The sun is setting on the Western world. Slowly but surely, the direction in which the world spins has reversed: where for the last five centuries the globe turned westward on its axis, it now turns to the east.... For centuries, fame and fortune were to be found in the West - in the New World of the Americas. Today it is the East that calls out to those in search of adventure and riches. The region stretching from Eastern Europe and sweeping right across Central Asia, deep into China and India, is taking center stage.

Throughout their childhood in the dusty cane fields of Saint Michael, Isabel and her older brother Isaias have been inseparable. Life is simple, and for Isabel, happiness is playing by the empty fountain in the village square, or listening to Isaias playing the fiddle. But when Isaias runs away to become a musician, promising to return, Isabel's life changes irrevocably.

Winona is a young Lakota orphan adopted by former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole. Living with Thomas and John on the farm they work in 1870s Tennessee, she is educated and loved, forging a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. But the fragile harmony of her unlikely family unit, in the aftermath of the Civil War, is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand. 

Some stories are universal. They play out across human history. And time is the river which will flow through them. It starts with a family, a family which will mutate. For now, it is a father, mother and two sons. One with his father’s violence in his blood. One who lives his mother’s artistry. One leaves. One stays. They will be joined by others whose deeds will change their fate. It is a beginning. Their stories will intertwine and evolve over the course of 2,000 years.

One rain-swept February night in 1809, an unconscious man is carried into a house in Somerset. He is Captain John Lacroix, home from Britain's disastrous campaign against Napoleon's forces in Spain. Gradually Lacroix recovers his health but not his peace of mind - he cannot talk about the war or face the memory of what happened in a village on the gruelling retreat to Corunna. After the command comes to return to his regiment, he sets out instead for the Hebrides, with the vague intent of reviving his musical interests and collecting local folk songs. 

Moving between Ghana and London, Hold is an intimate, moving, powerful coming-of-age novel. It’s a story of friendship and family, shame and forgiveness, of learning what we should cling to and when we need to let go. Belinda knows how to follow the rules. As a housegirl, she has learnt the right way to polish water glasses, to wash and fold a hundred handkerchiefs and to keep a tight lid on memories of the village she left behind when she came to Kumasi.

On the surface Maud and Tim seem ill matched. Maud is a scientist, an only child from a modest background; Tim is a musician from a large, rich family. She is emotionally cool, he wears his heart on his sleeve. Yet they make a home together, have a child and restore an old yacht. One day they will sail it, all three. Then a dreadful tragedy occurs. The strange thing is, Maud appears unscathed by it. Tim's family are horrified - what is wrong with her?

One afternoon, a mother opens her front door to find the length of her son's body stretched out on the veranda, swaddled in akwete material, his head on her welcome mat. The Death of Vivek Oji transports us to the day of Vivek's birth, the day his grandmother Ahunna died. It is the story of an over protective mother and a distant father and the heart-wrenching tale of one family's struggle to understand their child, just as Vivek learns to recognise himself.

Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it. At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.

 Dora Simon is comfortable in her retirement, indulging her interests in gardening and music. Joe O’Cleary is content on the Jersey farm he helped rebuild with its owner, Geoffrey Laurent. But their worlds are shattered by the arrival of Barbara Hummel, who is anxious to track down the identity of a mysterious woman whose photograph she found among her mother’s possessions. Forced to resurrect long-buried secrets and confront a past they never thought they would revisit, Dora and Joe’s lives unravel - and entwine - in shocking and surprising ways.