Years have gone by and the once peaceful and prosperous Land of Oz is knotted with social unrest. The Wicked Witch has long passed into legend, her boy Liir and his wife are in exile, and their daughter Rain in hiding. Even Galinda Upland is under house arrest and the Cowardly Lion on the run from the law. Then there is the matter of Dorothy, and the rumours of her return. The Emerald City mounts an invasion of Munchkinland and chaos reigns. Rain must come of age; it is up to her to take up her broom – and her legacy – in an Oz wracked by war.

The Channel Islands, June 1940.

The Nazis are bombing Cherbourg. In her secluded house on Guernsey, Vivienne de la Mare waits fearfully. And then the Occupation begins. Nothing is safe anymore. Vivienne’s husband is fighting on the frontline, and she has two young daughters and her mother-in-law to care for; and her new life is one where the enemy lives next door.

In Confessions of A Conjuror, Derren Brown invites you on a whimsical journey through his unusual mind. Structured around various stages of a conjuring trick, performed by his younger self in a crowded restaurant, Derren’s endlessly engaging narrative takes you from the history of magic, to speculations on the manufacturing of Monster Munch and the correct way to poach an egg, via discussions about psychology, what he hums while cleaning his teeth and the social niceties surrounding parmesan cheese.

Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a storybook world – but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery.

Each family carries its own secrets. Into their world comes a young stranger, a working-class boy from the potteries, drawn by the beauty of the Museum’s treasures. And in midsummer a German puppeteer arrives, bringing dark dramas. The world seems full of promise but the calm is already rocked by political differences, by Fabian arguments about class and free love, by the idealism of anarchists from Russia and Germany.

London, 1862. Sue Trinder, orphaned at birth, grows up among petty thieves – fingersmiths – under the rough but loving care of Mrs Sucksby and her ‘family’.

But from the moment she draws breath, Sue’s fate is linked to that of another orphan growing up in a gloomy mansion not too many miles away…