London, 1985. Joe, father to 11-year-old Matty, has disappeared and nobody will explain where he's gone, or why. In the long, hot summer that follows, Matty's hunt for Joe leads to the ponds at Hampstead Heath. Beneath the water, there is a new kind of freedom. Above the water, a welcoming community of men offer refuge from an increasingly rocky home life. Fourteen years later, a new revelation sees Matty set off alone in a campervan, driving westwards...

Rita Blackthorn?s heart was barren and hard. In all of her life she had never truly loved. But she had hated. Beneath the loving gaze of her daughter?s soft green eyes, her heart swelled with dark and dangerous emotions. Young Cathy Blackthorn has never experienced any loving response from her mother. It is her beloved Aunt Margaret, with a heart as big and warm as the summer sky, who has been more of a mother than her own could ever be. And when...

In the summer of 2006, Emma Price watched helplessly as her six-year-old son?s red coat was fished out of the River Ouse. It was the tragic story of the year - a little boy, Aiden, wandered away from school during a terrible flood, fell into the river and drowned. His body was never recovered. Ten years later, Emma has finally rediscovered the joy in life. She?s married, pregnant and in control again ... until Aiden returns. Too traumatised to speak,...

Toni and Agatha are in the car on the way to Officer Bill Wong?s long-awaited wedding when, much to their shock, a naked young man bursts through a hedge on the side of the road and comes running toward them. Terrified, he explains that he has just seen a dead body in the woods. Toni lends him an old t-shirt to cover himself, Agatha calls the police and the young man takes them to the spot where he saw the body, across from a meadow where the Mircester...

Some people's lives are entirely their own creations. James Rebanks' isn't. The first son of a shepherd, who was the first son of a shepherd himself, he and his family have lived and worked in and around the Lake District for generations. Their way of life is ordered by the seasons and the work they demand, and has been for hundreds of years. A Viking would understand the work they do: sending the sheep to the fells in the summer and making the hay;...

Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend have a dramatic break up. After she hits rock bottom in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insists Lucy dog-sit for the summer. Annika's home is a gorgeous glass cube on Venice Beach, but Lucy can find little relief from her anxiety - not in the Greek chorus of women in her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic...