In a frozen gold-mining settlement where fear keeps doors shut, Erica Dutrieu is left for dead after a brutal beating by her husband. Rescued at terrible cost and forced to confront both frontier justice and her own will to survive, she fights back in the only way left to her. Harsh Times is a tale of violence, endurance, and hard-won hope on the edge of civilization.
Fourteen-year-old, androgynously beautiful Damian Stanton is pulled from his boys’ school in England in 1914 for fear that the older boys at school will do him as both they and his tutor have already done him. He is taken to the family’s rubber plantation in Malay, where all the men also want to do him. While the plantation men jockey for Damian, they do each other.
Enoch is proud of his service in the War of Independence, in which he helped to make America a land of Freedom, Opportunity and Democracy. But there are limits to the new Liberty. The rights enshrined in the new constitution do not extend to all. Least of all to the slaves on Enoch's farm who have yet to taste any of this bravely won Freedom in the New World, but so badly want a share of it.
Jack and Frieda have known each other for two or three months and Jack decides to invite Frieda to spend a night in Brighton and she accepts. Unfortunately, it is 1952 and Frieda's husband is one of the most dangerous bosses of an East End London gang, involved in prostitution, white slavery, bookmakers and extortion. Games are being played for high stakes, do they really know what they are letting themselves in for?
Bad, strungout, fearless romance: In Chicago, 1968, a hippie dreaming of revolution and a reporter sent to cover conventional politics find each other - or do they?
May, a war widow struggling to keep her Dorset smallholding alive after the brutal winter of 1946/47, is close to despair when two charming drifters arrive offering help in exchange for board and lodging. Their kindness, humour and dangerous influence draw her into acts she would once have thought unthinkable. By the time they vanish with the summer, they have left her carrying far more than memories. A reason to live.
Big strapping black bull slave Big Sam had been brought to the Mississippi River Duval plantation to cover slave women and increase the size of the slave force. He'd done that, but he likes chasing down fourteen-year-old slave boys even better. He's seen with stable boy Joshua by the fourteen-year-old son of the plantation owner, John. John wants what Joshua is getting.