Daphne
By Justine Picardie
Bloomsbury £14.99
FT bookshop price: £11.99

One need not be a self-confessed Daphne du Maurier-obsessive like Picardie to enjoy this journey through her troubled later years. With a marriage wracked by affairs on both sides, Daphne retreats to her writing hut to plan a biography of Branwell Bronte. Corresponding with a Bronte scholar with a dark past, she is drawn into a tantalising literary mystery.