Fiction

The UK’s premier Instamum Isabella M Smugge has never met a hashtag she doesn’t like. And with her mother’s wedding to organise, blended families to negotiate and her long-awaited  house renovation – all while potty training a toddler – there are plenty to choose from. What could possibly go wrong?

Maggie has always tried to be her mother’s perfect companion. But isolated by her care, a weekly service at the local cathedral has become her sole escape – though its lofty spires, and the God they point to, have often seemed to soar far above her simple concerns. But when one morning...

Lady Efa knows the pain of heartbreak and betrayal. Thrust into a marriage she did not choose, and made mother to three neglected children, she is deserted by the man she loved and forced to leave all she knows behind.
Yet amid bitterness and despair, unexpected friendships introduce Efa to a different kind of love...

Estranged from his family, divorced and in debt, Noel Reilly has nowhere to turn. When his pregnant ex-partner is murdered and he is viewed as a suspect by local police, he contemplates taking his life – before a mystical riverside encounter offers a glimmer of hope...

Amalric and Edwin Faceby were still young men, ambitious to make their marks on the world, when the Great Plague of 1349 receded. But when recurring outbreaks brought further loss and unleashed social unrest, the brothers were driven apart, and master glazier Amalric was compelled to...

Passionate Isabella Buckley feels like life is passing her by. In her late thirties and yearning for adventure, she is constrained by Victorian England’s gender roles and suffocated by the quiet life she leads with her parents. But when tragedy strikes on the other side of the world...

Now in her third year of living the rural dream, starry Instamum Issy Smugge is up against it. A single parent of four with an award-winning brand, a gin-swigging mother convalescing upstairs and a distraught relative craving a shoulder to cry on...

When the fearsome Lord Draker approaches Banyard and Mingle for help, they are immediately on their guard. Two high-profile silkers have been murdered with …

Driven by ambition and family expectation, young Henry de Brampton is determined to make his mark. Destined for a prestigious career in the Church, he readily embraces the chance to experience the world before taking his vows. But fuelled by selfish desire, he recklessly betrays those he loves...

Life in the country isn’t going as Issy Smugge planned it. However, the woman Gorgeous Home magazine once called ‘Britain’s Most Relatable Mum Designer’ is nothing if not resilient...

It’s half past four on Christmas Eve, 1976. Lori Bloom, aged three and three-quarters, is leaving a busy department store with her mother when the tannoy announces that a child in reception is lost and crying for her parents...

Shadowy deaths have long made Grayrton Mire a place of gruesome legend. But when a vulnerable boy is charged with the latest killing, Banyard and Mingle brave the treacherous marshes to defend him...

Driven to despair by heart-breaking betrayal, nobleman Philip de Braose has lost faith in God and man. Working as a soldier for hire, he recklessly seeks death and is brutally injured, only for rescue to come in the unlikely form of a Cistercian monk...

Meet Isabella Smugge – as in ‘Br-uge-s’, naturally! Instagram influencer, consummate show-off and endearingly self-unaware. With a palatial home, charming husband and three well-mannered children, she is living the Country Life dream...

Following their success recovering King Doon’s bones, Banyard and Mingle’s services are in high demand. But when a mysterious green-ink letter claims Michael’s dead father was murdered, he is compelled to reopen a long-forgotten case...

Seventy-five-year-old, green-fingered Albert Stridemore’s carefully ordered life has been unchanged for years. Content to live alone and diligently work his allotment, he safely buries the past as he turns the soil. But with the arrival of the coronavirus and lockdown...

Zander Bennings’ writing has brought him a lifestyle his parents and grandparents could never have imagined. But when he is confronted with the cold reality that his success is built upon a lie, he is plunged into a desperate search for truth and forgiveness...

Young private detectives, Banyard and Mingle, are out of money and out of luck when a swindled widow presents a life-changing case. As clues reveal a treacherous shipwreck and a rotting corpse in a cage, they are confronted by brutal smugglers and ghoulish gawpers in a mystery that could cost them their lives!

Three women, three friends, three saints... or are they?
Beautiful and determined Hayley, careworn and devoted Sophie, selfless but self-doubting Lucy – they share faith and unfulfilled longings as they confront painful challenges of infertility, adoption and singleness.
But when temptations arise...

It’s spring 1349 and a terrible plague is spreading like wildfire across England. Dreading its arrival, gifted young glazing apprentice Amalric despairs of the Church’s response and his village’s rampant superstition – but even he cannot deny the ominous portents that seem to abound...

Meet Matthew Gold: wealthy, successful and secure – but totally alone.
Afflicted from childhood by a crippling stammer, words have been his greatest problem. But, as his talent as a writer of detective fiction emerges, words become his greatest passion...

Christmas is fast approaching when psychologist Dr Mike Lewis is presented with the most unlikely client – twenty-two-year-old Adelle Merchant. Dressed all in blue, she could be like any other young woman. Except it’s not just her clothes – her hair, her home, everything she eats or drinks has to be blue...

When young, expat businessman Jack Troughton’s girlfriend tells him about the Bible she found on a Cheltenham bench, his life is turned upside down …

Something has happened to disturb the cheery routine of Kilfinan, a bustling port on the Scottish coast. Anonymous poetic entries in the local newspaper hint …

Fascist populists, callous sex-traffickers and violent anti-austerity riots – these were not what Pastor Jude Kilburn had expected to face when he moved to Albania.

But when vulnerable 19-year-old Alban disappears...

When the caretaker of St Peter’s finds that the church has been broken into early on the Saturday morning after Christmas, and that the elderly intruder is still in the building and kneeling at the communion rail, no-one is quite sure what to do...

Motherless nineteen-year-old Ava has always believed brilliant botanist, Theo Gage to be her father. But when a chance discovery reveals she is not …

David Sourbook thought he'd been saved. He thought his problems were behind him. A new life had opened up before him, with a new lady friend, a new faith and a new circle of friends.
But was it really that simple?

Meet Becky Hudson.

Loving wife to Dave, devoted mother to Jennifer (9), Adam (5) and Ellie (2) – and queen of self-doubt.
If only she tried harder, Becky reasons, she could be a 'proper' Christian and mother!

'It was like the pictures I'd seen of the battlefields of the First World War. No life, no growth ...A vision of hell.'

What can Abbie see that no one else can? Is the charming Will Chambers all he seems? And will anyone believe her?

'I can't go on!' - 'Life's not fair!' - 'If only...' ...cries as common today as in Capernaum 2000 years ago!

Life Lines imagines the stories of four desperate people who reached out to Jesus in the Gospels: An abused woman, a troubled teen...

Was she a friend or was she an angel?

He couldn't tell!

David Sourbook is a callous man. Locked inside his sneering heart, Christmas jollities and festive cheer leave him cold...

Jaded Clinical Psychologist Dr Mike Lewis is on the edge. Separated from his wife, Ella, and deeply wounded by the death of their child, the …

Where can a man find grace when he no longer believes?

Ray Young, an experienced Christian leader, has been married for almost thirty years. But his once vibrant faith, like his marriage, is steadily fading...

When Dame Emily sold Seascape House, her beloved Elizabethan mansion on the Sussex coast, to pork sausage magnate James Wedderburn, she could never have imagined …

Jenny Drake has never forgotten what she saw on that Devon beach. Just a small girl at the time, those frightening events have overshadowed her …

Brilliant scientific researcher Tilda Moss wakes up in hospital unable to speak or move and with no recollection of what happened to her.

High-flying financier Vincent Stevens has lost everything in the economic crash – smart London flat, trophy girlfriend, champagne lifestyle – and is forced to return...

As Alfie's first birthday draws near, his mother, Sophie, and her family are forced to confront a past they have been trying to shut …

Twenty-first-century scientist Frank Scanlon and a sixteenth-century monk are thrown together by a series of horrific events. Their lives become inextricably bound …

Lydia's quiet expat life in Cambodia is dramatically turned upside down by the sudden arrival of Song, a young & vulnerable Vietnamese girl, and …

Geoffrey Crees is a retired Anglican vicar with a whimsical sense of humour and witty writing style.

In these 20 enchanting and quirky short stories...