At thirty, Aislinn Kelly is an occasional novelist with a near-morbid attunement to the motives of those around her. Isolated, restless and stuck, she decamps to America—a default recourse—this time to an attic room in Indianapolis, to attempt once again the definitive act of self-salvage. There are sharp memories to contend with as the summer heats up, and not least regarding her family history, now revealed as so botched and pitiful it seems it might yet cancel her out. She's spent years evading the attentions of her unstable, bullying father, only to find her mother now cowering in a second rancid marriage. There are also friendships lost or ailing: with bibulous playwright Karl, sly poet Erwin, depressed bookshop-wallah Bronagh, and Aislinn's best friend Cathy, who has recently found God... Finally her thoughts turn to her last encounter with Jim Schmidt, a man she's loved for ten years, hasn't seen for five, yet still has to consider her opposite number in life.

Opposed Positions is a startlingly frank novel about the human predicament, about love and its substitutes, disgraceful or otherwise. Some of these people want to be free—of themselves, of each other - and some have darker imperatives. Wry, shocking, perfectly observed and utterly heart-breaking, the novel moves towards its troubling conclusion: a painful appreciation of what it is we've come from, and what we might be heading for.

The year is eighteen hundred and thirty one when fifteen-year-old Mary begins the difficult task of telling her story. A scrap of a thing with a sharp tongue and hair the colour of milk, Mary leads a harsh life working on her father's farm alongside her three sisters. In the summer she is sent to work for the local vicar's invalid wife, where the reasons why she must record the truth of what happens to her - and the need to record it so urgently—are gradually revealed.

In the mid-eighties, four friends got together round a kitchen table and determined to give the women of Wales a voice: to bring back to life the voices of the past and find the classics of the future. 25 years later Honno Press is a thriving independent publisher—the only surviving independent women's press. This collection brings together a selection of the best of Welsh Women's writing taken from commissioned anthologies from every decade of Honno's working life. All Shall be Well is an essential guide to the recorded and creative lives of the nation's women.

Rhea—dark, intense and brilliant—and her golden, voluptuous sister Amber are not alike, but they are bound tighter than most: by love, by the loss of their father, and by the man who stands between them. Lewis is Amber's husband and the ferociously driven director of the biotech lab where Rhea is a rising star. In search of commercial funding, academic advancement and in alchemical pursuit of the perfect stem cell—their Holy Grail in one flawlessly reproducing genetic blueprint—Rhea and Lewis inhabit a rarefied world. Putting their trust in science, they are blinkered against the fatal human element: sex and envy, treachery and error. Amber, however, desperate for a child and embarking on fertility treatment, has to confront precisely this flawed physicality, and a Faustian pact is forged. As the three are increasingly drawn into a transgressive relationship, the result is a series of betrayals that none, finally, will be able to forgive.

Vivid, intelligent and gripping, Breathing on Glass is both coolly analytical and erotically subversive in its exploration of passion and power intertwined, and breeds a whole DNA sequence of cautionary tales: on weakness, temptation, ambition and the limits of science.

On a bone-chilling February morning, Catherine Berlin, investigator with the Financial Services Agency, finds the almost-headless body of her informant, 'Juliet Bravo', rolling in a shallow reach of the Thames. That Juliet Bravo's death is linked to an investigation of local loan shark Archie Doyle is no surprise to Berlin, but when Berlin's own unorthodox methods are blamed for the murder, she realises bigger predators are circling. To start with, it looks as though Berlin will pay only with her job. And then, on a routine trip to her GP (one of a dying breed who will still prescribe heroin to long-term addicts), she stumbles across a second body. Suspended, incriminated, and then blackmailed into cooperation by the detective leading the murder investigation, Catherine Berlin has seven stolen days of clarity in which to solve the crime—and find a new supplier.

Catherine never knew her father. A Polish exile, he disappeared when she was a small child, leaving her only a pair of binoculars and a lifelong love of the stars. Now in her forties, she leads a settled academic life in Cambridge—until one day she receives a letter with a Polish postmark from an American film-maker who is in Krakow to research the wartime experiences of his aunt. What Konrad has uncovered will send Catherine on a voyage of discovery not only into Poland's past, but into her own history. And what she uncovers there will change her life in ways she could not possibly have imagined.
Moving between present-day Krakow and wartime Poland, The Beautiful Truth tells a passionate and moving story of the way ordinary lives are swept up in extraordinary events. Heartbreaking and uplifting in equal measure, it will not be easily forgotten.

It is 1923 and Evangeline English, keen lady cyclist, arrives with her sister Lizzie at the ancient Silk Route city of Kashgar to help establish a Christian mission. Lizzie is in thrall to their forceful and unyielding leader Millicent, but Eva's motivations for leaving her bourgeois life back at home are less clear-cut. As they attempt to navigate their new home and are met with resistance and calamity, Eva commences work on her book, "A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar"… In present-day London another story is beginning. Frieda, a young woman adrift in her own life, opens her front door one night to find a man sleeping on the landing. In the morning he is gone, leaving on the wall an exquisite drawing of a long-tailed bird and a line of Arabic script. Tayeb, who has fled to England from Yemen, has arrived on Frieda's doorstep just as she learns that she is the next-of-kin to a dead woman she has never heard of: a woman whose abandoned flat contains many surprises—among them an ill-tempered owl. The two wanderers begin an unlikely friendship as their worlds collide, and they embark on a journey that is as great, and as unexpected, as Eva's.

A stunning debut peopled by unforgettable characters, A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar is an extraordinary story of inheritance and the search for belonging in a fractured and globalised world.

These stories observe how people live through moments of realisation; how they negotiate the avenues of loss, with cowardice and courage and a fair amount of bewilderment.

While fishing on a sunny loch, a woman is suddenly convinced and terrified that her lover is about to leave her. Parents in San Francisco learn that their son has been in a car accident, and may be dying. A girl loses her virginity the same day as the funeral of her much despised mother, and later understands which is the greater loss.

Humour threads through these dark moments and days. Even death—especially death—is not exempt. And love is perfectly heaving with embarrassing poignancy. These are warm stories about real people. Loss changes them, but change makes them feel alive.

Challenge was Vita Sackville-West's second novel. It was ready to go to print in 1920, but the author suddenly changed her mind. This was not because she lacked confidence in her work,but because of the scandal it would have caused. Challenge remained unpublished for over fifty years. Vita's love affair with Violet Trefusis had reached its peak and, eloping to France, they decided to abandon everything and everyone—children and husbands included—to spend the rest of their lives together. Challenge remains a testament to their love, and was written during that period. The hero, Julian, might be a Byronic young Englishman, and Eve the woman he adores; it may be an adventure set on a Greek island. But really, this is a love story, written in the presence of the beloved, and inspired by her. And, as its title implies, the novel is a challenge to the society that condemned Vita and her lover.

A woman's body is found in Ireland's most notorious body dump zone, an area in the Dublin mountains where a number of women disappeared in the past. The victim is from an exclusive gated development in the suburbs - where the prime suspect in the vanishing triangle cases, Derek Carpenter, now lives. It looks like the past is coming back to haunt the present. But DI Jo Birmingham doesn't believe the case is open and shut. Her husband Dan was part of the original investigation team; is she trying to protect her own fragile domestic peace? The one person who could help her crack the case, Derek's wife Liz, is so desperate to protect her family that she is going out of her way to thwart all efforts to establish the truth. Can both women emerge unscathed?

Elizabeth Taylor, highly acclaimed author of classic novels such as Angel, A Game of Hide and Seek and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, is also renowned for her powerful, acutely observed stories. Here for the first time, the stories—including some only recently discovered—are collected in one volume. From the awkward passions of lonely holiday-makers to the fresh-faced anticipation of three school friends preparing for their first dance, from the minor jealousies and triumphs of marriage to tales of outsiders struggling to adapt to the genteel English countryside, with a delicate, witty touch Elizabeth Taylor illuminates the nuances of ordinary lives.

After every war there are stories that are locked away like bluebottles in drawers and kept silent. But sometimes the past can return: in the smell of carbolic soap, in whispers darting through a village after mass, in the colour of an undelivered letter. Jeanne Nerin and Marie-Angele Baudry grow up, side by side yet apart, in the village of Ste Madeleine. Marie-Angele is the daughter of the grocer, inflated with ideas of her own piety and rightful place in society. Jeanne's mother washes clothes for a living. She used to be a Jew until this became too dangerous. Jeanne does not think twice about grasping the slender chances life throws at her. Marie-Angele does not grasp; she aspires to a future of comfort and influence. When war falls out of the sky, along with it tumbles a new, grown-up world. The village must think on its feet, play its part in a game for which no one knows the rules. Not even the dubious hero with 'business contacts' who sweeps Marie-Angele off her feet. Not even the reclusive artist living alone with his sensual, red canvases. In these uncertain times, the enemy may be hiding in your garden shed and the truth is all too easily buried under a pyramid of recriminations.

Michele Roberts's new novel is a mesmerising exploration of guilt, faith, desire and judgment, bringing to life a people at war in a way that is at once lyrical and shocking.