Brilliant Green

Are plants intelligent? Can they solve problems, communicate, and navigate their surroundings? Or are they passive, incapable of independent action or social behavior? Philosophers and scientists have pondered these questions since ancient Greece, most often concluding that plants are unthinking and inert: they are too silent, too sedentary - just too different from us. Yet discoveries over the past 50 years have challenged these ideas, shedding new light on the extraordinary capabilities and complex interior lives of plants.

Ismay Deagan has one wish in the world - to leave Ireland and join her brother, Bram, in Australia. However, her father has other ideas and orders her to marry their vicious neighbour Rory Flynn, even though she loathes him. But after Rory brutally attacks her Ismay realises she has to escape...

'This is one of the best books I've ever read' - 5-star reader review The unputdownable saga from the author of A PENNYWORTH OF SUNSHINE and DOWN WEAVERS LANE. Calico Road runs through a tiny Lancashire hamlet up on the edge of the moors, miles from anywhere. Its folk are an independent breed -...

The extraordinary life of the woman behind the beloved children's classics Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny comes alive in this fascinating biography of Margaret Wise Brown. Margaret's books have sold millions of copies all over the world, but few people know that she was at the center of a children's book publishing revolution.

The Great War opened up an exciting new career for Vi in London. But that was yesterday. Now the war's over, her husband is dead and she needs to pick up the pieces of her life. On her way home from work she meets a man who is in huge need of her help. Recently demobbed, Joss Bentley has no job...

Ellen Dawson is glad when the Great War ends, but sad that Lady Bingram's aides are to be disbanded. She can't bear to go back into service again after working as a driver and mechanic in London. But she is forced by her mother's illness to accept her old position as housemaid in order to stay...

Set in Lancashire and Western Australia in the 1860s, Anna Jacobs' entrancing new saga follows the fortunes of the family that first appeared in FAREWELL TO LANCASHIRE In the untamed outback of Western Australia, the Blake sisters are together again despite what seemed like unsurmountable odds...

Saga storytelling at its finest for all Catherine Cookson fans. Cassandra Blake has raised her three motherless sisters. The girls are the pride of their book-loving, impractical father, and not in a hurry to marry. Then the American Civil War cuts off supplies of cotton to Lancashire, the mills...

Anna Jacobs' vivid Lancashire saga introduces us to the world of the music hall. Carrie Preston is used to hard work - oldest of ten, with an incompetent mother and a drunken father, she struggles to find food for her siblings. But nothing could have prepared her for the day fate deals her...

Dora Preston has guts but it will take more than that for her to break free from Hedderby and make a life for herself on the stage. Then she meets Gideon - and pursuing her ambitions becomes even harder. Gideon has returned from the fighting in India only to discover that an impostor has stolen...

In Shattered to Shining, nine women and one male domestic violence survivor describe how they were shattered, as their home became a place where physical and sexual violence, emotional and psychological control dominated their lives. Through persistence and courage, they have risen above their situation and come out the other side shining with positivity, strength, commitment, and empathy for others.