Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: In postwar Liverpool, a teenager joins a theater troupe to escape her working-class life-and is drawn into a darker world. From one of Britain's best-loved novelists, this is the story of Stella Bradshaw, an orphaned sixteen-year-old with dreams of getting out of her boardinghouse in the slums. Unwilling to resign herself to a job at Woolworth's, she finds a place at the Liverpool Repertory Company instead.  ...

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: A masterwork of love, guilt, and friendship set in Victorian Liverpool and Eastern Europe during the Crimean War.   Photography is the common thread weaving together three different points of view that span the years from 1846 to 1854. The first "plate" opens with the account of Myrtle, a young orphan girl, as she is taking a photograph of her adoptive father, Mr. Hardy, who has just passed away in Liverpool....

Will a new romance only lead to more heartbreak? With her modelling career in tatters and her long-term relationship with her sailor boyfriend at an end, Maggie Gregory returns to her family in Liverpool to decide what to do with the rest of her life. A chance encounter with a handsome stranger offers the possibility of new romance, but is the man who calls himself Tim Murphy really all he seems, and what secrets has he been keeping from Maggie? An...