Mary Wesley Books in Order

Drawn from decades of letters between Mary Wesley and her second husband Eric Siepmann, Darling Pol traces their long love affair through wartime separation, work, money worries and family life, while showing how her fierce, funny voice as a novelist began to emerge.

Part travel book, part memoir, this collaboration pairs Mary Wesley's memories of the West Country with atmospheric photographs to capture the houses, lanes and coastline that shaped her fiction, from wartime hideaways to the landscapes she came to call home.

In 1941, Juno Marlowe shelters from an air raid in a stranger's London house and leaves the next morning with a letter to his family in the West Country. Taking refuge on their farm, she discovers she is pregnant and slowly transforms from awkward evacuee into a capable young woman with her own place in the world.

Still shattered by the car crash that killed her husband and young son, Julia Piper lives quietly in London, cleaning other people's flats and trying not to feel. A chance encounter on a stalled train, a gentle publisher and a malicious stalker gradually pull her toward a reckoning with grief, fear and the possibility of love.

During and after World War II, landowner Henry Tillotson brings his troubling bride home to his West Country estate, only to have her retreat to bed and rule the house from there. Two younger couples become regular guests, entangled for decades in Henry's charm, Margaret's barbed games and the question of who belongs to whom.

As a lonely ten year old on holiday in 1920s Brittany, Flora Trevelyan is ignored by her parents and falls in love with three older boys. Over the following decades she builds a "sensible" independent life, yet keeps colliding with the people from that first summer.

Forty something Laura Thornby prides herself on brief affairs and complete control, until she meets twenty three year old aspiring writer Claud Bannister. Rearranging his life for art and amusement, she finds her own past, her parents and her feelings slipping beyond her rules.

At nineteen, Rose chooses a safe marriage to steady Ned Peel over the wild love she feels for penniless Mylo Cooper. Decades of wartime secrets, quiet infidelity and the pull of a cherished country house leave her wondering what loyalty has really cost her.

Poppy Carew is dumped by her feckless boyfriend on the eve of her beloved father's death, then inherits his money and his request for a "fun" funeral. As undertakers, pig farmer and ex lover compete for her, Poppy must finally choose her own future.

As a pregnant teenager Hebe overhears her wealthy family planning an abortion to avoid scandal and runs away instead. Years later she is a devoted single mother in Cornwall, funding her son's schooling through a secret mixture of private catering and discreet paid encounters.

In August 1939 five cousins gather at their aunt and uncle's Cornish house, racing along the camomile lawn that leads to the sea. War scatters them into London offices, service and dangerous love affairs, and a reunion decades later reveals what each has become.

Recently widowed Matilda Poliport plans a tidy suicide on a Cornish beach, but when she instead rescues a wanted man intent on his own death, the two outsiders strike a strange bargain that forces them to face guilt, desire and buried secrets.

Eleven year old Lisa Fuller thinks her impulsive father has lost his mind when a long-shot bet lands the family in a half burned country house, where a friendly ghost, deserted village and slippery sense of time turn everyday life into something uncanny.

After a sudden catastrophe wipes out most of the population, a mother, her teenage son and his friend pick their way through an eerily empty English countryside and join a mismatched band of survivors who must invent a new kind of village life.

When a group of English children discover they can talk with animals, they find themselves helping foxes, birds and farm creatures outwit cruel adults, turning a quiet countryside summer into a clever battle over kindness, freedom and who truly owns the wild.