Europe – One for the Weekend

Corsica. Summer 1989. Fifteen year old Clotilde is the sole survivor when her family's car veers off a narrow road into a ravine. Twenty-seven years later she returns to the island with her husband and teenage daughter in an attempt to come to terms with her past. But then she receives a letter - from her mother as if she were alive. It seems impossible. Clotilde watched her parents and brother die that day. She has lived with their ghosts ever since. But then who sent the letter - and why?

London 1986. Bequeathed an old portrait by her grandmother, Kate Darling begins to unpick the tapestry of her family's secret history in a journey that take her to Corsica, Paris and back to the heady days of the roaring twenties where it all began. Paris, 1939: Alice Eversley and Thomas Stafford meet again in the City of Light. Tom is now a world-famous artist, Alice is much changed too - bruised from the events of the last decade. Perhaps they can lost themselves in the love story that ignited by a moonlit lake all those years ago. But sometimes there's no place for happy endings - and there's no hiding from the shadow of war...

Gost is surrounded by mountains and fields of wild flowers. The summer sun burns. The Croatian winter brings freezing winds. Beyond the boundaries of the town an old house which has lain empty for years is showing signs of life. One of the windows, glass darkened with dirt, today stands open, and the lively chatter of English voices carries across the fallow fields. Laura and her teenage children have arrived. A short distance away lies the hut of Duro Kolak, who lives alone with his two hunting dogs. As he helps Laura with repairs to the old house, they uncover a mosaic beneath the ruined plaster and, in the rising heat of summer, painstakingly restore it. But Gost is not all it seems; conflicts long past still suppurate beneath the scars.

Growing up in Zagreb in the summer of 1991, 10-year-old Ana Juric is a carefree tomboy; she runs the streets with her best friend, Luka, helps take care of her baby sister, Rahela, and idolizes her father. But when civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, football games and school lessons are supplanted by sniper fire and air raid drills.  The brutal ethnic cleansing of Croats and Bosnians tragically changes Ana's life, and she is lost to a world of genocide and child soldiers; a daring escape plan to America becomes her only chance for survival. Ten years later she returns to Croatia, a young woman struggling to belong to either country, forced to confront the trauma of her past and rediscover the place that was once her home.

Romance. Antonia Butler is on the brink of a life-changing decision and a job advert looking for a multilingual housekeeper at a beautifully renovated Croatian farmhouse, Vila Maslina, is one she can’t ignore. Arriving on the tiny picturesque island of Korčula, Antonia feels a spark of hope for the first time in a long time. This is a chance to leave the past behind. But this island, and its inhabitants, have secrets of their own and a not-too-distant past steeped in tragedy and war. None more so than Vila Maslina’s enigmatic owner Damir Maric. A young man with nothing to lose but everything to gain…

Zoe is an artist from California. Martin an engineer from Yorkshire. Both have found themselves in Cluny, France coming to terms with their recent past. For Zoe it is the death of her husband, for Martin a difficult divorce. Looking to make a fresh start, each sets out alone to walk 2000km from Cluny to Santiago de Compostela in NW Spain, following in the footsteps of pilgrims who have walked the camino for centuries. It's said the Camino changes you - it's a chance to find a new version of yourself. But can these two very different people find each other?

Cold War thriller. Berlin is still in ruins almost four years after the war, caught between political idealism and the harsh realities of Soviet occupation. Alex Meier is a young Jewish writer who fled the Nazis for America before the war. Now, the politics of his youth have left him embroiled in the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, Alex makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. Espionage, like the black market, is still a way of life.

Contemporary fiction. When a successful songwriter tries to leave her sadness behind, and mend a broken heart by taking a series of pet-sitting jobs around the globe, she can't believe her luck when she lands a job in a luxurious villa on the island of Madeira. But her plans to spend time on her own are rudely disrupted with the arrival of an unexpected house guest, and she is forced to confront regrets, sorrow and what she really wants from the future.

Every summer, Jenn and her husband Greg return to Deia, on Mallorca's dramatic west coast. This year the arrival of Emma, Jenn's stepdaughter, and her new boyfriend Nathan threatens to upset their equilibrium. Beautiful and reckless, Nathan stirs something unexpected in Jenn. As she is increasingly seduced by Nathan's youth and the promise of passion, the line between desire and obsession begins to blur. What follows is a highly-charged liaison that puts lives and relationships in jeopardy.

A story that switches between the present day and the violence of the Spanish Civil War. Kate is running away. The hide-out she chooses is Menorca, the simple, beautiful island she knew as a child. A chance encounter with an old friend enmeshes her in a web of family and island secrets that have endured since the Civil War, warping the lives of three generations. The last person to champion truth over reticence, she is nevertheless a catalyst for breaking a sixty year 'pact of forgetting'. Until the only secret left is her own.

Amsterdam. Historical fiction. 1686 and a young woman arrives at the grand home  of a wealthy merchant to begin a new life as his wife. His wedding gift is an extraordinary miniature replica of their home - a doll's house that will be furnished with tiny creations that are eerily true to the household. Gradually she begins to uncover the secrets and dangers of the household, realising that their fate is in the hands of the creator of the tiny replicas.

Non-fiction. Summer 1940, Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground operative, accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands interned at a new concentration camp, report on Nazi crimes, raise a secret army and stage an uprising. The name of the camp - Auschwitz. A meticulously researched account of the two and a half years he spent forging a resistance within the camp, and gathering evidence of horrifying abuse and mass murder.

Lisbon. Thriller. A woman wakes up to discover that her new husband is missing from their hotel room. With the local police and Embassy slow to respond she finds herself in a race against time. And the one person she can ask for help is the one person she does not wish to talk to.

Lisbon. A body lies slumped in a stationary train. A high-profile man who appears to have died from repeatedly throwing himself against the glass - and it seems there many have been other forces at play. A small number of the population are classified as Gifted. Along with the label comes stigma and suspicion. In a city divided by prejudice, Gifted Inspector Isabel Reis is hiding her own secret whilst risking everything to find the killer.

Andalucía/London. Historical fiction. 1967, Odelle takes a job at a London gallery. Employed as a typist her enigmatic employer spots and begins to unlock a talent for writing. When a lost masterpiece arrives at the gallery, Odelle sets out to discover its story. The trail leads back to 1936, a large house in beautiful, rural Spain and another young women with ambitions of her own. Against a background of political unrest,  two young strangers become involved in the fragile paradise with potentially devastating consequences.

Thriller. Swiss Alps. A beautiful hotel cut off by a blizzard. A young woman goes missing at her engagement party. As the other guests find they are unable to leave they start to worry who's next.

Any book set in this location.