Biographer Rona Parish goes to Buckford to interview townspeople for an 800th anniversary celebration of the town. When she begins interviewing the aunt of the divorcee with whom she's staying, she learns of a recent tragic murder in the town.

"I spent my entire youth idolizing Nancy Drew. I'm pushing forty now, but some fantasies die hard." Besides her beloved collection of vintage designer clothing, there is nothing Cece Caruso cherishes more than her childhood memories of Nancy Drew. Her near obsession with the fictional teenage sleuth led her to become a professional biographer of classic mystery writers. And now that she's working on a book about Nancy's pseudonymous creator, "Carolyn...

On the surface Judith Gill, the protagonist, is a nobody, a middle-class housewife with two children living in a small town. But her job as a biographer has taught her it is the little things in life that count, and from that point of view her story is alive with action. By the author of The Stone Diaries, for which she won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

'Hame, n. Scottish form of 'home': a valued place regarded as a refuge or place of origin.' In the wake of the breakdown of her relationship, Mhairi McPhail dismantles her life in New York and moves with her 9-year-old daughter, Agnes, to the remote Scottish island of Fascaray. Mhairi has been commissioned to write a biography of the late Bard of Fascaray, Grigor McWatt, a cantankerous poet with an international reputation. But who was Grigor McWatt?...

The architect Klaus Lehmann loves his wife, Elsa, with a passion that continues throughout their married life despite long periods of separation. Almost half a century after Lehmann's death in the village of Steerborough, a young woman, Lily, arrives to research his life and work. Pouring over Klaus's letters to Elsa, Lily pieces together the story of their lives together and apart. And alone in her rented cottage by the sea, she begins to sense an...