Recruited into MI5 against a backdrop of the Cold War in 1972, Cambridge student Serena Frome, a compulsive reader, is assigned to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young writer whose politics align with those of the government, a situation that is compromised when she falls in love with him.

When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring...

Includes: Agatha and the Truth of Murder; Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar; Agatha and the Midnight Murders.

"On April 18th, 1941, twenty-two days after Virginia Woolf went for a walk near her weekend house and never returned, her body was reclaimed from the River Ouse. For more than half a century, Woolf's suicide has been attributed to alleged depression; bipolar disorder; her impaired mental state after two of her London apartments had been bombed during the Second World War's brutal Blitz. With Adeline--a stunning and provocative reimagining of the events...

We know the facts of Mary Shelley's life in some detail--the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers; her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley; the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed. But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous...

"On the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, comes a riveting biography of its author, Mary Shelley, whose life reads like a dark gothic novel, filled with scandal, death, drama, and one of the strangest love stories in literary history"--

A biography of the English author and illustrator who grew up during the Victorian era and whose detailed drawings of plants and animals found their way into her famous picture books.