Oxford

Historical fiction. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood at her father’s feet as he and his team gather words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. One day she sees a slip of paper containing a forgotten word flutter to the floor unclaimed. And so she begins to collect words for another dictionary in secret. As she does, the world is on the cusp of change, as the Great War looms and women fight for the vote. Can the power of lost words from the past help to make sense of the future?

Thriller. When the eight year old daughter of an Oxford College Master vanishes in the middle of the night, police turn to her nanny for answers. She paints them a picture of a high-achieving but dysfunctional family and their life within the ancient, eerie Master’s Lodge. But is this the whole story or just the version she wants to tell?

2059 and the world has stopped turning. One half suffers and endless, frozen night, the other nothing but burning sun. Life only survives in a slim, twilight region. In an isolationist Britain, Ellen receives a letter from a dying man. A letter that contains a powerful and dangerous secret.

Non-fiction. On 1 January 202 Professor Sarah Gilbert read an article about four people in China with an illness of unknown cause. Within two weeks, she and her team had designed a new vaccine that would go on to save millions of lives from Covid-19. Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green reveal their story of making the pioneering Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, and fighting a pandemic as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

It begins with two boys who are inseparable. And the boys become men. And then Annie walks into their lives, and it changes nothing and everything. A painting, three lives and a powerful story about love, friendship and loss.

Contemporary fiction. Ada is a widowed writer, navigating loneliness after the death of her husband. With no children and no grandchildren she fears she is becoming invisible. Eliza is a student, finding it difficult to form meaningful relationships after the estrangement with her mother and break-up with her girlfriend. It is easier, she thinks, to be alone. When they meet through unlikely circumstances, the two start to find what they are looking for in each other.

Crime thriller. When a house explodes in a quiet suburb and a girl disappears, Sarah - a young married woman bored with domestic life – becomes obsessed with finding her, and suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew, as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are alive, and the living are fast joining the dead.