When Sara Foster runs away from home at 16, she leaves behind not only the losses that have shattered her world but the girl she once was, capable of trust and intimacy. Years later, in Los Angeles, she is a sought-after bartender, renowned as much for her brilliant cocktails as for the mystery that clings to her. Across the city, Emilie Dubois is in a holding pattern. In her seventh year and fifth major as an undergraduate, she yearns for the beauty and community her Creole grandparents cultivated but is unable to commit.

Eleanor Bennett won't let her own death get in the way of the truth. So when her estranged children - Byron and Benny - reunite for her funeral in California, they discover a puzzling inheritance. First, a voice recording in which everything Byron and Benny ever knew about their family is upended. Their mother narrates a tumultuous story about a headstrong young woman who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder, a story that cuts right to the heart of the rift that's separated Byron and Benny. Second, a traditional Caribbean black cake made from a family recipe.

Kiara Johnson does not know what it is to live as a normal seventeen-year-old. With her mother in a rehab facility and an older brother who devotes his time and money to a recording studio, she fends for herself—and for nine-year-old Trevor, whose own mother is prone to disappearing for days at a time. As the landlord of their apartment block threatens to raise their rent, Kiara finds herself walking the streets after dark, determined to survive in a world that refuses to protect her.

Yinka wants to find love. The problem is she also has a mum who thinks she's better qualified to find it for her. She also has too many aunties who frequently pray for her delivery from singledom, a preference for chicken and chips over traditional Nigerian food and a bum she's sure is far too small as a result. Oh, and the fact that she's a 31-year-old South-Londoner who doesn't believe in sex before marriage is a bit of an obstacle, too.

It's the opportunity of a lifetime: Feyi is about to be given the chance to escape the City's blistering heat for a dream island holiday: poolside cocktails, beach sunsets, and elaborate meals. And as the sun goes down on her old life, our heroine also might just be ready to open her heart to someone new. The only problem is, she's falling for the one man she absolutely can't have.

It is 1938 in China, and the Japanese are advancing. A young mother, Meilin, is forced to flee her burning city with her four-year-old son, Renshu, and embark on an epic journey across China. For comfort, they turn to their most treasured possession - a beautifully illustrated hand scroll. Its ancient fables offer solace and wisdom as they travel through their ravaged country, seeking refuge. Years later, Renshu has settled in America as Henry Dao. His daughter is desperate to understand her heritage, but he refuses to talk about his childhood.

In the snowbound city of Kiev, aspiring historian Mila Pavlichenko’s life revolves around her young son - until Hitler’s invasion of Russia changes everything. Suddenly, she and her friends must take up arms to save their country from the Führer’s destruction. Handed a rifle, Mila discovers a gift - and months of blood, sweat and tears turn the young woman into a deadly sniper: the most lethal hunter of Nazis. Yet success is bittersweet. Mila is torn from the battlefields of the Eastern Front and sent to America while the war still rages. There, she finds an unexpected ally.

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing. But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant Nobel-prize-nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

Junius is the patriarch, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a mesmerising talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1830s rural Baltimore, the country draws ever closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war. Of the six Booth siblings who survive to adulthood, each has their own dreams they must fight to realise - but it is Johnny who makes the terrible decision that will change the course of history - the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

One by one, she undid each event, each decision, each choice. If Davy had remembered to put on a coat. If Seamie McGeown had not found himself alone on a dark street. If Michael Agnew had not walked through the door of the pub on a quiet night in February in his white shirt. There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever.

Glory arrives back in Peckham, from her seemingly glamorous life in LA, to mourn the sudden death of her father and finds her previously close family has fallen apart in her absence. Her brother, Victor, has been jailed, her sister, Faith, appears to have lost her independence and ambition and their mother, Celeste, is headed towards a breakdown. Glory is thrown by their disarray, and rather than returning to America, she decides to stay and try to bring them all together again. 

Alice Stern isn't ready to turn 40. She thought she'd have more time to figure it all out. Above all, she thought she'd have more time with her father, Leonard Stern, an eccentric novelist—but he's lying in a hospital bed and Alice isn't sure if she'll hear his voice again. When she falls asleep outside their old apartment on the night before her birthday, she's surprised to be greeted the next morning by a much younger Leonard, with a 16th birthday card for a teenage Alice who, far from clinging to her youth, is hurtling towards adulthood.

The great scholar W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote about the problem of race in America, and what he called ‘Double Consciousness', a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois' words all too well. 

Alethea Lopez is about to turn 40. Fashionable, feisty and fiercely independent, she manages a boutique in Port of Spain, but behind closed doors she's covering up bruises from her abusive partner and seeking solace in an affair with her boss. When she witnesses a woman murdered by a jealous lover, the reality of her own future comes a little too close to home. Bringing us her truth in an arresting, unsparing Trinidadian voice, Alethea unravels memories repressed since childhood and begins to understand the person she has become. Her next step is to decide the woman she wants to be.

In 1912, 18-year-old Edwin St. Andrew crosses the Atlantic, exiled from English polite society. In British Columbia, he enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and for a split second all is darkness, the notes of a violin echoing unnaturally through the air. The experience shocks him to his core. Two centuries later, Olive Llewelyn, a famous writer, is travelling all over Earth, far away from her home in the second moon colony.