Dear Lucy Silchester, You have an appointment for Monday 27th July 2011. Yours sincerely, Life. Lucy Silchester has been invited along a few times to this appointment, but she keeps brushing the gold embossed envelope under the shag pile carpet. She has taken her eye off the ball and has busied herself with work (a job she does not love), helping out friends, fixing her car, feeding her cat, seeing her family and devoting her time to their life dramas....

Until very recently, if a woman became pregnant out of marriage in Ireland, her future was grim. The child was usually taken away, often sold to America; the woman was incarcerated in a convent, one of the infamous 2laundries,3 and everything was swept under the carpet. Young, pregnant and alone, the unlikely heroine of The Lane devises a remarkable strategy and employs a fair amount of courage to take a different path. Not only does Kate sidestep...

"Iris Bowen is a young Irish gardener and mother of a beloved adopted daughter, Rose. A recent widow, Iris has spent the last two years concentrating on the day-to-day business of launching Rose into the world. But when she receives some worrisome results on a breast scan, the words of her husband as he was dying of cancer become hauntingly urgent. He had begged Iris to search for Rose's birth mother so that Rose would still have family if anything...