Böcker av Elizabeth Speller

From the author of the highly successful The Return of Captain John Emmett, comes a novel about betrayal - the tiny betrayals and the ones that may end a life - set in Berlin in the 1960s.

This is a novel about betrayal: the tiny betrayals that get us all through life, the wider moral betrayals, the treasonable betrayals and the ones that may end a life. Set in Berlin, in a particularly chilly period in the Cold War of the late 1960s, the story has at its heart a young woman, newly arrived in the city, married to a reserved British junior civil servant she has not known for long and trying to find her place in a tightly knit expatriate community. But Lucy is also longing for independence and in her efforts to follow her ideals and find her own life brings herself and others into danger.Is Lucy is, as she first appears, innocent, lonely, out of her depth, unaware of what she is putting at risk, or is there something else? And what about those close to her? Her sensible, rather old-fashioned husband, Peter, who married her so hastily? Her parents, living a reclusive life abroad? Her new and overwhelming Berlin social circle? Peter's colleagues? German civilians, some hostile some apparently helpful? It is soon clear that Lucy has brought secrets with her but are they her own or ones she is keeping for others? Berlin is a walled city recently ruined and still in the shadow of guilt and atrocity. In a society where almost everyone is playing a part, who can Lucy turn to when it seems that someone, or the city itself, is out to destroy her? And why is she there in the first place?

In the summer of 1913, the world seems full of possibility for four very different young men. Young Jean-Baptiste dreams of the day he'll leave his Picardy home and row down-river to the sea.Earnest and hard-working Frank has come to London to take up an apprenticeship in Regent Street. His ambitions are self-improvement, a wife and, above all, a bicycle.Organ scholar Benedict is anxious yet enthralled by the sensations of his synaesthesia. He is uncertain both about God and the nature of his friendship with the brilliant and mercurial Theo.Harry has turned his back on his wealthy English family, has a thriving business in New York and a beautiful American wife. But his nationality is still British. Three years later, on the first of July 1916, their lives have been taken in entirely unexpected directions. Now in uniform they are waiting for dawn on the battlefield of the Somme. The generals tell them that victory will soon be theirs but the men are accompanied by regrets, fears and secrets as they move towards the line.

When former infantry officer Laurence Bartram is called to the small village of Easton Deadall, he is struck by the beauty of the place: a crumbling stately home; a centuries-old church; and a recently planted maze, a memorial to the men of the village, almost all of whom died in one heroic battle in 1916.But it soon becomes clear to Laurence that while rest of the country is alight with hope for the first time since the end of the War, as the first Labour government takes power, the Wiltshire village is haunted by its tragic past. In 1911, five-year-old Kitty Easton disappeared from her bed and has not been seen since: only her fragile mother believes still she is alive. When a family trip to the Empire Exhibition in London ends in disaster and things take an increasingly sinister turn, Laurence struggles to find out what has happened as it seems that the fate of the house, the men and of Kitty herself may be part of a much longer, darker story of love, betrayal - and violence.

Tells the story of the most powerful man on earth in the early part of the second century. The man who built Hadrian's Wall, the Pantheon in Rome, and, for himself, a nine hundred-room villa at Tivoli. Hadrian was a great but flawed Roman Emperor, an intellectual and patron of the arts but he was also melancholy, volatile and utterly ruthless.