Books in the Fairlight Moderns series

David Aguilera's life is collapsing around him. After the catastrophic loss of the vessel under his command and a perilous trek across the Baltics to safety, he returns home to find himself unable to reconnect with his family. Frustrated by his inability to express what he is feeling, his wife Margalit moves out to stay with friends, taking their children with her.As David anxiously awaits the official inquiry into his conduct, he turns to those who are most important to him - his closest friend and comrade Marce; his Catholic adoptive mother; his Jewish birth mother; and Margalit, herself Sephardi Jewish. Faced with the prospect of losing his family altogether, he must confront his conflicting identities and faiths and decide the man he wants to become.

She's had this feeling before. This feeling of marking time. Of pressing her nose against a window and watching as everyone else lives their best lives. Isla Wintergreen has not seen her grandfather since she was seven, but when she unexpectedly inherits his cottage on the Isle of Skye, she cannot resist the opportunity to escape her purposeless life. As she slowly becomes a part of the island community, she learns more about the family she never really knew - from her estranged father, to her reclusive grandfather, and her intelligent but oppressed great-grandmother. Meanwhile, her mother Cathy reflects on her own past. Mother and daughter both hope to find new freedom - but can family patterns ever really be broken? Told through the lives of four generations of Isla's family, all linked by their connection to water, Dancing in the Shallows masterfully explores family relationships and generational inheritance.

North-east India, 1945. Tensions are rising, but fourteen-year-old Joya doesn't pay much attention to 'political business' - she is more concerned with doing well at school and having fun with her best friends.Yet when her father disappears without a trace, Joya's life falls apart. Forced to drop out of school and support her mother by working in a garment factory, she refuses to accept that her father is gone forever, spending her nights sewing him a suit from scraps of fine material.But as political unrest grows and rumors of corruption spread, Joya questions the true nature of her father's disappearance. And who is the sinister figure known only as the two-tailed snake?

Rural Cyprus, 1925. The twelve days of Christmas are beginning - the time when, according to local folklore, creatures known as kalikantzari come up from Hell to wreak havoc. Despo is heavily pregnant and deeply afraid. Meanwhile, her husband Loukas finds himself irresistibly drawn to an Englishman, a newcomer to the island.

In snapshots through time, 'Only About Love' takes a sweeping loop around Frank's life as he navigates courtship, marriage, fatherhood and illness. Told through the perspective of Frank and his family, this story is one of intense honesty about the things we do to those closest to us.

Longlisted for The Women's Prize for Fiction 2019 and The Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019. 1970s communist Romania. When Alina's brother-in-law defects to the West, her and her husband's careers come grinding to a halt. Alina turns to her aunt for help - the wife of a communist leader and a secret practitioner of the old folk ways.