Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries. When her mother phones, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found...

"Elena, struggling with memory loss due to a trauma that has unmoored her sense of self, deserts graduate school and a long-term relationship to accept a bizarre proposition from an estranged family friend: she will search for a young woman, Ella, who went missing six years earlier in Southeast Asia, by rewriting her journals. As she delves more deeply into Ella's story, Elena begins to lose sight of her own identity and drift dangerously toward self-annihilation....

Mrs. Braithwaite, self-appointed queen of her English village, finds herself dethroned, despised, and dismissed following her husband's selfish divorce petition. Never deterred, the threat of a family secret being revealed sets her hot-foot to London to find the only person she has left--her clever daughter Betty, who took work there at the first rumbles of war. But when she arrives, Betty's landlord, the timid Mr. Norris, informs her that Betty hasn't...

During a trip to North America, a Scottish heiress encounters a childhood friend who disappeared from her family's estate five years ago on the night of a double murder.