Tuesday 1st March 2005

Set in the idyllic, beachside hamlet of Dolphin Cove, Return to Paradise is six gripping, twisting and fiendishly clever murder mysteries – all against the spectacular backdrop of the Australian coastal landscape.

Australian ex-pat Mackenzie Clarke is the seemingly golden girl of the London Metropolitan police force – with an intuitive approach to detective work, she has built a reputation for being able to crack the most impossible of cases. However, she's suddenly forced to up sticks and move back to her childhood home of Dolphin Cove, a beautiful, coastal paradise… and Mackenzie's worst nightmare.

English Teacher follows Evan Marquez, a high school teacher in Austin, Texas, who often finds himself at the intersection of the personal, professional and political aspects of working at a high school. Evan wants to be a principled person but often runs into trouble because of it.

Heartstopper tells the story of Nick and Charlie, two British teens at an all-boys grammar school. Charlie, a highly-strung, openly gay over-thinker, and Nick, a cheerful, soft-hearted rugby player, who one day are made to sit together.

The American Gilded Age was a period of immense economic change, of huge fortunes made and lost, and the rise of disparity between old money and new.

Against this backdrop of change, the story begins in 1882 — introducing young Marian Brook, the orphaned daughter of a Union general, who moves into the New York City home of her thoroughly old money aunts Agnes van Rhijn and Ada Brook. Accompanied by Peggy Scott, an accomplished African-American woman, Marian inadvertently becomes enmeshed in a social war between one of her aunts, a scion of the old money set, and her stupendously rich neighbors, a ruthless railroad tycoon and his ambitious wife, George and Bertha Russell.

In this exciting new world that is on the brink of the modern age, will Marian follow the established rules of society, or forge her own path?