The Mermaid Collection
The Mermaid Collection proudly champions forgotten voices - iconic storytellers and women who were breaking the mould from the very beginning of the 20th century; chroniclers of the female experience who address issues that remain relevant today. Each Mermaid is introduced by a contemporary bestselling female author, each reflecting on the author and book’s importance to the world in which it was published and its continued relevance. Every book in the collection has something unique to offer, but what they all have in common is the quality of the story, plot, characterisation and page turnability – everything you want in a great read.
Beautifully curated with flaps and gorgeous inside cover printing, they are as covetable, collectable, and giftable as they are brilliant reads.
The books
Not So Quiet . . .
Nell Smith is one of England’s ‘Splendid Daughters’, women abroad doing their bit in WWI. At 21, she pays for the privilege of driving an ambulance to ferry the wounded between the front line and hospital.
Facing constant shellfire, half frozen, fed on slop, and enduring the lashing tongue of commandant ‘Mrs Bitch’, Nell and her sister drivers entertain no illusions about the war – unlike friends and family back home. Only their comradeship and letters from lovers sustains them.
As the war grinds on, the lottery of who lives creeps closer to Nell herself. A naïve girl volunteered for this. But who is this woman nightly driving blind through hell itself?
Forever Amber
1644, and Amber St Clair’s birth leads to her noble-born mother’s death. Raised in ignorance of her true origins, Amber is sixteen when she learns the power of her voluptuous beauty.
Attracting the eye of soldier Lord Bruce Carlton, Amber is whisked away to London. In a city of highwaymen and whores, courtiers and conmen, she finds danger. For nearly all see Amber as a girl to discard.
But Amber – abandoned, pregnant and penniless – knows her beauty is a blessing. As plague and fire abound, she uses her charms to licentiously rise to the bed of the King of England.
Yet always, Amber pines for the man who stole her heart . . .
A Long Way From Home
When the aunt who raised her on a remote Scottish island dies, orphan Katy Kelsey heads to London to seek out her grandfather, Charles Kelsey.
Instead, she encounters the Kelsey family’s dashing lawyer Adam Maxwell. Unsure what to make of this destitute waif, Adam decides to help, and flies Katy out to the family villa on the Spanish island of Santa Carina.
There she meets the other Kelseys – who resent this cuckoo in their midst. And Katy fears they’ll uncover the secret reason she came to find her grandfather.
The only one she dares trust is Adam. But can a simple island girl really trust her own complicated feelings?
Regiment of Women
Soon, the pair are spending every moment together, with Alwynne growing as dependent on Clare as she is drawn to her beguiling wit and charm.
But when tragedy touches the school, Alwynne begins to question Clare’s attentions. Sometimes, she thinks, her new friend can be cruel.
Torn between a Clare she loves and a Clare she fears, Alwynne must decide between loyalty and independence – before Clare chooses for her . . .
Answer in the Negative
Frank Morningside, assistant at The National Press Archives on Fleet Street, is receiving nasty poison pen letters. His superior Toby Lorn wants to put a stop to it, so he calls on his friends Sally and Johnny Heldar.
Married amateur sleuths, the Heldars agree to go undercover, posing as researchers to scout out the many suspects in the Archives. After all, Fleet Street is home to plenty of seedy types. But, soon after they begin, they find a body – bludgeoned to death by a box of glass negatives.
Suddenly, the genteel world of the archives is a tangled web of suspicion. When another murder swiftly follows, the Heldars worry that one of them maybe next . . .
The Cost of Living
The party is in Alexandra’s attic flat. Marianne will contribute a few bottles of red optimistically labelled Bordeaux. Can it be judged a success? There’s Donald the bus conductor with high-brow dreams, nervous bespectacled Bernhardt and Marius the ghostwriter. Not to mention a brace of Peters. It’s left to sexy, young Pisa and riotous, middle-aged Mummy (neither invited) to steal the show.
Yet, after the party both Marianne and Alexandra find themselves caught in unexpected – sometimes far from romantic – relationships. Meeting people, it turns out, has the most peculiar consequences.
Is that really the cost of living?
Tortoise by Candlelight
Fourteen-year-old Emmie Bean loves her family. But she worries about them too. Her mother is gone (no one will say where). Her father drinks instead of writing. Her younger brother Oliver has started stealing. And older sister Alice disappears on illicit dates.
Then there is their isolated house’s menagerie of birds and animals, including Mo the squirrel and Murgatroyd the tortoise, all of which require Emmie’s love and attention. When the Sargents, a childless couple, move in next door, Emmie and the Beans find themselves drawn to this welcoming but aimless husband and wife.
Emmie fears the darkness and chaos surrounding them all. But perhaps love burns bright . . .
Down Among the Women
So says Wanda, a former radical who left her husband and raised her daughter Scarlet to be as liberated as she. But twenty-year-old Scarlet, with an abortion already behind her, is about to discover real liberation – as a single mother in Fifties’ London.
Yet Scarlet’s not alone. Meet her friends: Sylvia, the born victim; respectable Jocelyn, willingly trapped in a dull, bourgeois marriage; Audrey, bristling to break free of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant – and very doomed.Over the course of twenty years, from the Fifties to the Seventies, Scarlet, Wanda and their friends will wonder if they can ever become the women they always dreamed of being.
Fenny
Yorkshire teacher Ellen Fenwick has never been abroad. But when her mother dies, this young woman finds herself taking a position as governess to an English girl in Florence in the summer of 1933. Little does Ellen realise how this girl, Juliet, and her family will claim her.
For as the summer passes, Ellen falls so in love with Italy and her new home that she cannot bear to leave – even when her own hopes of love are cruelly thwarted. Even when the shadow of war falls across the country, she doesn’t flee but clings on – for her friends, for those she loves more than herself.
Ellen – selfless, big-hearted, accepting – cannot know what is coming. Yet, she will not face it alone . . .
Lucy Carmichael
Lucy Carmichael is jilted at the altar. But no matter. Her loving and kind family never liked her explorer fiancé anyway.
Instead of moping or falling into her supportive family’s arms, however, Lucy abandons their suburban home. Heading for the country, she takes up a teaching position in the industrial town of Ravonsbridge.
There, she finds solace in her work, in her new (rather gossipy) colleagues – and rediscovers her sensible young self. But if Lucy has, despite everything, kept her head – where lies her heart?
Through A Glass, Darkly
‘They watch me all the time. In and out of the classroom, their eyes are always following me . . .’
Quiet, gentle, young Faustina Crayle is dismissed from her teaching position at Brereton School for Girls after just a few weeks. She is given no explanation, but it’s clear certain staff and pupils fear her.
Her friend and fellow teacher Gisela contacts psychologist and sleuth Dr Basil Willing who offers to investigate these outlandish claims. But this only confirms two damning facts – first, that this happened at a previous school and, second, people believe there are two sides to enigmatic Faustina.
When a body is found at the school and Faustina is implicated in the death, it is clear that darkness swirls around this young woman. But is she the perpetrator or victim?
The authors
The foreword writers
Gillian McAllister is the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of nine stand-alone novels. Her books have been selected for the Radio 2 Book Club, Reese's Book Club and the Richard & Judy Book Club. Her previous novel, Wrong Place Wrong Time, was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month and was shortlisted for The British Book Awards Crime & Thriller Book of the Year and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. Gillian's books are published in thirty-eight languages.
Photo credit: Sam Braithwaite
Lucy Mangan is the TV critic for The Guardian, and a columnist, features writer and reviewer for Stylist magazine, The Telegraph and many other publications. She broadcasts frequently on radio and occasionally on television, and is the author of Bookish, Bookworm, My Family and Other Disasters, The Reluctant Bride, Hopscotch and Handbags and Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.
Photo credit: Stylist Magazine
Jennie Godfrey was raised in West Yorkshire and her debut novel, The List of Suspicious Things which was a #1 Sunday Times bestseller, is inspired by her childhood there in the 1970s. Jennie is from a mill-working family, but as the first of the generation born after the mills closed, she went to university and built a career in the corporate world. In 2020 she left and began to write. She is now a writer and part-time Waterstones bookseller and lives in the Somerset countryside.
Photo credit: Esme Mai
Jenny Colgan is the author of numerous Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling novels and has won various awards for her writing, including the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance, the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year Award and the RNA Romantic Comedy Novel of the Year Award. Her books have sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide and have been published in 36 territories, and in 2015 she was inducted into the Love Stories Hall of Fame. Jenny is married with three children and lives in Scotland.
Photo credit: Kasja Goeransson
Eve Chase writes bestselling, page-turning mysteries. Her novels include The Midnight Hour, a Richard and Judy Book Club pick and Amazon no.1; The Glass House, a Richard and Judy Book Club pick and Sunday Times bestseller; The Birdcage, The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde and Black Rabbit Hall. A winner of the Saint-Maur en Poche prize in Paris for Best Foreign Fiction and longlisted for the HWA Gold Crown Award, her work has been translated into twenty languages. She lives in Oxford.
Photo credit: Philippa Gedge
Jane Fallon is the multi-award-winning television producer behind shows such as This Life, Teachers and 20 Things to Do Before You're 30. Her Sunday Times bestselling books - Getting Rid of Matthew, Got You Back, Foursome, The Ugly Sister, Skeletons, Strictly Between Us, My Sweet Revenge, Faking Friends, Tell Me a Secret, Queen Bee, Worst Idea Ever, Just Got Real and Over Sharing - have sold over two million copies in the UK. Getting Rid of Matthew is being adapted for film, starring Luke Wilson and Heather Graham. Got You Back has been adapted into the Roxette jukebox musical Joyride, which premiered at the Malmö Opera in Sweden.
Photo credit: Stuart Simpson
Sophie Hannah is a Sunday Times, New York Times and Amazon Kindle UK No. 1 bestselling writer of crime fiction, published in forty-nine languages and fifty-one territories. Her books have sold millions of copies worldwide. She writes contemporary psychological thrillers and, at the request of Agatha Christie’s family and estate, the new series of Hercule Poirot novels. Sophie’s murder mystery musical, The Mystery of Mr E, was released as a feature film in 2023, directed by Martyn Tott, and is available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV+ and soon to be on several other platforms too. In 2023, Sophie won the Crime Writers Association’s Dagger in the Library Award for her body of work, and in 2013 her thriller The Carrier won the Crime Thriller of the Year Award at the Specsavers National Book Awards.
Photo credit: Onur Pinar
Claire Daverley was born in 1991 and has been writing stories ever since she was six years old. After graduating with a degree in Fine Art from The University of Oxford, she began a career in publishing, writing about books by day but penning her own by night. Her debut novel, Talking at Night, was nominated in the Debut of the Year category at the Nibbies and shortlisted for the Nota Bene prize. People in Love is her second novel. She lives in Scotland with her husband and spaniel.
Jacqueline Wilson wrote her first novel when she was nine years old, and she has been writing ever since. She is now one of Britain’s bestselling and most beloved children’s authors. She has written over 100 books and is the creator of characters such as Tracy Beaker and Hetty Feather. More than forty million copies of her books have been sold. As well as winning many awards for her books, including the Children’s Book of the Year, Jacqueline is a former Children’s Laureate, and in 2008 she was appointed a Dame.
India Knight is the author of four novels: Darling, Mutton, Comfort and Joy, Don't You Want Me? and My Life on a Plate. Her most recent book is India Knight's Beauty Edit. She is a columnist for the Sunday Times, and author of the Substack newsletter Home. She lives in Suffolk.
Photo credit: Francesco Guidicini
Alice Winn is the author of In Memoriam which won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, Waterstones Novel of the Year, and was named Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards 2023. It was also a top five Sunday Times bestseller.
Photo credit: Jesse Dittmar
Shop the full collection
The Mermaid Collection: Creating the Dream Book Collection by Elizabeth Smith