I walked out into the autumn morning and smelt a bonfire behind the exhaust fumes. I only had to cross the road to walk into the tall glass cube that would be my art school for the next three years.Evie has left her father, her life in Cornwall and her childhood behind her to begin a very different sort of life in London. At first the great city provides her with a world of inspiration. Her imagination is fired by the history, and the scenes of London. With Rob, Bianca and 'the ballerina', Evie discovers the ancient and ever-changing city and her paintings are filled with colour and fantasy as she indulges her need to escape.This new life seems safe and peaceful until the moment her alcoholic father arrives and spins this new world around so that the past is again her present. Evie struggles to carry on with the life she has been building but her fears and memories are never far away. The dreams and the nightmares come together on the canvas of Evie's young life and it is her...

Elizabeth can hardly accept that her brother James, her nursery soulmate and partner in crime, committed suicide, so when her sister Kitty dies too it is more than she can comprehend. As she wanders the large family mansion of her childhood—a haunting place of mystery, wonder and opulence—the memories of an apparently idyllic but secretly threatening past will not let her go. Confronting at last the hidden fears from her early years, Elizabeth begins to make some sort of sense of the confusion of sadness, half-known truths and moments of happiness that embraced her whole family.