Lola Jordan's life is sinking deep into disaster. Not only does she feel like a total loser at her new London school, but then her project on phosphorescence is read out in front of the entire school assembly – and she wants the ground to swallow her up. Why on earth did she write those weird descriptions of diving under glowing green waves like a glittering mermaid?Desperate to avoid everyone finding out that Lola's spent her entire life in a tiny seaside village, things take a serious turn for the worse when her project sparks a school trip to the Norfolk village where she grew up. Suddenly she finds herself stuck on a deserted island with a group of teenagers she has nothing in common with, and a boy she can't get out of her mind.Against a background of the mysteriously sparkling sea, the two halves of Lola's life collide in an explosion of romance and adventure.

Laura Sale has become invisible in her own life. Her domestic existence in North London with thirteen-year-old twins Dolly and Fred, and their father, the fascinating but ridiculously demanding Inigo, seems relentless, while her professional life fostering Inigo's career as Britain's most successful conceptual artist is frustrating and unfulfilling. What does she really like? What makes her laugh? Is a passionate existence passing her by?A chance encounter with Guy, the man she nearly married twenty years ago, is the catalyst she needs. Change comes in mysterious guises, and Laura finds herself confronting old ghosts, ferrets , a goat and a collapsing relationship, back in the rural Norfolk of her childhood holidays. As she starts to savour the space she has craved, she begins a new stage of her life with its own surprises, demons and delights. Taking control of her destiny, Laura finds it lit with possibility.

April, 1946. Michael, a soldier, returns to Southampton on a troop ship. Brutalised and in shock, he cannot face the life that awaits him at home. Impulsively he boards a train to the western tip of Cornwall, where his life is shaped by his heart and the fragmented Britain he has come back to.More than half a century later, Kit, an enigmatic stranger, arrives in Norfolk to take up his unwanted inheritance- a decommissioned lighthouse, half hidden in the shadows of the past, now sweeping its beam forward through time. According to Kit, his life is complete, and he doesn't wish to see anything the lighthouse's glare exposes. But the choice is out of his hands.Luisa, a second-generation Italian, has so far lived through her children and has reached a point of invisibility. The constant push and pull of family life has turned like the tide, and she is suspended, without direction. Kit and Luisa meet and neither can escape the inevitability of Michael's split-second decision...

We all want a perfect life. At what price? What do you do when you should be happy, but you're not? What do you blame when you realise you don't want your husband anymore? What can you change when you see your family falling apart? What if you had the perfect life ... and it turned out to be anything but?

On a freezing cold night in an unfamiliar city, a man meets a woman. The encounter lasts just moments, they party barely knowing one another's names, they make no plans to meet again. But both are left breathless. Five years on, the man and the woman are still living separate lives, thousands of miles apart. But both still think about that night. So if they were to meet again, you'd think, this time, they'd do whatever it took to hold on to each other. But can it be that simple? Or will real life get in the way?

Gabriella has many siblings and many more animals. Her father is an impoverished poet with a penchant for mending cars with string and optimism, her mother a classicist now more concerned with trying to keep track of hectic family life the the declining of verbs. Gabriella and her brothers run amuck through the attics and wilderness garden of their home Mildney. Here she experiences the triumphs and pitfalls of belonging to a wayward family; and longs for conformity. Her failure to achieve it is absolute.

Christy Naylor feels as if she is being cut open; her life is wrenched apart when her mother dies and her father's crazed reaction is to gamble. He wins a fish farm in a game of poker and uproots them from their lives in the patchwork of suburbia to live on a couple of watery fields and a lake full of fish fry. Unsettled and unsure of herself, Christy is seventeen, suffocating and suffering. Mick Fleet, tall, magnetic and overpowering, is irresistible. Christy falls for him, longing for him to hook her out of her sorrow and into his mystery. She knows nothing about him and plunges deep into an intense love affair, blind to the catastrophe he will bring...

Venetia Summers appears to lead a fairy-tale rural existence with her husband and two sons in her tumbledown Norfolk cottage. But when her husband leaves her for his masseuse, not even the arrival of a splendid baby daughter can make up for the sense of loss she feels for her newly lopsided family. Hens Dancing follows Venetia's diaries over the course of a year. It tells of domestic battles - with an unruly garden, errant cockerels, Orcs and War Hammers and a traumatic bathroom conversion. But there are also consolations: a passion for fun fur, the severe beauty of the Norfolk landscape, the regal serenity of The Beauty (Venetia's baby daughter) and perhaps, amongst it all, the promise of new love.From Publishers WeeklyBritish magazine columnist Barker channels a postmodern Erma Bombeck in her thinly plotted yet charming U.S. debut, a year-in-the-life story told via the journal entries of Venetia Summers, a transplanted Londoner living in the Norfolk countryside. Feisty, 35-year-old Venetia has recently shed her philandering, ex-soldier husband, Charles, "who fries cuddly animals for a living." While Charles is thriving in the pet crematorium business and reveling in his new romance with "poison dwarf" Helena, Venetia delouses her sons Felix and Giles; staggers after her hyperactive eight-month-old daughter, "The Beauty"; and tackles laundry and gardening to avoid writing copy for corporate brochures. As house and garden deteriorate around her, Venetia bewails her fading looks and dependence on her mother, seeking solace in junk food, friends, trashy clothes and Georgette Heyer romance novels. She also refuses to admit that she has a serious crush on David Lanyon, the cute carpenter who volunteers to renovate her bathroom; in exchange, she takes photos for his publicity brochure. Barker keeps things wickedly off-kilter, subjecting various characters to unforeseeable disasters and indignities: one eats a toxic mushroom, one chops off his finger and another stumbles poolside only to have a "bit of his head" gobbled up by an affectionate Labrador. Readers who share Venetia's enthusiasm for Georgette Heyer will guess where Barker's predictable tale is heading, but the newer author's caustic pen will endear her to grownups who like their women quick-witted and their fairy tales fractured. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalMeet Venetia Summers, a charmingly disorganized, thirtysomething single mom who's doing her best to raise her kids and keep her sanity in a rural English cottage amidst a maelstrom of pets, plants, and wacky relatives. Told in diary format over the course of a year, this work represents literary voyeurism at its best. We share in the birth of a daughter (The Beauty) after Venetia's husband, Charles, leaves her for the dreaded Helena; the antics of Venetia's well-meaning, albeit daffy, mother; chaotic seaside holidays; and the home-improvement projects of the increasingly attractive and available David. This wonderfully entertaining and endearing book, Barker's first American publication after much success in England, will doubtless be favorably compared to Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (LJ 5/15/98). Her characters are real, the events believable, and the author able to address some all-too-common family problems without losing the story's humor and appeal. Venetia is a woman many readers would like to have as a friend. Essential for libraries with fans of Bridget Jones.- Susan Clifford Braun, Aerospace Corp., El Segundo, CA Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For a year, Venetia Summers has been 'buffered from single-motherhood' by boyfriend David, but when work takes him to a Brazilian rainforest, things begin to unravel. Phone lines crackle, emails languish, and high-tech, long-distance love proves bewildering and vexing. Meanwhile the children and dogs run wilder than ever, brother Desmond's outrageous wedding takes over her home, and her relationship with her new neighbour, Hedley Sale, gets off to a rather unfortunate start. How is Venetia to cope alone with outward-bound style holidays, a foul-mouthed parrot and her new career as a designer of demented cardigans? A moonlit walk takes an unexpected turn, and she finds herself with a real dilemma.