In a darkened room a young man sits telling the macabre and eerie story of his life – the story of a vampire, gifted with eternal life, cursed with an exquisite craving for human blood.

Anne Rice’s compulsively readable novel is arguably the most celebrated work of vampire fiction since Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897.

As the Washington Post said on its first publication, it is a ‘thrilling, strikingly original work of the imagination … sometimes horrible, sometimes beautiful, always unforgettable’.

Life is the strangest thing. One minute, Mrs Elner Shimfissle is up a tree, picking figs to make jam, and the next thing she knows, she is off on a strange adventure, running into people she never expected to see again, in the unlikeliest of places. Meanwhile, Elner’s highly strung niece Norma takes to her bed, before embarking on a brand new career; Elner’s neighbour Verbena turns to the Bible; her truck-driver friend, Luther Griggs, runs his eighteen-wheeler into a ditch; a dark secret emerges from the past – and the entire town is left wondering ‘What’s life all about anyway?’ Except for Tot Whooten, whose main concern is that the end of the world might come before she can collect her social security.

The Great War robbed a generation of friends, lovers and their gilded youth. In Freddie Watson’s case, it took his beloved brother and at times, his peace of mind. Haunted by his loss and fearing for his sanity, he still seeks some sort of resolution.

In the winter of 1928, Freddie is travelling through southern France – which has also seen too much bloodshed over the years – when his car spins off the road during a storm. Shaken, he stumbles into the woods and takes refuge in an isolated village. There he meets Fabrissa, a beautiful young woman also mourning a lost generation.

Over the course of a single night, Fabrissa and Freddie share their stories. And by the time dawn breaks, he finds himself holding the key to a heartbreaking mystery.

By turns thrilling, poignant and haunting, The Winter Ghosts is a story of lives touched by war, transformed by courage and redeemed by love.

Few believed Professor Coldwell was in touch with an unseen world – that he could commune with spirits. But in Scotland’s oldest university town something has passed from darkness into light. And now the young are been haunted by night terrors. And those who are visted disappear.

This is not a place for outsiders especially at night. So what chance do a rootless muscian and burnt-out explorer have of surviving their entanglement with an ageless supernatural evil and the ruthless cult that worships it?

John Huffam was to learn a great many things before he got very old: he would know why humans toiled under inhuman conditions, why the poor scavenged in rotting sewers and why both the sane and the mad starved in asylums. Yet he did not know why an unnamed menace had haunted his childhood, hounded his mother and now threatened his own life.

 The answer lay in a document written half a century before, a document that had provoked avarice, hatred, murder and lunacy, that had determined the fates of five families and had set the pattern of John’s own life. A pattern that was woven around, and would be unravelled within, the mysterious symbol of five – the Quincunx.

“My beautiful girls. If you’ve read this, you’ll know it contains some – not all, but some – of the things I want my daughters to know. And the greatest of these is love …”

How would you say goodbye to those you love most in the world?

Barbara must say a final farewell to her four daughters. But how can she find the words? And how can she leave them when they each have so much growing up to do? There’s commitment-phobic Lisa. Brittle, unhappily married Jennifer. Free-spirited traveller Amanda. And teenage Hannah, stumbling her way towards adulthood.

Barbara’s answer is to write each daughter a letter, finally expressing the hopes, fears, dreams and secrets she couldn’t always voice. These words will touch the girls in different – sometimes shocking – ways, unlocking emotions and passions to set them on their own journey of discovery through life.

In fin-de-siècle Copenhagen, part time prostitute Charlotte and her lumpen sidekick, Fru Schleswig, have taken on jobs as cleaning ladies of dubious talent to tide then over the harsh winter of 1897. But the home of their neurotic new employer, the widow Krak, soon reveals itself to be riddled with dark secrets – including the existence of a demonic machine rumoured to swallow people alive.

Rudely catapulted into twenty-first-century London, the hapless duo discover a whole new world of glass, labour-saving devices and hectic, impossible romance…

When a family tragedy strikes, Alice Fonseka, a dreamy, artistic child with a Singhalese mother and a Tamil father, leaves the beautiful island of Sri Lanka. Unable to bear the injustice of what has happened, her family heads for England.

There in the cold, urban landscape of London, Alice grows up, creating a life for herself, with all that this means: struggles, a home in London – and a blossoming of the art through which she expresses herself. But there is much she cannot find. Understanding. Peace. Lasting love. She has nearly given up when, unbidden, it blooms brightly.

Then on the clear summer morning of July 7, 2005, violence crosses her path again…