man's life - a young Chinese cockle picker, one of the only survivors of a tragic mass drowning.

From the foggy streets of Victorian London to the eerie perfection of 1950s suburbia, the everyday is invaded by the evil otherworldly in this unforgettable collection of new ghost stories from the author of The Woman in Black. In the title story, on a murky evening in a warmly lit club off St James, a bishop listens closely as a paranormal detective recounts his most memorable case, one whose horrifying denouement took place in that very building....

On a moonlit night in 1898, Kathleen Wyman lies in labour at Bessington Hall. Her husband, Edward, is sure that she has been unfaithful to him. In his blind, jealous rage he later gives away the baby to gypsy Rona Parrish, summoned to help with the delivery. Kathleen, frenzied with grief, is soon after locked away in an asylum. Rejected by her father, the little girl begins her new life with only a valuable brooch pinned to her shawl as a clue to...