Quatermain is hired by a Norfolk gentleman to find his kidnapped wife, and the trail runs to a people beyond the Kendah desert who worship a white elephant, and to a priesthood that has been waiting for a man who can shoot.
A boy grows up in a New Hampshire valley beneath a cliff whose crags form a vast human face, and waits for the great man the prophecy says will one day resemble it.
The May family grown up: a summer holiday at the seaside, an actress with a past, a stepson nobody knows what to do with, and a parish that must be kept going.
The Ramsay family and their guests gather at their summer home on the Isle of Skye, where young James longs to visit the lighthouse across the bay - a trip endlessly promised and endlessly postponed.
Two officers, friends since boyhood, love the same woman, and the friendship is the real subject - a short German romance about honour, and about the point at which honour stops being a virtue.
An American playwright in London, a girl he cannot have, a Cuban gun-runner and a young officer off to the war - four stories about people who behave better than they need to.
A young man of good family is told he is not his father's son but a foundling, and that a document proving otherwise can be bought - for a price that ruins everyone who touches it.
Born a nobleman in Elizabethan England, Orlando lives for over three hundred years, wakes up one morning transformed into a woman, and carries on - through the frost fairs of the seventeenth century, the drawing rooms of the eighteenth, and into Virginia Woolf's own 1928 present - barely aging a day.
The Watsons are poor, the town is small, and Pearl Watson, aged twelve, has opinions about all of it - while the doctor drinks, the rich woman condescends, and a baby called Danny is raised by committee.
A Paris literary lion seduces the wife of an Alsatian ironmaster, and the husband - a slow, decent, formidable man - declines to behave like a comic figure.
A man tastes a madeleine soaked in tea and the whole of his childhood returns unbidden - the most famous few pages in modern fiction open a novel that is, in fact, about how little we control what we remember.
Joan Allway means to reform the world through journalism and finds the world has arrangements of its own - a married politician, a war, and a slum parish.
A young American in Rome, flattered by a title and a shabby-genteel circle of expatriates, spends his money proving he belongs among them - and the compatriots he snubs turn out to be the only people who behave decently.
A tired American businessman and a psychiatrist take a motor tour of the West Country - Stonehenge, Avebury, Salisbury, Glastonbury - and talk, for a week, about the man's marriage, his mistress and what is wrong with him.
An orphan girl of ferocious learning is taken into a rich Georgia household and refuses, for six hundred pages, to marry its master - a Byronic wreck who has ruined women and lost his faith, and who will not be had until he has been remade.
Two sisters in a Midlands mining town take up with two men - a school inspector and a colliery owner - and the four of them argue their way across England and into the Alps about whether love is a bond or a cage.
This is a novel to savour CHRISTINA LAUREN, bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners A gorgeously warm and inviting novel HOLLY GRAMAZIO, bestselling author of The HusbandsInspired by the viral 'treasure houses' on social media, a single mother and her daughter relocate to rural Maine for the chance to own their very first home only to discover that the real treasures hidden inside arent just objects, but community, belonging and love.
A young man arrives in a country town, falls in love with a woman already promised to another, and writes letters about it until there is nothing left to write.
Frederick at home: Voltaire arriving, Voltaire quarrelling, Voltaire leaving; the flute, the greyhounds, the Berlin theatre, the brothers who cannot please him, and the ministers who dare not contradict.
An American millionaire tries to buy a steak and a bottle of beer in London's grandest hotel, is refused, and buys the hotel instead - after which the staff begin to disappear.
Miss Ludington believes that the girl she was at seventeen is a separate person, dead these forty years - so she builds a copy of the village she grew up in and hangs the girl's portrait in it.
Provence, 1799: a company of royalist highwaymen rob the government's gold with perfect courtesy and give it to the Vendee, while Bonaparte comes back from Egypt to take the country.
The Seven Years' War: Frederick against Austria, Russia, France and Saxony at once, and the court at Sans Souci going on around him - his brothers, his sister, the actresses, the poets, the flute.
The Rudd family take up a selection in Queensland scrub and spend twenty years failing at it - drought, bark huts, one plough, a cow that dies, a crop that does not come.
A new captain, unsure of himself and unknown to his crew, takes the anchor watch alone and finds a naked man in the water at the ship's side - a fugitive from another vessel, and his double in everything but circumstance.
A young man of good family walks out of his own class one afternoon, falls in with a penniless Belgian vagabond who asks awkward questions, and finds he can no longer sit through a dinner party.
New York talking to itself: a shop girl deciding how to spend her lunch hour, a millionaire's son on a park bench, a waiter who was once a gentleman, and the Fool-Killer walking up a Southern road looking for custom.
The narrator dreams himself into Kent in 1381, the night before the Peasants' Revolt, and hears John Ball preach at the cross - then sits with him in the church afterwards and tells him what the next five hundred years will do to everything he is about to die for.
A Bengali landowner encourages his wife out of the women's quarters and into the world, and the world arrives in the person of his friend - a nationalist agitator who wants her jewellery for the cause and rather more besides.
A literary scholar takes rooms in a decaying Venetian palazzo under a false name, because the old woman upstairs was once a great poet's lover and still has his letters.
An Irish physician who has given up soldiering is arrested for dressing a rebel's wounds, sold as a slave in Barbados, and becomes the most dangerous captain in the Caribbean - chiefly because he keeps his word.
Twenty-odd stories about the difference between what people meant to do and what they did: a wife who keeps a diary, a man who comes home after twenty years, a child who understands the grown-ups perfectly.
From childhood to old age, six friends - Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis - narrate their lives entirely in interior monologue, their voices rising and falling like the waves that punctuate the novel between chapters.
A Catholic convert stands for Parliament, is loved by two women and married to neither in any way the Church will accept, and must decide what he owes his faith when it costs him everything else.
Two couples meet at a German spa for nine seasons, and the American narrator explains that he understood none of it - the affairs, the money, the suicide - until it was over.
The stationmaster of a Cape Cod town - depot master, unofficial magistrate, and the only man everyone tells things to - is handed a runaway boy, a disputed will and a summer visitor with an alias.
