Beryl Bainbridge

The Bottle Factory Outing follows Freda and Brenda, who work together in an Italian-run wine-bottling factory. A work outing becomes a pivotal moment that promises different experiences for each woman: excitement for Freda and apprehension for Brenda.

It is 1950 and the Liverpool repertory theatre company is rehearsing its Christmas production of Peter Pan , a story of childhood innocence and loss. Stella has been taken on as assistant stage manager and quickly becomes obsessed with Meredith, the dissolute stage director.

Beryl Bainbridge’s classic early novel is a vintage story of English domestic life, laced with sadness, irony and wicked black humour.

Quiet and reliable, Douglas Ashburner has never been much of a womaniser. So when he begins an extra-marital affair with Nina, a bossy, temperamental artist with a penchant for risky sex, he finds adultery a terrible strain.

An old snapshot shows a group of friends lounging in the sunshine, on a weekend in the country at the invitation of bearded, satyric Claude and his wife Julia.

Paranoid, wilful, lazy, the young Adolf Hitler turns up in Liverpool to stay with his brother Alois and sister-in-law Bridget. Hailed by Alois as a student and an artist, Adolf soon irritates his family beyond measure...

Edward is throwing a dinner party with Binny, his mistress. Aware that she has long been denied those small intimacies that his wife takes for granted, he wants to give her a chance to feel more involved in his life, to socialise with some of his friends (the discreet ones).

A brilliantly realised evocation of the thoughts and voices of Captain Scott and the four men with him, who suffered extraordinary hardships before finally dying during their 1912 attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole.

Genteel, passive Ann works for the BBC in London and is engaged to a successful academic, fulfilling her snobbish mother's ambitions – more or less – while the Swinging Sixties happen elsewhere, to other people. Then she meets William: snub-nosed and generous, cunning and protean.

A girl returns from boarding school to her sleepy Merseyside hometown and waits to be reunited with her childhood friend, Harriet, chief architect of all their past mischief. She roams listlessly along the shoreline and the woods still pitted with wartime trenches, and encounters ‘the Tsar’...

Wartime Liverpool is a place of ration books and jobs in munitions factories. Rita, living with her two aunts Nellie and Margo, is emotionally naïve and withdrawn. When she meets Ira, a GI, at a neighbour’s party, she falls in love...

Anne Armstrong shares a squalid room in Dublin with her sister. Then a hasty marriage to John Watson, a former cleric and newly appointed teacher, transports her to a life of almost equal hardship and frustration in South London.