MIDDLE ENGLAND

BOURNVILLE

For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it's the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. Mary will go on to live through the Coronation and the World Cup final, royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She'll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave. As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the World Wide Web, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary's family - and their country - closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before?

THE CLOSED CIRCLE

On Millennium night, with Blair presiding over a superficially cool, sexed-up new version of the country, Benjamin Trotter finds himself watching the celebrations on his parents' TV. Watching, in fact, his younger brother, Paul, now a bright young New Labour MP who has bought wholeheartedly into the Blairite dream. Neither of them can know that their lives are about to implode. Set against the backdrop of a changing Britain and the country's increasingly compromised role in America's 'war against terrorism', the characters struggle to make sense of the perennial problems of love, vocation and family.

THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS

Rosamund lies dying in her remote Shropshire home. But before she does so, she has one last task: to put on tape not just her own story but the story of the young blind girl who mysteriouslt turned up many ago.

THE ROTTER'S CLUB

Set in the 1970s against a backdrop of terrorism and the downfall of 'Old Labour', three friends take over the editorship of their school magazine. A very funny look at this period through the eyes of teenagers.