Gym and Slimline
by Emma Burstall

A swanky new gym has opened in leafy south-west London. Four women bond over push ups and Pilates and become firm friends.

Percy likes sorting out other people's problems, but her own life is a shambles, with a terrible secret addiction. Can she kick it and win back the love of her husband?

Patrice, wealthy but damaged, wants another baby, but husband Jonty isn't interested in sex. Is it her imagination, or is he getting too close to the husband of one of her new friends?

Carmen is living dangerously, determined to get pregnant by her cold, treacherous boyfriend. She doesn't see what is under her nose until it's nearly too late.

Suzanne adores her sexy second husband, but is she neglecting him for her job? And has she realised what is happening to her teenage daughter?

New best friends. Their friendship is about to be tested to the limit.

Halcyon River Diaries
by Philippa Forrester and Charlie Hamilton James

A mayfly dances above honey-gold water in the evening sunshine; a kingfisher plunges into the sparkling depths to emerge with a struggling minnow in its orange beak; an otter slips silently through reeds; a family of moorhens paddles to its night-time lodgings. Here is the perfect, idyllic scene of a British river in summertime captured with love and astonishing skill by two of the leading wildlife filmmakers of our age.

Halcyon River Diaries was commissioned following the phenomenally successful and award-winning My Halcyon River an intimate portrait of a secret world along a river in Britain, where otters hunt on the midnight current, mink lie in wait to ambush unwary victims and gleaming kingfishers pierce the water to spear their prey. Deemed as one of the most beautiful films at the Wildscreen festival, 2004, My Halcyon River was the winner of the Kodak Cinematography Award.

Halcyon River Diaries is an evocative look at the wildlife of a typical English river, through the eyes of Philippa and Charlie's family, including their three young sons Fred, Gus and Arthur, who live beside it. Over the period of a year we experience life on the river following the same group of animal characters as they navigate the seasons, as well as seeing how Philippa and Charlie’s passion for the river extends into every part of their family life.

Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Burton, Harris, O'Toole and Reed
by Robert Sellers

'God put me on this earth to raise sheer hell.' Richard Burton
'I was a sinner. I slugged some people. I hurt many people. And it’s true, I never looked back to see the casualties.' Richard Harris
'Booze is the most outrageous of all drugs, which is why I chose it.' Peter O’Toole
'I don’t have a drink problem. But if that was the case and doctors told me I had to stop I’d like to think I would be brave enough to drink myself into the grave.' Oliver Reed

This is the story of four of the greatest thespian boozers who ever walked - or staggered - off a film set into a pub. It’s a story of drunken binges of near biblical proportions, parties and orgies, broken marriages, drugs, riots and wanton sexual conquests. They got away with it because of their extraordinary acting talent and because the public loved them. They were truly the last of a breed, the last of the movie hellraisers.

Himglish and Femalese: Why women don't get why men don't get them
by Jean Hannah Edelstein

As we tumble headlong into the second decade of the third millennium, we are in a refreshing era of unprecedented freedom of the sexes to be whatever we want to be, in defiance of fusty old gender stereotypes. But while the women revel in ruling the boardroom, the men make magic in the kitchen, and everyone does rather unusual things in the bedroom, all of this freedom does have its downside: without understanding the fundamental differences between the genders, we're in for an era of dire confusion when it comes to living with the other half of humanity.

It's simply no secret that women simply don't get why men don't get them. It's even less of a secret to men that women are simply unfathomable. From Men are From Mars and Women are from Venus to Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps the differences have been trumpeted. But let's face it: in this new liberated and singularly open age there are so many more ways women and men can misunderstand each other.

But don't furrow your brow. Jean Hannah Edelstein is here to lead you through the perplexing questions of what it means to be a man or a woman and to live with men and women in the twenty-first century.

With a spectacular talent for unpicking social trends, Edelstein draws equally on experiential and anecdotal evidence, as well as the latest scientific studies, delivering a witty, edgy and definitive manual – dare we also say womanual? – to understanding your partner/husband/ boyfriend/girlfriend and any permutations thereof.

So let us say goodbye John Gray, au revoir Alan and Barbara Pease, and welcome, if you please, a fresh new expert on men and women: Jean Hannah Edelstein.

How Could He Do It?
by Emma Charles

‘In many ways we were an ordinary family: mum, dad, two kids, three dogs, one rabbit, two guinea pigs. I stayed at home, studying with the Open University, and dad worked, and the kids went to private schools. We lived in a rather nice semi in a rather nice area of Edinburgh, with a rather nice Volvo in the drive, and took rather nice holidays, wearing rather nice clothes. I loved Daniel deeply and I thought – no, I was sure – he loved me deeply, too. And we both loved our kids deeply (I thought). And that was as it should be. We had it made.

In some ways we weren't a completely ordinary family. There was Daniel, for one; he worked for most of the time we were married as a ship's engineer, and so he was away from home for up to four months and then home on leave for up to two. And Tamsin, our fifteen-year-old daughter, had specific learning difficulties.

But I'm pretty ordinary: an unlikely heroine. I am disabled because of back problems. I'm pretty fat – I've put on a lot of weight through lack of exercise and, yes, comfort-eating! Not the stuff of movies.

But I never for a moment dreamt that my family was all that extraordinary – until that day when Tamsin broke down and told me that her father, my loving husband, had been sexually abusing her.’