Allie Cresswell

Considered a troublesome burden, Evelyn Talbot is banished by her family to their remote country house. Tall Chimneys is hidden in a damp and gloomy hollow. It is outmoded and inconvenient but Evelyn is determined to save it from the fate of so many stately homes at the time - abandonment or demolition. Occasional echoes of tumult in the wider world reach their sequestered backwater - the strident cries of political extremists, a furore of royal scandal, rumblings of the European war machine. But their isolated spot seems largely untouched. At times life is hard - little more than survival. At times it feels enchanted, almost outside of time itself. The woman and the house shore each other up - until love comes calling, threatening to pull them asunder. Her desertion will spell its demise, but saving Tall Chimneys could mean sacrificing her hope for happiness, even sacrificing herself. A century later, a distant relative crosses the globe to find the house of his ancestors. What he finds in the strange depression of the moor could change the course of his life forever. One woman, one house, one hundred years.

The Amazon # 1 best-seller, this is a collection of short stories, travel-writing, reviews, excerpts and articles. In 'The Book' a woman on a station platform has her life changed by the gift of a strangely powerful book. 'Baseball for Beginners' attempts to understand the subtleties of this nuanced game. In 'Many Rooms' three strangers who inhabit an inner city square find they have more in common than they think. 'Grave Secrets' explores the buried lives, hopes and dreams of the dead. In 'Open Day' the pinkest, fluffiest, most innocuous old lady at the old folks' home surprises everyone, including the Mayor. 'The Peach Side of Apricot' recalls a conversation overheard on a bus.

From the author of the Amazon #1 best-selling anthology 'The Book' comes a new collection of journal entries, original short stories, excerpts, reviews and articles. In 'Genesis' a writer begins a new work from scratch. It is to be her signature work and the main character will go down as one of literature's greatest. But the character has other ideas about the way the plot should go, and the writer has to decide whether to consign the whole manuscript to the bin or just let the story unfold.'Being Mandy Broadhead' is a memoir of the writer's teenage years. The agony of being plain and not particularly popular crystallises into a fixation with the prettiest and most popular girl in her school.'No-One Was Saved' is the outworking of the lyrics of a popular song. Who was Eleanor Rigby and why did she collect rice from the church grounds? What was the face she kept in a jar, and who was it for'Moving' includes excerpts from a diary written when the writer moved with her family from suburban Cheshire to rural Cumbria in 2000.

A novel from the Amazon #1 best-selling author Allie Cresswell. Who knows what secrets are trapped, like caged tigers, behind our neighbours' doors? When Molly and Stan move into a new housing development, Molly becomes a one-woman social committee, throwing herself into a frantic round of communal do-gooding and pot-luck suppers. She is blinded to what goes on behind those respectable facades by her desire to make the neighbourhood, and the neighbours, into all she has dreamed, all she needs them to be. Twenty years later, Molly looks back on the ruin of the Combe Close years, at the waste and destruction wrought by the escaping tigers: adultery, betrayal, tragedy, desertion, death. But now Molly has her own guilty secret, her own pet tiger, and it is all she can do to keep it in its cage.

Imagine that, for one night only, you could do whatever you wanted and nobody would ever know. Welcome to Game Show. It is 1992, and in a Bosnian town a small family cowers in their basement. The Serbian militia is coming - an assorted rabble of malcontents given authority by a uniform and inflamed by the idea that they're owed something, big-time, and the Bosnians are going to pay. When they get to the town they will ransack the houses, round up the men and rape the women. Who's to stop them? Who's to accuse them? Who will be left, to tell the tale? Meanwhile, in a nondescript northern UK town a group of contestants make their way to the TV studios to take part in a radical new Game Show. There's money to be won, and fun to be had. They'll be able to throw off their inhibitions and do what they want because they'll all be in disguise and no-one will ever know. In a disturbing denouement, war and game meld into each other as action and consequence are divided, the words 'blame' and 'fault' have no meaning and impunity reigns . Game Show asks whether the situation which fostered the Bosnian war, the genocide in Rwanda, the rise of so-called Islamic State in Syria and the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar could ever happen in the West. The answer will shock you.

The McKay family gathers for a week-long holiday at a rambling old house to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Robert and Mary. In recent years only funerals and sudden, severe illnesses have been able to draw them together and as they gather in the splendid rooms of Hunting Manor, their differences are soon uncomfortably apparent. For all their history, their traditions, the connective strands of DNA, they are relative strangers. There are truths unspoken, but the question is: how much truth can a family really stand? The family holiday mushrooms, drawing in sundry relatives both estranged and deranged. The machinations of an appalling, uninvited aunt threaten the holiday - and the family - with irreparable damage. This book will make you question your own family situation. What does it really mean to be 'family'?