These Lovers Fled Away (1955) by Howard Spring is an epic, intergenerational British family saga spanning from the Boer War to World War II. Narrated by Chad Boothroyd, the novel follows the complex, long-lasting romantic entanglements and social changes affecting a group of friends and their families, particularly focusing on his enduring love for the elusive Rose.

Rachel Rosing by Howard Spring is about the ambitious, beautiful, and calculating social climber Rachel Rosing, focusing on her pursuit of fame and fortune as an actress, depicting her ruthless ascent through marriage and career. But will this be met with eventual downfall? Can she lose everything, including her beauty, and be left with only an empty life?

"Heaven Lies About Us" recounts Spring's childhood in Cardiff during the closing years of the 19th century. He grew up in an impoverished but loving family and left school at age 12 to support them after his father's death. The path of a writer:  Spring's memoir details his humble beginnings working as an errand boy for a newspaper. This experience was his first step into the world of journalism and literature, which he pursued through evening classes, before later becoming a best-selling author.

Maria Legassick is the youngest of the three daughters of a Cornish vicar, and she tells here the story of what happened, in a swiftly-changing world, to herself, her sisters, and her brilliant, gifted brother-Roger whom she loved too well; Louisa whom she admired but could never love; Bella whom she more and more despised. The book opens as an idyll in a beautiful part of Cornwall, with the vicarage looking out upon the sea, the stern old isolated father writing away for ever at ecclesiastical books that no one read; Roger dreaming of a career in scholarship; Louisa impatient, passionate, eager to be away and at work in a world she wants to change; Bella slothful and asking of life nothing but its unmindful satisfactions; in the background a chorus of rustics, including the sexton Thomas May, one of those Howard Spring characters who go to the heart. Maria is the observer who outlives them all.

When he was a schoolboy George Ledra watched the recruits of World War I marching through the Manchester streets. His account of his own life; which makes this novel, concludes with the ending of the second war. This is a stretch of time that Howard Spring has often written about-a slice of his own days; and how people fared in the swiftly-changing political and social scene of those three decades fascinates him (and us).

The story of William Essex, who rose from humble beginnings to become a successful dramatist and novelist, and his friend Dermot O'Riordon, a fervent Irish patriot and founder of a great London furnishing house; and their sons, Oliver Essex and Rory O'Riordon. Plus some other assorted characters, from old Mr Moscrop and his daughter Nellie, and Maeve O'Riordon. Those boys grow up in friendship, but the passing years create circumstances that divide them as their fathers learn the hard way that sons do not always develop the way a parent might wish.

From the pomp of Victoria's reign to the end of World War II, a brilliant panorama of life in England and Europe is the setting of the story of an extraordinary woman. Sarah Rainborough was a little girl when she was taken away from the elegance of London society to the estates of her step-father on the stormy Cornwall coast. Here she learned to know the giant sailor, Captain Rodda, who wenched and drank as ardently as he sang hymns, and his beautiful mistress, Lucy Evans. When Lucy came into Sarah's household with the Captain's son, no one would have believed that one day she was to involve the family in blackmail and murder, or that the boy was to become one of England's greatest merchants. As Sarah grew older, her nurse-now a successful novelist-introduced her to the literary greats of London. Later her own husband took her into the circles of statesmen and politicians. Meanwhile the fortunes of Lucy's family and her own were bringing her the challenge of violence and tragedy.

The theme of this particular book (set around Manchester and Cornwall, as so many of his are) is that there is no armour against fate; and the period it covers was certainly a fateful one, ranging as it does from the close of the Victorian era through two World Wars. It's told in the first person, and takes the protagonist from a childhood of poverty to the distinction of the Royal Academy. If you're new to Howard Spring, here is an excellent starting point.

Beginning just before the outbreak of the First World War, this is the story of the moral values of the age. It is a story of illegitimacy and deception-where a child has to come to terms with discovering who his mother really is. It is a story in which romance is set against the backdrop of the growth of fascism in Europe, where London has become a refuge for persecuted Jews, and where Dunkerley newspaper reporter Joe Morrison has become a thorn in the sides of the European dictators. It is a story in which the looming Second World War and the intrigue leading up to it take on a frightening reality.

''Dunkerley's''  by Howard Spring is about  the  Dunkerley family, now wealthy from their successful penny journal  Hard Facts, as their children come of age amidst family secrets, romance, ambition, and conflict in late 19th-century England, leading to drama and a violent climax, especially focusing on the new London magazine  Dunkerley's  and its brilliant but troubled editor,  Alec Dillworth. It's the second book in the "Hard Facts" trilogy, exploring class, change, and the moral costs of success.