Sister Bernard has lived in a grey-stone convent in rural France for more than seventy years. In that time, a once youthful and lively cloister has gradually emptied, until only Bernard and two other nuns remain, a knot of survivors facing the creeping challenges of old age - ailing bodies and worn-thin friendships, slips of mind and, in their most secret moments, slips of faith. Now, the halls will fall silent as the three women pack away their few possessions into wooden boxes, preparing to leave the building that has been their home for decades. For the nuns, the closing of the convent means more than losing a home: the crumbling walls have shielded them from a changing modern world; for Sister Bernard, the quiet monotony of the religious life has protected her from memories of the past - the disgrace of when, as a young woman in wartime France, she became the unwitting prize of a cruel wager; when her devotion to God faded in the face of her need for a young Nazi soldier;...

Arthur Craythorne has barely married Queenie May when he is called away to fight in the First World War. When he returns from the trenches, he is a changed man and his wife and two young daughters, Alice and Florrie, strive hard to steer clear of his aggression and make him proud. Although Florrie follows Arthur into the Catholic Church, it is Alice he seems to favour, and Florrie seethes with envy of her sister as she watches them grow closer. But Arthur's attentions towards Alice prove darker than either of them can yet acknowledge, and when Arthur dies, the three women he leaves behind must each find ways to cope with all that remains unspoken between them.

During the Victorian age, British collectors were among the most active, passionate and eccentric in the world. Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves tells the stories of some of the nineteenth century's most intriguing collectors following their perilous journeys across the globe in the hunt for rare and beautiful objects. From art connoisseur John Charles Robinson, to the aristocratic scholar Charlotte Schreiber, who ransacked Europe for treasure, and from London's fashionable Pre-Raphaelite circle to pioneering Orientalists in Beijing, Jacqueline Yallop plunges us into the cut-throat world of the Victorian mania for collecting.

Ellie Barton has spent her young life living in the dilapidated manor house with her elderly father. Her duty is to her aristocratic lineage, something of which she is often reminded by those few people around her. But Marlford, the local village founded by her grandfather, is in decay - subsidence from the old salt mines is destroying the buildings, the books in the memorial library are mouldering, and old loyalties and assumptions are shifting. When two idealistic young men decide to squat in the closed wing of the house, they show her a world much wider than Marlford, and Ellie begins to feel trapped beneath the unbearable weight of history and expectation.