DecemberEleven year old Isabelle hasn't spoken in nine months, and as December begins the situation is getting desperate. Her mother has stopped work to devote herself full time to her daughter's care. Four psychiatrists have already given up on her, and her school, which until now has allowed her to study from home, will not take her back in the New Year. Her parents are frantically trying to understand what has happened to their child so they can help her,

so thoroughly disreputable that he has been hired to kill a man

Except that Jean made one mistake

nice husband

“I’m not asking you to build something impossible

First published in 1983 and winner of the Booker Prize

newly appointed aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington

But their search for the truth reveals more secrets in their neighbourhood

Christina will have to make a choice

and asked to work on a commission for the house she is building on the desolate Smugglers' Coast of North Yorkshire

There are dark forces

all but a professor

of that nightmare time in the bloody cellars of the Gestapo and the hideous sick double-cross that followed when freedom appeared to be within his grasp