All Alison ever wanted was a blissful childhood for her six children, with summers at the beach and birthday parties on the lawn at their family home. Together with Ingrid, the family au pair, she has worked hard to create a real old-fashioned family life. But beneath its postcard sheen, the picture is clouded by a distant father, Alison's inexplicable emotional outbursts, and long-repressed secrets that no one dares mention.

A teenage girl has gone missing and everyone is called upon to join the search. The villagers fan out across the English moors as the police set up roadblocks and news reporters descend. Meanwhile, there is still work that must be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. As the seasons unfold and the search for the missing girl goes on, there are those who leave the village and those who...

The Turn of the Screw is a gothic ghost story, described by Oscar Wilde as 'a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale'. An unnamed governess lives in an isolated country house with her two charges. When the governess begins to see ghostly apparitions roaming the grounds, she does everything she can to protect the children, but the situation soon spirals out of control. This uneasy and sinister novella has influenced a number of films including...

A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book for 2011
One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books 2011
Far from London's crime and pollution, Hanmouth's wealthier residents live in picturesque, heavily mortgaged cottages in the center of a town packed with artisanal cheese shops and antiques stores. They're reminded of the town's less desirable outskirts—with their grim, flimsy housing stock and chain stores—only when their

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A tale of family secrets and the damaging corruption of the British legal system from the author of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. In Bleak House, Charles Dickens not only pries apart the stultifying and ponderous conduct and contracts of British moneyed society, but also takes specific aim at an English judicial system in desperate need of modernization and reform. Featuring the voice of Esther Summerson-Dickens's only female narrator-the story...

Three years after his daughter went missing, children's author Stephen Lewis struggles to find purpose in his life without her. His wife Julie has left him, and his best friends Charles and Thelman have retired to the countryside, battling demons of their own. With tenderness and insight, the movie explores a marriage devastated, the loss of childhood, the fluidity of time, grief, hope, and acceptance.

At the beginning of World War II, twelve-year-old Nora Lynch is one of thousands of London children sent away to the safety of the English countryside. Her surrogate family, Reverend and Mrs. Rivers and their daughter, Grace, are like no one she has ever met, offering shelter, affection, and the sister she never had. But Nora is too young and too naïve to understand the cracks beneath the surface of her idyllic new life at the rectory or the...