Karen Hayes
Author

SUMMER POEM

When her daughter Abigail does something unforgivable on the blessed shine of Sainte Barbe, Hester's quiet widowhood is noisily interupted. Hauled away from her well-tended English garden and her tidied away heart, she is summoned to Brittany, home of the affronted shrine and her other daughter, Imogen, whose life is also shattered by the unsaintly act.

But neither of her daughters knows that Brittany is a place Hester would rather avoid. It holds too many memories - bizarre, beautiful, joyful and sad - which still linger. For Hester has a past, to which, in trepidation, she is now returning.....

Pocket Books 1993 ISBN 0-671-85209-4

LETTING GO

Anna,widowed young and still hurting, has become obsessed with her sick daughter, sophie, fending off everyone else and facing the strain alone.

When she meets Steve, a guitar maker from Devon, during a camping holiday in France, he quickly becomes very attached to her and twelve-year-old Sphie. But before Anna can let him into her life, she needs to let go of the past and its insidious influence on herself and those around her.

Pocket Books 1995 ISBN 0-671-85210-8

STILL LIFE ON SAND

To an artist's eye the receding sea leaves the boats in the harbour looking like abandoned water toys after the bath has been drained. Living in the harbour community of St Ives, sculptor Esme Cochran has watched both her sons fall in love with that sea - Hugo with the surfing and Crispin with the fishing. But here, in the company of the tides, the mists and the extraordinary local light, other love affairs are also begun.

Affairs that divide husband from wife and artist from canvas take place alongside budding youthful romances, whilst one old sailor. Percy Prynne, is haunted by the tragic echoes of the past and watches over Esme's own growing turmoil with uncanny foreknowledge.

Black Swan 1997 ISBN 0-552-99724-2

CLOUD MUSIC

To musician Troy O'Donnell, who has inherited Heron's Cove from a spinster aunt, it is a setting which is 'no less than paradise'. To brilliant harpsichordist Alina Montgomery, it is a retreat from the outside world as she convalesces from a serious accident like a damaged Celtic princess. To Troy's elder sister Steffie, who longs for a daughter at forty-two, it is the place where she experiences the exhaustion of motherhood before she even has a child. And to their photographer brother Ivo, last of the three 'Ginger Nuts', it is a magical landscape where the energy of each summer's spectacular electrical storms offers the only release he knows.

Into this arena of sea, mountains and music, from far away in a soft, mystical forest in Brittany, come the connections that spell the passion of unrequited love, of soul-healing, witch-doctoring, and of altered destinies.

Black Swan 1997 ISBN 0-552-99754-4

A PATCH OF GREEN WATER

As a travel tour guide, Callie Miller is used to spending most of her time with complete strangers who gather round her like knots on a string necklace. And she has come to know destinations like Venice and its Hotel Isabella better than her own base of Whitstable - where a dust-filled empty home awaits her.

City of myth and melancholy, part reality and part reflection, Venice is a natural port of call for all wanderers. It is here that Callie breaks her golden rule about married men (don't), when she meets Tommaso Venturi and becomes the 'other woman'. With its labyrinth of dark narrow, alleyways that lead nowhere and its shops full of carnival masks, Venice itself lulls the lovers into dreaming of a life together as they develop their own Brief Encounter against the deceptive backcloth.

While the members of Callie's Venetian tour painfully confront their own past illusions in the city of fantasy, she and Tommaso, wary of causing a tragic outcome, are forced to make choices which will alter their lives irrevocably.

Black Swan 1998 ISBN 0-552-99778-1

BRIDGE OF SHADOWS

Italy is an Aladdin's Cave of colour, scent and sensations which adds to Dellas confusion as she first meets Stefano. The half Italian son of her lover, he is young, free and ready for anything...except what fate has in store when he joins the staff of his father's language school.

Despite the Villa Tiglio's idyllic setting just outside Florence, whose white haze of summer heat sets the temperature, it seems to be home to a curse. For it has become a place where no one can face the truth, and where twisted passions gather their own special force.

As new love affairs develop, the scars of past ones at last begin to fade, but a dangerous human triangle is taking shape - based on taboos, lies and betrayal. And when this Italian masquerade finally faces the brutal light of day, the only thing that remains unchanged is the scent of the lime trees at the Villa Tiglio.

Black Swan 1999 ISBN 0-552-99779-X