-
In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever. Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence. ISBN 9780552776653 -
Lydia and Freddie. Freddie and Lydia. They've been together for almost a decade, and are just about to get married. But then, on Lydia's 27th birthday, Freddie dies in a tragic accident. Then something unbelievable happens. Lydia gets another chance at her old life with Freddie. But what if there's someone in her new life who wants her to stay? ISBN 9780241986165 -
***A new collection from the acclaimed author of My Name is Leon*** As she walks out of her marriage, a woman remembers the day her husband rescued a boy from drowning. A blind man on his wedding day celebrates the pursuit of love. And a young man leaves prison with only one desire - to see his son again. Kit de Waal's characters light up the page in vivid stories of thwarted desire, love and loss. With power and precision, humanity and insight, Supporting Cast captures the extraordinary moments in our ordinary lives, and the darkness and the joy of the everyday. 'It's so good. Full of Kit's trademark humanity. I can feel my heart grow with every word' Cathy Rentzenbrink ISBN 9780241973424 -
A lifetime of love. Six months of silence. One last chance. Frank hasn't spoken to his wife Maggie for six months. For weeks they have lived under the same roof, slept in the same bed and eaten at the same table - all without words. Maggie has plenty of ideas as to why her husband has gone quiet, but it will take another heartbreaking turn of events before Frank finally starts to unravel the secrets that have silenced him. Is this where their story ends? Or is it where it begins? With characters that will capture your heart, THE SILENT TREATMENT celebrates the phenomenal power of love and the importance of leaving nothing unsaid. A BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick 'A remarkable debut' JOJO MOYES 'It's beautiful, so moving and clever. I truly adored it.' JOSIE SILVER, author of One Day in December ISBN 9781529123951 -
Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted - while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she's avoided all her life. Change can be good. Change can be bad. 'Funny, touching and unpredictable' Jojo Moyes 'Heartwrenching and wonderful' Nina Stibbe Winner of Costa First Novel Award, a No.1 Sunday Times bestseller and the Book of the Year ISBN 9780008172145 -
Six strangers with one universal thing in common: their lives aren't always what they make them out to be. What would happen if they told the truth instead? Julian Jessop is tired of hiding the deep loneliness he feels. So he begins The Authenticity Project - a small green notebook containing the truth about his life. Leaving the notebook on a table in his friendly neighbourhood cafe, Julian never expects Monica, the owner, to track him down after finding it. Or that she'll be inspired to write down her own story. Little do they realize that such small acts of honesty hold the power to impact all those who discover the notebook and change their lives completely. ISBN 9781784164690 -
It is the 1980s and the Winshaw family are getting richer and crueller by the year: Newspaper-columnist Hilary gets thousands for telling it like it isn't; Henry's turning hospitals into car parks; Roddy's selling art in return for sex; down on the farm Dorothy's squeezing every last pound from her livestock; Thomas is making a killing on the stock exchange; and Mark is selling arms to dictators. But once their hapless biographer Michael Owen starts investigating the family's trail of greed, corruption and immoral doings, the time growing ripe for the Winshaws to receive their comeuppance... This wickedly funny take on life under the Thatcher government was the winner of the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. 'A sustained feat of humour, suspense and polemic, full of twists and ironies' Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times. ISBN 9780241967799 -
In thirteen stories that investigate ordinary and working-class Thailand, characters aspire for more but remain suspended in routine. With curious wit, this collection offers revelatory insight and subtle critique, exploring class, gender, and disenchantment in a changing country. ISBN 9781911284406 -
Alison has it all. A doting husband, adorable daughter, and a career on the rise - she's just been given her first murder case to defend. But all is never as it seems... Just one more night. Then I'll end it. Alison drinks too much. She's neglecting her family. And she's having an affair with a colleague whose taste for pushing boundaries may be more than she can handle. I did it. I killed him. I should be locked up. Alison's client doesn't deny that she stabbed her husband - she wants to plead guilty. And yet something about her story is deeply amiss. Saving this woman may be the first step to Alison saving herself. But someone knows Alison's secrets. Someone who wants to make her pay for what she's done, and who won't stop until she's lost everything... ISBN 9781472252746 -
Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home - a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse - but not with John. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb... 'An astonishing act of literary ventriloquism unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master...' Daily Telegraph ISBN 9781784705114 -
A young, broke Irish woman narrates her relationship with a successful comedian in New York; two hapless university students take to the stage in a bid to assert their autonomy; a school teacher makes her way through a series of dead-end dates, gamely searching for love or distraction as the world teeters towards ruin. The characters in these magnificently accomplished stories are haunted as much by the future as they are by their pasts. Urgent and unforgettable, Show Them a Good Time marks the arrival of a strikingly original new voice in fiction. ‘I truly love and admire Nicole Flattery’s writing. Show Them a Good Time is a masterclass in the short story – bold, irreverent and agonisingly funny – and it does full justice to its author’s immense talent.’ — Sally Rooney ISBN 9781906539788 -
In these eleven stories, debut author Lucy Sweeney Byrne invites us to experience travelling the world alone as a young woman, with all its attendant pleasures and dangers. The staff of a boat moored in Brooklyn rebel against their tyrannical boss. A drifting writer house-sits in the wilds of Donegal in the midst of a health scare. In a Texas dive bar, two former lovers try to salvage a friendship from their intense connection. And in Mexico, a frustrated artist navigates a city both dangerous and alluring. Whether set in New York, Oaxaca, Havana or back home in Dublin, the result is by turns sharp, fearless and heartbreaking. Laced with biting humour and devastating observations, Paris Syndrome introduces a unique literary talent. 'Full of vitality and precision, and so rawly funny - this is a fabulous debut.' Kevin Barry 'A feisty portrayal of the bleakness of modern life, full of fruitless longing, misplaced knowing and black irony.' Sara Baume ISBN 9781838312626 -
In Love Notes from a German Building Site, Adrian Duncan exposes the fragile architecture of the mind with unrelenting accuracy and sensitivity. Mapping the emotional realities of immigration onto the structural demands of professional existence and the complexities of his relationship with his girlfriend, Evelyn, Paul's daily experiences fragment, collapse and are formed anew. This is at once a treatise on language, memory, building and desire. ISBN 9781843517542 -
In an unnamed city, where to be interesting is dangerous, an eighteen-year-old woman has attracted the unwanted and unavoidable attention of a powerful and frightening older man, 'Milkman'. In this community, where suggestions quickly become fact, where gossip and hearsay can lead to terrible consequences, what can she do to stop a rumour once it has started? Milkman is persistent, the word is spreading, and she is no longer in control... 'Utterly compelling.' Irish Times ISBN 9780571338757 -
'Captivating, potent, incisive, and wise, a moving story of a young woman finding her courage for life' Madeline Miller, author of Circe. Casey has ended up back in Massachusetts after a devastating love affair. Her mother has just died and she is knocked sideways by grief and loneliness, moving between the restaurant where she waitresses for the Harvard elite and the rented shed she calls home. Her one constant is the novel she has been writing for six years, but at thirty-one she is in debt and directionless, and feels too old to be that way - its strange, not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. And then, one evening, she meets Silas. He is kind, handsome, interested. But only a few weeks later, Oscar walks into her restaurant, his two boys in tow. He is older, grieving the loss of his wife, and wrapped up in his own creativity. Suddenly Casey finds herself at the point of a love triangle, torn between two very different relationships that promise two very different futures. Lily King's 'Writers & Lovers' follows Casey in the last days of a long youth, a time when everything - her family, her work, her relationships - comes to a crisis. Hugely moving and impossibly funny, it is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another. It is a novel about love and creativity, and ultimately it captures the moment when a woman becomes an artist. ISBN 9781529033137 -
The Witch is dead. After a group of children playing near the irrigation canals discover her decomposing corpse, the village of La Matosa is rife with rumours about how and why this murder occurred. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, Fernanda Melchor paints a moving portrait of lives governed by poverty and violence, machismo and misogyny, superstition and prejudice. Written with an infernal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling, HURRICANE SEASON, Melchor's first novel to appear in English, is a formidable portrait of Mexico and its demons. Translated by Sophie Hughes. ISBN 9781913097097 -
Fleeing the dark undercurrents of contemporary life in Britain, Hilary Byrd takes refuge in Ooty, a hill station in South India. There he finds solace in life's simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver Jamshed and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla have taken Hilary under their wing. The Padre is concerned for Priscilla's future, and as Hilary's friendship with the young woman grows, he begins to wonder whether his purpose lies in this new relationship. But religious tensions are brewing and the mission house may not be the safe haven it seems. The Mission House boldly and imaginatively explores post-colonial ideas in a world fractured between faith and non-belief, young and old, imperial past and nationalistic present. Tenderly subversive and meticulously crafted, it is a deeply human fable of the wonders and terrors of connection in a modern world. ISBN 9781783784301 -
"A young, grief-stricken soldier is nursed back to health by a quirky old woman. Soothed by the nearby river - and sloe gin - the two companions create a new life together. Reading this felt like discovering a modern fairy tale - one that ambles along beautifully at its own pace. Winman’s writing is vivid and bursts with life. She creates a fantastical world of magic and hope. If you are feeling down or world weary, this is the book to read." Rebekah ISBN 9780755390939
