At the age of 90-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two long-suffering carers, Nastya and Euphoria, with tangled stories of her husbands and love affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without the aid of a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he?s whispered about as the last of the eligible...

Charlie Matthews?s love story begins in a pebble-dashed house in suburban Bolton, at a time when most little boys want to grow up to be Michael Jackson, and girls want to be Princess Di. Remembering the Green Cross Code and getting out of football are the most important things in his life, until Auntie Jan gives him a gift that will last a lifetime: a seven-inch single called ?Lucky Star? ... On his ninth birthday, Charlie discovers Madonna, and falls...

'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon'. This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that day in July 1959. The whole family on the porch, relaxed, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different. Abby and Red are

Frankie Elkin spends her life doing what no one else will do: searching for missing people the world has stopped looking for. When the police have given up, when the public no longer remembers, when the media has never paid attention, Frankie gets to work. A new case brings Frankie to Mattapan, a Boston neighbourhood with a bad reputation. She is searching for Angelique Badeau, a Haitian teenager who vanished from her high school months earlier. But...

To the distaste of the Compton Dando villagers, the big house has been taken over by a group of New Age eccentrics. And when the first death is reported, no one is surprised ... or disappointed. The coroner rules it an accident. But only weeks later, there?s another death. And this time, it is murder. Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby is called to the scene immediately, and there?ll be no escape until he has sifted through the world of psychics, cult...