Books by Hilary Bailey

A Sequel to Henry James' the Turn of the Screw, finds Flora, now nineteen, happy and in love about to marry when her dead brothers ghost starts haunting her...

Journalist, Kate Higgins loses herself to her subject when researching the biography of Violet Levine and violence and Violet become intertwined.

First published in 1988, this is the story of Polly Kops, who lives in a charming part of West London, in a big house on a lovely garden square, with her lover and three daughters. From the outside, she looks to be living an ideal life, but upon closer inspection, it's easy to see that Polly's life is far from perfection: the bills haven't been paid in months; the phone has been cut off; her lover is a useless cad; and her house is falling apart. Polly can barely keep it together. It's a marked contrast to her earlier life, married to a wealthy man, and living in financial comfort - that life fell apart the day her husband discovered her affair with Clancy, her cousin and current lover, who would rather buy himself a new suit than pay for electricity or food for the slapdash family.Next door it's a much more civilised arrangement - at least, upstairs, where Anna lives with her husband Geoffrey in quiet, comfortable wedded bliss. Too bad about the downstairs tenant, a single mother of three who rents for a paltry £20 per week and will never leave. Why would she, after all? She has a garden flat, in a lovely area, for next to nothing, and no lump sum of money - no matter how much Anna scrapes together to offer her - will be enough to bribe her to go.As Time Goes By is a look into the lives of two women who, despite living mere metres away from each other, are as different as night and day. Their ambitions may not be the same - Anna wishes desperately for a quiet life with her increasingly distant husband, while Polly grasps at security for herself and her children - but their struggles are surprisingly parallel in certain ways. After all, what's more important to any of us than the people we love most?

'Hilary Bailey ... is a mistress of her melodrama'- MAIL ON SUNDAY'Bailey plays on the fear of the monstrous, compassionless woman and also plays with it'- OBSERVER

Sex, power, politics and scandal, set against the backdrop of Victorian London's underworld and one woman's rise from rags to riches.

Two stories about romance on the rocks, served with a twist of intrigue.

Jack the Ripper's most infamous victim, Mary Kelly, laid bare in this tantalizing take on her life in Victorian London.

Polly Kops is living with her husband, a hero of the alternative society and her twin daughters in a run-down house in the then-seedy area near Portobello Road. Her older, illegitimate son is being reared by her mother. She does not know who her father was. An old lover returns -. In an atmosphere of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, secrets are revealed.

Bailey's post-apocalyptic London in 2013 eerily foreshadows and accurately depicts the climate of fear and paranoia surrounding global economic downturn and its effects on society.

Bailey flips the legend of Troy on its head by asking 'What if?' Using a female, Trojan perspective she re-interprets and dissects the possibilities.

Hannie leads a double life, one as a wife and mother in a Devon manor house, and the other as an International smuggler.In this sharp and witty pastiche of the worlds of John Buchan and Rider Haggard, our heroine brings back cures for cancer from the Brazilian jungle, takes a small child across war-torn Chad, and steals the vital papers which restores a Black family's rights to their Caribbean island.Still, it's not all glitz and glamour for our heroine; all it takes is one wrong move and Hannie risks losing everything: her family, her country home, her lover, and even her life.

Melanie, Vanessa and Annie have all been betrayed by men - and Melanie is only 13. One day the two abandoned wives and the runaway girl vow the future will bring them love, money and revenge. This is a novel of the '90s, in which deceit, comedy and tragedy intermingle in modern London.

Somewhere between Sarah's Water's The Night Watch and William Boyd's Any Human Heart, friendship transcends class divides and the cruelty of war.

'To be your wife is, for me, to be as happy as I can be on earth' - Jane Eyre's acceptance of Edward Rochester's proposal, but the return to Thornfield proves too much for Jane to bear.

The pleasures and pains of growing up female in one entertaining volume.

Imagine if Sherlock Holmes had a sister who was brighter and quicker witted. Bailey's Charlotte Holmes is her.

Christmas at the Trents would demonstrate, not by design of course, for me, the outlander, loutish fellow from the North, what life could be like, should be like and, for friends and connections of the Trents, always would be like.