Charlie

In Elizabethan London, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her education has endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but still she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees the theatre, Emilia discovers the power of stories to beguile audiences. Secretly, she forms a plan to bring a play of her own to the stage – by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.

Summer 1914. A world on the brink of catastrophe. In London, 26-year-old Venetia Stanley – aristocratic, clever, bored, reckless – is having a love affair with the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, a man more than twice her age. He writes to her obsessively, sharing the most sensitive matters of state. As Asquith reluctantly leads the country into war with Germany, a young intelligence officer is assigned to investigate a leak of top secret documents – and suddenly what was a sexual intrigue becomes a matter of national security that will alter the course of political history.

Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship. He will work for a Bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition and prejudice - but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse. He will learn to handcraft beautiful volumes, and within each he will capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory. If there’s something you want to forget, he can help. If there’s something you need to erase, he can assist. Your past will be stored safely in a book and you will never remember your secret, however terrible.

"The Near Witch" is only an old story told to frighten children. If the wind calls at night, you must not listen. The wind is lonely and always looking for company. There are no strangers in the town of Near. These are the truths that Lexi has heard all her life. But when an actual stranger, a boy who seems to fade like smoke, appears outside her home on the moor at night, she knows that at least one of these sayings is no longer true.

In the wild, windswept Welsh Marches, a noble young lord rides homewards, embittered, angry and in danger. He is Guyon, Lord of Ledworth, heir to threatened lands, husband-to-be of Judith of Ravenstow. Their union will save his lands - but they have yet to meet...for this is Wales at the turn of the 12th century. Dynasties forge and fight, and behind the precarious throne of William Rufus, political intrigue is raging.

In a forbidding Gothic castle on a hilltop in the heart of Nazi Germany, an unlikely band of British officers spent the Second World War plotting daring escapes from their Nazi captors. Or so the story of Colditz has gone, unchallenged for 70 years. But that tale contains only part of the truth. The astonishing inside story, revealed for the first time by best-selling historian Ben Macintyre, is a tale of the indomitable human spirit, but also one of class conflict, homosexuality, espionage, insanity and farce.

On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There they took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three British citizens. A tense six-day siege ensued as millions gathered around screens across the country to witness the longest news flash in British television history, in which police negotiators and psychiatrists sought a bloodless end to the standoff, while the SAS – hitherto an organisation shrouded in secrecy – laid plans for a daring rescue mission: Operation Nimrod.

12th century, England: A penniless young knight with few prospects, William Marshal is plucked from obscurity when he saves the life of Henry II's formidable queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. In gratitude, she appoints him tutor to the heir to the throne, the volatile and fickle Prince Henry. But being a royal favorite brings its share of danger and jealousy as well as fame and reward.

New York City, New York. Meet Augustus Berrycloth-Young - fop, flaneur, and Englishman abroad - as he chronicles the Jazz Age from his perch atop the city that never sleeps. That is, until his old friend Thomas Nightingale arrives, pursuing a rather mysterious affair concerning an old saxophone - which will take Gussie from his warm bed, to the cold shores of Long Island, and down to the jazz clubs where music, magic, and madness haunt the shadows.

Born into poverty, brutalised and ignored by her family, it is only when she is married off to a nobleman that her life undergoes a transformation, as her husband recognises in Rosamund a magic she does not know she possesses but which affects almost all who encounter her. Presiding over a luxurious chocolate house where men go to be seen, exchange news and indulge in the sweet and heady drink to which they have become addicted, Rosamund feels blessed. But disaster strikes, and Rosamund stands on the brink of losing all she has worked so hard to achieve.