Raffaella Barker: 9 books

In April 1946 Michael returns from war and finds he cannot face the life that awaits him at home. Impulsively he leaps on a train to the western tip of Cornwall, and in doing so changes his destiny. He finds himself in a bohemian colony of artists gathered on the Cornish coast, and his fate is shaped...

For a year, Venetia Summers has been 'buffered from single-motherhood' by boyfriend David, but when work takes him to a Brazilian rainforest, things begin to unravel. Phone lines crackle, emails languish, and high-tech, long-distance love proves bewildering and vexing. Meanwhile the children and dogs...

Venetia Summers appears to lead a fairy-tale rural existence with her husband and two sons in her tumbledown Norfolk cottage. But when her husband leaves her for his masseuse, not even the arrival of a splendid baby daughter can make up for the sense of loss she feels for her newly lopsided family....

Laura Sale has become invisible in her own life. Her domestic existence in North London with thirteen-year-old twins Dolly and Fred, and their father, the fascinating but ridiculously demanding Inigo, seems relentless, while her professional life fostering Inigo's career as Britain's most successful...

Lola Jordan's life is sinking deep into disaster. Not only does she feel like a total loser at her new London school, but then her project on phosphorescence is read out in front of the entire school assembly – and she wants the ground to swallow her up. Why on earth did she write those weird descriptions...

Gabriella has many siblings and many more animals. Her father is an impoverished poet with a penchant for mending cars with string and optimism, her mother a classicist now more concerned with trying to keep track of hectic family life the the declining of verbs. Gabriella and her brothers...

We all want a perfect life. At what price? What do you do when you should be happy, but you're not? What do you blame when you realise you don't want your husband anymore? What can you change when you see your family falling apart? What if you had the perfect life ... and it turned out to be anything but?

On a freezing cold night in an unfamiliar city, a man meets a woman. The encounter lasts just moments, they party barely knowing one another's names, they make no plans to meet again. But both are left breathless. Five years on, the man and the woman are still living separate lives, thousands...

Christy Naylor feels as if she is being cut open; her life is wrenched apart when her mother dies and her father's crazed reaction is to gamble. He wins a fish farm in a game of poker and uproots them from their lives in the patchwork of suburbia to live on a couple of watery fields and a lake full...