Publish date: 20th July 2017
When Catherine moves several hundred miles away from her sister, Helen says, 'Phone calls aren't enough', but they make it easier to edit the truth. Helen can dismiss Gilbert and his enchanted Factory as 'weird' when she's never met him, and Catherine thinks Helen foolish for loving the unreliable and dangerous Joe. Neither sees the perils concealed in what they have not told each other, or guesses at the sinister connection between their separate lives.
Publish date: 20th May 2015
Daniel and Caroline are closest to each other, twins for whom the rest of the world is always distant. After the death of their mother and their father's remarriage they are sent to separate boarding schools, then a dramatic accident when they're students divides them again. The repercussions last for years, as they cut themselves off from the relatives who raised them, the cousins who adore them. Underneath the stable family life their grandparents worked so hard to establish, run currents of insecurity and restlessness, and a secret only one person is able to uncover.
Publish date: 1st April 2010
The three Douglas sisters were all expected to do well. Now, as they approach middle age, Gillian has her career and Frances is successfully bringing up her sons on her own. Then comes the phone call from Alec, the husband who left her for her sister Susan, thirteen years ago. Susan has disappeared, abandoning Alec and her daughter Kate. Who's responsible for he surly teenager Kate now? Not Frances, surely? As they begin to wonder what has really happened to her, Frances and Gillian find their sister is as powerful and disruptive as ever.
Publish date: 1st July 2001
On a sultry June night, a tinker and her baby are trapped in a burning barn. From the big house across the fields the Cairns children watch the blaze, fascinated and shocked. The woman touched their safe, ordinary childhood only once, but as adults they are still haunted by her: Marion facing illness, Eleanor widowhood, David – but who knows what David's life is like? All his sisters know is that in his frequent absences they miss him and when he comes back he makes everything seem magical. And yet David leaves disaster in his wake – or perhaps it's just bad luck that terrible things happen when he is around.
Publish date: 1st July 2000
On a hot July day, Lindsay Mathieson, confident, careless and thirteen years old, walks up the beach where she has played all her life, around the rocks and out of sight. She leaves behind her two younger brothers, and two cousins. She does not come back.
Thirty years later, the events on that fateful day remain a mystery. Gradually the cousins are drawn back to the High House, where as children they played on that sunny beach. There they must come to terms not just with the past, but with their own fallibility, and an uncertain future.