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The clan of the cave bear

The story of Ayla begins when, as a five-year-old orphan, she is adopted by the Clan, a group of Neanderthals. Initially she inspires surprise, then wariness and finally acceptance by the Clan. She is cared for by its medicine woman, Iza, and its wise holy man, Creb. But she makes an implacable enemy of the group's future leader, Broud. He will do all he can to destroy her - but Ayla is a survivor. Jean Auel's imaginative reconstruction of pre-historic life, rich in detail of language, culture, myth and ritual, has become a set text in schools and colleges around the world.

512 pages

Girl, Woman, Other

From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first. Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope. Winner of the Booker Prize 2019.

453 pages. 

My Brilliant Friend

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, 'My Brilliant Friend' is a rich, intense and generous hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.

336 pages

The New Silk Roads

When 'The Silk Roads' was published in 2015, it became an instant classic. A major reassessment of world history, it compelled us to look at the past from a different perspective. 'The New Silk Roads' brings this story up to date, addressing the present and future of a world that is changing dramatically. Following the Silk Roads eastwards, from Europe through to China, by way of Russia and the Middle East, 'The New Silk Roads' provides a reminder that we live in a world that is profoundly interconnected. In an age of Brexit and Trump, the themes of isolation and fragmentation permeating the Western world stand in sharp contrast to events along the Silk Roads since 2015, where ties have been strengthened and mutual co-operation established. Peter Frankopan takes a fresh look at the network of relationships being formed along the length and breadth of the Silk Roads today.

303 pages

Meadowland: the Private Life of an English Field

What really goes on in the long grass? Meadowland gives an unique and intimate account of an English meadow’s life from January to December. In exquisite prose, John Lewis-Stempel records the passage of the seasons from cowslips in spring to the hay-cutting of summer and grazing in autumn, and includes the biographies of the animals that inhabit the grass and the soil beneath: the badger clan, the fox family, the rabbit warren, the skylark brood and the curlew pair, among others. Their births, lives, and deaths are stories that thread through the book from first page to last.

304 pages

Black Wolf

Natalya Ivanova is investigating the death of a young woman found near a wealthy dacha community when the victim is identified as a member of the Decembrists - a secretive group of anti-corruption activists. Natalya's investigation is handed over to the Russian FBI but she knows they won't look for the killer of a 'traitor'. Another Decembrist goes missing and she is forced to work secretly on the case. Soon, there's an unbearable cost to her unofficial investigation - finding the killer means losing her family.

336 pages

Imagine This

A compelling story about the human spirit and resilience against the odds. London-born Lola is sent to live a small Nigerian village where her struggle for survival begins.

331 pages

To throw away unopened

Every memoir is a battle between reality and invention - but in her follow up to 'Clothes, Music, Boys', Viv Albertine has reinvented the genre with her unflinching honesty.

'To throw away unopened' is a fearless dissection of one woman's obsession with the truth - the truth about family, power, and her identity as a rebel and outsider. It is a brutal expose of human dysfunctionality, the impossibility of true intimacy, and the damage wrought upon us by secrets and revelations, siblings and parents.

304 pages

House of Spirits

Spanning four generations, Isabel Allende's magnificent family saga is populated by a memorable, often eccentric cast of characters. Together, men and women, spirits, the forces of nature and of history, converge in an unforgettable, wholly absorbing and brilliantly realised novel that is as richly entertaining as it is a masterpiece of modern literature.

496 pages

Only time will tell

The epic tale of Harry Clifton’s life begins in 1919, in the backstreets of Bristol. His father was a war hero, but it will be twenty-one tumultuous years before Harry discovers the truth about how his father really died and if, in fact, he even was his father. 'Only time will tell' takes a cast of memorable characters from the ravages of the Great War to the outbreak of the Second World War, when Harry must decide whether to take his place at Oxford, or join the fight against Hitler’s Germany.

464 pages

Eeny meeny

Rocket-paced serial-killer thriller debut. The girl emerged from the woods, barely alive. Her story was beyond belief, but it was true - every dreadful word of it. Days later, another desperate escapee is found - and a pattern is emerging. Pairs of victims are being abducted, imprisoned then faced with a terrible choice: kill or be killed. Would you rather lose your life or lose your mind? Detective Inspector Helen Grace has faced down her own demons on her rise to the top. As she leads the investigation to hunt down this unseen monster, she learns that it may be the survivors - living calling cards - who hold the key to the case. And unless she succeeds, more innocents will die.

448 pages

Life after life

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England, in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to? 'Life after life' follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in life’s bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past.

640 pages

The handmaid’s tale

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one option: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like all dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs. A brilliant and astutely perceived evocation of twenty-first-century America.

324 pages

Britt-Marie was here

For as long as anyone can remember, Britt-Marie has been an acquired taste. It's not that she's judgemental, or fussy, or difficult - she just expects things to be done in a certain way. But behind the passive-aggressive, socially awkward, absurdly pedantic busybody is a woman who has more imagination, bigger dreams and a warmer heart than anyone around her realizes. So when Britt-Marie finds herself unemployed, separated from her husband of 20 years, left to fend for herself in the miserable provincial backwater that is Borg - and somehow tasked with running the local football team, she is a little unprepared. European bestseller by the author of 'A man called Ove', 'Britt-Marie was here' is a funny, poignant and uplifting tale of love, community and second chances.

296 pages

An appetite for violets

That's how it is for us servants. No one pays you much heed; mostly you're as invisible as furniture. Yet you overhear a conversation here, and add a little gossip there. A writing desk lies open and you cannot help but read a paper. Then you find something, something you should not have found. Irrepressible Biddy Leigh, under-cook at the foreboding Mawton Hall, only wants to marry her childhood sweetheart and set up her own tavern. But when her elderly master marries the young Lady Carinna, Biddy is unwittingly swept up in a world of travel, scheming, secrets and lies.

400 pages

The life of elves

The villagers had never seen anything like it: dense white curtains of snow that instantly transformed the landscape. Not in autumn, not here in Burgundy. And on the same night a baby was discovered, dark-eyed little Maria, who would transform all their lives.

Hundreds of miles away in the mountains of Abruzzo, another foundling, Clara, astonishes everyone with her extraordinary talent for piano-playing. But her gifts go far beyond simple musicianship. As a time of great danger looms, though the girls know nothing of each other, it is the bond that unites them and others like them, which will ultimately offer the only chance for good to prevail in the world.

304 pages

The diving bell and the butterfly

On 8 December 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a massive stroke and slipped into a coma. When he regained consciousness three weeks later, the only muscle left functioning was in his left eyelid although his mind remained as active and alert as it had ever been. He spent most of 1996 writing this book, letter by letter, blinking as an alphabet was repeatedly read out to him. 'The diving-bell and the butterfly' was published in France on Thursday 6th March 1997. It was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. And then, three days later, he died. A remarkable book about the triumph of the human spirit and the ability to invent a life for oneself in the most appalling of circumstances.

144 pages

The mango orchard

'The mango orchard' is the story of parallel journeys, a hundred years apart, into the heart of Latin America. Undaunted by the passage of time and a paucity of information, Robin seeks out the places where his great-grandfather Arthur 'Arturo' Greenhalgh travelled and lived, determined to uncover his legacy.

Along the road Robin encounters witches, drug dealers, a gun-toting Tasmanian Devil and an ex-Nazi diamond trader. He is threatened with deportation, offered the protection of Colombian guerrilla fighters and is comforted by the blessings of Los Santos. He falls in love with a beautiful Guatemalan girl with mystical powers and almost gives up his quest, until a sense of destiny drives him on to western Mexico and the discovery of much more than he had bargained for.

320 pages

The particular sadness of lemon cake

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the slice. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother - her cheerful, can-do mother - tastes of despair and desperation.

Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes perilous. Anything can be revealed at any meal. Rose's gift forces her to confront the secret knowledge all families keep hidden - truths about her mother's life outside the home, her father's strange detachment and her brother's clash with the world. Yet, as Rose grows up, she realises there are some secrets that even her taste buds cannot discern. 'The particular sadness of lemon cake' is a luminous tale about the heartbreak of loving those whom you know too much about. It is profound and funny, wise and sad.

304 pages

Alan: talking heads 2

Dramatic monologues written for television, reflecting social attitudes, entertaining with acute asides and moving with their insight into people’s lives.

92 pages

The craftsman

Devoted father or merciless killer? His secrets are buried with him. Florence Lovelady's career was made when she convicted coffin-maker Larry Glassbrook of a series of child murders 30 years ago. Like something from our worst nightmares, the victims were buried - alive. Larry confessed to the crimes; it was an open and shut case. But now he's dead, and events from the past start to repeat themselves. Did she get it wrong all those years ago? Or is there something much darker at play?

Alain: status anxiety

We all worry about what others think of us. We all long to succeed and fear failure. We all suffer - to a greater or lesser degree, usually privately and with embarrassment - from status anxiety. For the first time, Alain de Botton gives a name to this universal condition and sets out to investigate both its origins and possible solutions. He looks at history, philosophy, economics, art and politics - and reveals the many ingenious ways that great minds have overcome their worries. The result is a book that is not only entertaining and thought-provoking - but genuinely wise and helpful as well.

320 pages

Any human heart

Logan Mountstuart's long life is both ordinary and extraordinary. A writer, spy and art dealer, Logan mixes with the men and women who shaped the twentieth century - he's also a son, a husband and a lover, and he makes the same mistakes we all do in his search for happiness. William Boyd's bestselling novel is a rich account of a life lived to the full.

490 pages

Testament of Youth

One woman's unforgettable record of the First World War, 'Testament of Youth' is in spirit and impact as powerful a classic as 'All Quiet on the Western Front' and 'Goodbye to All That' - a haunting elegy for a lost generation.

612 pages

A Death in Chelsea: a Mayfair 100 Mystery

His Bloody Project

Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2016. The year is 1869. A brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands leads to the arrest of a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae. A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but it falls to the country's finest legal and psychiatric minds to uncover what drove him to commit such merciless acts of violence. Was he mad? Only the persuasive powers of his advocate stand between Macrae and the gallows. Graeme Macrae Burnet tells an irresistible and original story about the provisional nature of truth, even when the facts seem clear. His Bloody Project is a mesmerising literary thriller set in an unforgiving landscape where the exercise of power is arbitrary.

288 pages

Milkman

In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous. Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2018.

368 pages

The Miniaturist

On an autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year old Nella Oortman arrives at a grand house in Amsterdam, to begin her new life as the wife of wealthy merchant Johannes Brandt. He presents her with an extraordinary wedding gift: a cabinet-sized replica of their home. It is to be furnished by an elusive miniaturist, whose tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in unexpected way.

433 pages

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

This powerful collection of stories, set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection was to become one of the most influential literary works of the 1980s.

144 pages

The Defence

Eddie Flynn used to be a con artist, and then he became a lawyer. It turned out the two weren't that different. It's been over a year since Eddie vowed never to set foot in a courtroom again. But now he doesn't have a choice; with a ticking bomb strapped to his back, he must defend the head of the Russian mafia in an impossible murder trial, and win, or the mafia will kill his ten year old daughter.

320 pages

Small Pleasures

1957, the suburbs of South East London. Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper, disappointed in love and on the brink of 40. Living a limited existence with her truculent mother, a small life from which there is no likelihood of escape. When a young Swiss woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth, it is down to Jean to discover whether she is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely and not unpleasantly intertwined with that of the Tilbury's.

352 pages

Larchfield 

It's early summer when a young poet, Dora Fielding, moves to Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland. Newly married and pregnant she's excited by the prospect of a life that combines family and creativity. She thinks she knows what being a person, a wife, a mother, means. She is soon shown that she is wrong. As the battle begins for her very sense of self, Dora comes to find the realities of small town life suffocating, and, eventually, terrifying; until she finds a way to escape reality altogether.

Another poet, she discovers, lived in Helensburgh once. Wystan H. Auden, brilliant and awkward at 24, with his first book of poetry published, should be embarking on success and society in London. Instead, in 1930, fleeing a broken engagement, he takes a teaching post at Larchfield School for boys where he is mocked for his Englishness and suspected - rightly - of homosexuality. Yet in this repressed limbo Wystan will fall in love for the first time, even as he fights his deepest fears. The need for human connection compels these two vulnerable outsiders to find each other and make a reality of their own that will save them both.

368 pages

Piranesi

Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has. In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. At other times he brings tributes of food and waterlilies to the Dead. But mostly, he is alone. Messages begin to appear, scratched out in chalk on the pavements. There is someone new in the House. But who are they and what do they want? Are they a friend or do they bring destruction and madness as the Other claims? Lost texts must be found; secrets must be uncovered. The world that Piranesi thought he knew is becoming strange and dangerous. Winner of the Women’s Prize 2021.

272 pages

The Girls

Evie Boyd is desperate to be noticed. In the summer of 1969, empty days stretch out under the California sun. The smell of honeysuckle thickens the air and the sidewalks radiate heat. Until she sees them; the snatch of cold laughter, hair long and uncombed, dirty dresses skimming the tops of thighs and cheap rings like a second set of knuckles. The girls. And at the centre, Russell and the ranch, down a long dirt track and deep in the hills. Incense and clumsily strummed chords, rumours of sex, frenzied gatherings and teen runaway. Was there a warning, a sign of things to come? Or is Evie already too enthralled by the girls to see that her life is about to be changed forever? Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in the Evening Standard, Observer and The Times.

368 pages 

The Binding

Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship. He will work for a bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition, and prejudice,  but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse. He will learn to handcraft beautiful volumes, and within each he will capture something unique and extraordinary, a memory. If there's something you want to forget, he can help. If there's something you need to erase, he can assist. Your past will be stored safely in a book and you will never remember your secret, however terrible. In a vault under his mentor's workshop, row upon row of books and memories are meticulously stored and recorded. Then one day Emmett makes an astonishing discovery, one of them has his name on it.

438 pages

These Dividing Walls

In a forgotten corner of Paris stands a building. Within its walls, people talk and kiss, laugh and cry; some are glad to sit alone, while others wish they did not. A woman with silver-blonde hair opens her bookshop downstairs, an old man feeds the sparrows on his windowsill and a young mother wills the morning to hold itself at bay. Though each of their walls touches someone else's, the neighbours they pass in the courtyard remain strangers. Into this courtyard arrives Edward. Still bearing the sweat of a channel crossing, he takes his place in an attic room to wait out his grief. But in distant corners of the city, as Paris is pulled taut with summer heat, there are those who meet with a darker purpose.

256 pages

The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually 

On an island off the west coast of Ireland, the Moone family gather, only to be shattered by tragedy. Murtagh Moone is a potter and devoted husband to Maeve, an actor struggling with her most challenging role yet, as mother to their four children. Now Murtagh must hold his family close as we bear witness to their story before that night.

352 pages

Hope Nicely’s Lessons for Life 

Hope Nicely hasn't had an easy life. But she's happy enough living with her mum, Jenny Nicely, and loves her job, walking other people's dogs. She's a bit different, but as Jenny always tells her, she's a rainbow person, a special drop of light. It's just, there's something she needs to know. Why did her birth mother abandon her in a cardboard box on a church step 25 years ago? And did she know that drinking while pregnant could lead to Hope being born with Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder? In a bid to find her birth mother and the answers to these questions, Hope decides to write a book.

328 pages

SS-GB

Deighton’s classic thriller, the first and certainly greatest ‘what-if?’ novel about the Second World War. In February 1941 British Command surrendered to the Nazis. Churchill has been executed, the King is in the Tower and the SS are in Whitehall. For nine months Britain has been occupied, a blitzed, depressed and dingy country. However, it’s ‘business as usual’ at Scotland Yard run by the SS when Detective Inspector Archer is assigned to a routine murder case. Life must go on. But when SS Standartenfuhrer Huth arrives from Berlin with orders from the great Himmler himself to supervise the investigation, the resourceful Archer finds himself caught up in a high level, all action, espionage battle.

400 pages

The Sisters Brothers

An offbeat Western about a reluctant assassin and his murderous brother who are on the trail of a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. On the way, the brothers have a series of unsettling and violent experiences in the Darwinian landscape of Gold Rush America. A dark comedy about the things you tell yourself in order to be able to continue to live the life you find yourself in, and what happens when those stories no longer work.

272 pages

The Reader on the 6.27

Guylain Vignolles lives on the edge of existence. Working at a book pulping factory in a job he hates, he has but one pleasure in life. Sitting on the 6.27 train each day, Guylain recites aloud from pages he has saved from the jaws of his monstrous pulping machine. And it's this release of words into the world that starts our hero on a journey that will finally bring meaning into his life. For one morning, Guylain discovers the diary of a lonely young woman, Julie. A woman who feels as lost in the world as he does. As he reads from these pages to a rapt audience, Guylain finds himself falling hopelessly in love with their enchanting author.

193 pages

All The Light We Cannot See

A beautiful, ambitious novel about a blind French girl and an orphan German boy whose paths collide in occupied France, as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

530 pages

Rebecca

Du Maurier's famous tale of suspense, mystery and love concerns Maxim de Winter's shy new bride and the house she is to inhabit. One which still reverberates with the haunting presence of his previous wife's influence. A tense and unnerving story, 'Rebecca' depicts the crippling effect that self-doubt and external manipulation can have on a young and innocent woman's spirit. Due to her own feelings of jealousy, du Maurier is said to have based the tale on her husband's first fiancée, claiming that 'Rebecca' would demonstrate the 'influence of a first wife on a second', where 'wife two is haunted day and night' and 'tragedy' is looming very close.

441 pages

The World’s Wife

An extremely original and playful collection from one of the nation’s leading contemporary poets. Here, Duffy takes notable male figures from history and then presents their story from the perspective of their lesser-known wives and sisters. Meet Mrs Darwin, the Kray sisters, Mrs Midas, Frau Freud and a cast of others. Shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize: Best Collection.

200pages

Miss Webster and Cherif

Elizabeth Webster is a spinster pushing seventy. Forced out of her teaching job, she unleashes her sharp tongue and dogmatic opinions on everyone in the English village of Little Blessington. Then, one night, she grinds to a dead halt. To recover from this illness, she travels to North Africa where she has a brush with terrorism -not that she cares about politics. Three weeks after Miss Webster has returned home her doorbell rings. There stands a beautiful young Arab man carrying a large suitcase. Who is he, why is he there and what does he want?

256 pages

Inside the Wave

To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead - the underworld and the human living world - and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage. Her final poem, 'Hold out your arms', written shortly before her death and not included in the first printing of 'Inside the Wave', has now been added to the reprint. Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Poetry Award.

72 pages

Manhattan Beach 

Anna Kerrigan, nearly 12 years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and a secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard where she becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career as a Ziegfield folly, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a night club, she chances to meet Styles, the man she visited with her father before he vanished, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, and the reasons he might have been murdered.

438pages

Whispers through a Megaphone 

Miriam hasn't left her house in three years, and cannot raise her voice above a whisper. But today she has had enough, and is finally ready to re-join the outside world. Meanwhile, Ralph has made the mistake of opening a closet door, only to discover with a shock that his wife Sadie doesn't love him, and never has. And so he decides to run away. Miriam and Ralph's chance meeting in a wood during stormy weather marks the beginning of an amusing, restorative friendship, while Sadie takes a break from Twitter to embark on an intriguing adventure of her own. As their collective story unfolds, each of them seeks to better understand the objects of their affection, and their own hearts, timidly refusing to stand still and accept the chaos life throws at them. Filled with wit and sparkling prose, 'Whispers Through a Megaphone' explores our attempts to meaningfully connect with ourselves and others, in an often deafening world - when sometimes all we need is a bit of silence.

352 pages

The Garden of Evening Mists

In the lush highlands of Malaya, a woman sets out to build a memorial to her sister, killed at the hands of the Japanese during the brutal occupation of their country. Yun Ling's quest leads her to 'The Garden of Evening Mists', and to Aritomo, a man of extraordinary skill and reputation, once the gardener of the Emperor of Japan. When she accepts his offer to become his apprentice, she begins a journey into her past, inextricably linked with the secrets of her troubled country's history.

352 pages

The Garden of Lost and Found 

Nightingale House, 1919. Liddy Horner discovers her husband, the world-famous artist Sir Edward Horner, burning his best-known painting the ‘Garden of Lost and Found’ days before his sudden death. Nightingale House was the Horner family's beloved home - a gem of design created to inspire happiness - and it was here Ned painted 'The Garden of Lost and Found', capturing his children on a perfect day, playing in the rambling Eden he and Liddy made for them. When Ned and Liddy's great-granddaughter Juliet is sent the key to Nightingale House, she opens the door onto a forgotten world. The house holds its mysteries close but she is in search of answers. For who would choose to destroy what they love most? Whether Ned's masterpiece - or, in Juliet's case, her own children's happiness, something shattered this corner of paradise. But what?

560 pages

A Little History of Archaeology

What is archaeology? The word may bring to mind images of golden pharaohs and lost civilizations, or neanderthal skulls and Ice Age cave art. Archaeology is all of these, but also far more: the only science to encompass the entire span of human history. This book tells the riveting stories of some of the great archaeologists and their amazing discoveries around the globe: ancient Egyptian tombs, Mayan ruins, the first colonial settlements at Jamestown, mysterious Stonehenge, the incredibly preserved Pompeii, and many, many more.

277 pages

The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank

On February 16, 1944, Anne Frank recorded in her diary that Peter, whom she at first disliked but eventually came to love, had confided to her that if he got out alive, he would reinvent himself entirely. This is the story of what might have happened if the boy in hiding survived to become a man. Based on extensive research of Peter van Pels and the strange and disturbing life Anne Frank's diary took on after her death, this is a novel about the memory of death, the death of memory, and the inescapability of the past.

261 pages

The Shock of the Fall

There are books you can't stop reading, which keep you up all night. There are books which let us into the hidden parts of life and make them vividly real. There are books which, because of the sheer skill with which every word is chosen, linger in your mind for days. The Shock of the Fall is all of these books. The Shock of the Fall is an extraordinary portrait of one man's descent into mental illness. It is a brave and ground-breaking novel from one of the most exciting new voices in fiction.

320 pages

The Great Gatsby

Brilliant fable of the hedonistic excess and tragic reality of 1920s America. Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach. Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby - young, handsome, fabulously rich - always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.

140 pages

Casino Royale 

In the novel that introduced James Bond to the world, Ian Fleming’s agent 007 is dispatched to a French casino in Royale-les-Eaux. His mission? Bankrupt a ruthless Russian agent who’s been on a bad luck streak at the baccarat table. Taut, tense, and effortlessly stylish, Ian Fleming’s inaugural James Bond adventure has all the hallmarks that made the series a touchstone for a generation of readers.

229 pages

My Life in Houses

So begins Margaret Forster’s journey through the houses she’s lived in, from that sparkling new council house, to her beloved London home of today. This is a book about what houses are to us, the effect they have on the way we live our lives and the changing nature of our homes: from blacking grates and outside privies; to cities dominated by bedsits and lodgings; to the houses of today converted back into single dwellings. Finally, it is a personal inquiry into the meaning of home.

272 pages

Lucky Break 

It is their first day at Drama Arts, and the circle of huddled, nervous students are told in no uncertain terms that here, unlike at any other drama school, they will be taught to Act. To exist in their own world on the stage. But outside is the real world - a pitiless, alluring place in which each of them in their most fervent dreams, hopes to flourish and excel. Over the following decade these young actors will grapple with haphazard tours, illogical auditions, unobtainable agents, deluxe caravans, rocky relationships and red-carpet premieres. This dazzling new novel from Esther Freud uncovers a world of ruthless ambition, uncertain alliances and the many-sided holy grail of success.

320 pages

Bitter Orange 

Frances Jellico is dying. A man who calls himself the vicar visits, hoping to extract a deathbed confession. He wants to know what really happened that fateful summer of 1969, when Frances was tasked with surveying a dilapidated country house. This is when she first set eyes on the glamorous bohemian couple, Cara and Peter. She recalls the relationship they forged through sweltering days, lavish dinners, and elaborate lies, and the Judas hole through which she would spy on the couple. Were the signs there right from the beginning? Or was it impossible to avoid the crime that split their lives open like rotten fruit?

288 pages

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Dive into a magical novel of memory and the adventure of childhood, from one of the brightest writers of our generation. It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive. There is primal horror here, and menace unleashed - within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. His only defence is three women, on a farm, at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duck pond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang. 'The Ocean at The End of the Lane' is a fable that reshapes modern fantasy.

272 pages

Where Shall We Run To?

In 'Where Shall We Run To?', Alan Garner remembers his early childhood in the Cheshire village of Alderley Edge. Life at the village school as 'a sissy and a mardy-arse'; pushing his friend Harold into a clump of nettles to test the truth of dock leaves; his father joining the army to guard the family against Hitler; the coming of the Yanks, with their comics and sweets and chewing gum. From one of our greatest living writers, it is a remarkable and evocative memoir of a vanished England.

208pages

The Man I Think I Know

Whatever their friends and teachers might have expected, neither Danny nor James is currently running the country. Depressed and unemployed, Danny is facing an ultimatum from his girlfriend Maya: if he doesn't get out and get a job, she's leaving. It was an accident that changed James's life and now he is looked after affectionately by his parents. But his sister Martha believes that the role of full-time carers is destroying their lives - and infantilising her brother. She suggests that James should go into a respite home while her parents take a break. The respite home, as it turns out, where Danny has just got a job. What is the path that has brought these two people to this unexpected place, and where will it take them next?

310 pages

Gun Island

A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way. There is Piya, a fellow Bengali American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen's eyes to the realities of growing up in today's world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey which will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood and about the world around him.

313 pages 

A Woman Made of Snow Scotland

1949: Caroline Gillan and her new husband Alasdair have moved back to Kelly Castle, his dilapidated family estate in the middle of nowhere. Caroline feels adrift, alone, and unwelcome. But when she is tasked with sorting out the family archives, Caroline discovers a century-old mystery that sparks her back to life. And when a body is found in the grounds of the castle, her hunt becomes more than just a case of curiosity.

304 pages

Mr Doubler Begins Again

Baked, mashed, boiled or fried, Mr Doubler knows his potatoes. But the same can't be said for people. Since he lost his wife, he's been on his own at Mirth Farm, and that suits Doubler just fine. Crowds are for other people; the only company he needs are his potato plants and his housekeeper, Mrs Millwood, who visits every day. Until the day she doesn't. With Mrs Millwood missing, Doubler's routine is plunged into chaos, and more alone than ever, he begins to worry that he might have lost his way. But could the kindness of strangers be enough to bring him down the hill?

372 pages

The Silent Treatment

A lifetime together. 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 heart-breaking 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? The Silent Treatment celebrates the power of love and the importance of leaving nothing unsaid.

328 pages

Wild: An Elemental Journey 

Part travel book, part political manifesto and deeply personal throughout, 'Wild' has inspired fervent reviews and impassioned responses as well as a fair amount of controversy and debate.

480 pages

Transcendent Kingdom 

As a child Gifty would ask her parents to tell the story of their journey from Ghana to Alabama, seeking escape in myths of heroism and romance. When her father and brother succumb to the hard reality of immigrant life in the American South, their family of four becomes two - and the life Gifty dreamed of slips away. Years later, desperate to understand the opioid addiction that destroyed her brother's life, she turns to science for answers. But when her mother comes to stay, Gifty soon learns that the roots of their tangled traumas reach farther than she ever thought. Tracing her family's story through continents and generations will take her deep into the dark heart of modern America. 

256 pages

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Among the brightest and best of his graduating class at Princeton, Changez is snapped up by an elite firm and thrives in New York and the intensity of his work. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. Changez's own identity is in seismic shift, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.

224 pages

The Dry

Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, it hasn't rained in small country town Kiewarra for two years. Tensions in the community become unbearable when three members of the Hadler family are brutally murdered. Everyone thinks Luke Hadler, who committed suicide after slaughtering his wife and six-year-old son, is guilty. Policeman Aaron Falk returns to the town of his youth for the funeral of his childhood best friend, and is unwillingly drawn into the investigation. 

401 pages 

Conclave 

The Pope is dead. Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, 118 Cardinals from all over the globe will cast their votes in the world's most secretive election. They are holy men. But they have ambition, and they have rivals. Over the next 72 hours one of them will become the most powerful spiritual figure on Earth.

400 pages 

Elizabeth is Missing

Meet Maud. Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn't remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is unrecognizable - or her daughter Helen seems a total stranger. But there's one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to the bottom of it. Because somewhere in Maud's damaged mind lies the answer to an unsolved seventy-year-old mystery. One everyone has forgotten about. Everyone, except Maud. Winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2014.

275 pages

Catch 22

A top 21 Big Read, this title has entered common parlance to describe a no-win situation. Set on a fictitious island, it centres on Captain Yossarian's attempts to survive the Second World War by avoiding dangerous combat duties. But the enemy above is not Yossarian's problem, it is his own army intent on keeping him airborne, and the maddening 'Catch-22' that allows for no possibility of escape.

528 pages

The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83 1/4 years old

Meet Hendrik Groen. An octogenarian in a care home who has no intention of doing what he's told, or dying quietly. To that end, he creates the Old-But-Not-Dead Club and with his fellow members sets about living his final years with careless abandon. Such anarchism infuriates the care home director but pleases Eefje, the woman who makes Hendrik's frail heart palpitate. If it's never too late to have fun, then can it never be too late to meet the love of your life?

389 pages

Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century 

It is the century about which we know too much, yet understand too little. With disorientating ideas such as relativity, cubism, existentialism, chaos mathematics and postmodernism to contend with, the twentieth century, John Higgs argues, cannot fit easily into a traditional historical narrative. Time then, for a new perspective. Higgs takes us on a refreshingly eclectic journey through the knotty history of the strangest of centuries. In the company of radical artists, scientists, geniuses and eccentrics, he shows us how the elegant, clockwork universe of the Victorians became increasingly woozy and uncertain; and how in the twentieth century we discovered that our world is not just stranger than we imagine, but 'stranger than we can imagine'.

352 pages

Unbroken

From the author of the bestselling and much loved 'Seabiscuit', an unforgettable story of one man's journey into extremity. On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane's bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. The lieutenant's name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he'd been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channelled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown. Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a failing raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humour; brutality with rebellion.

500 pages

The Island  

On the brink of her own life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding longs to find out about her mother's past. But Sofia has never spoken of it. All she admits to is growing up in a small Cretan village before moving to London. Sofia gives her daughter a letter to take to an old friend, and promises that through her she will learn more. 

384 pages

Cold, Cold Heart

Promising young TV reporter Dana Nolan has escaped from notorious serial killer Doc Holliday, and was the only one to make it out alive, but can she ever be safe? A year has passed since she survived the ordeal but she is still physically, emotionally, and psychologically scarred. In an attempt to put herself back together, Dana returns to her hometown. But it doesn't provide the comfort she expects and she struggles to recognize family and childhood friends and begins experiencing dark flashbacks. Dana decides to use her investigative skills to piece together her past and the event that made her become a reporter in the first place: the disappearance of her best friend, Casey Grant, the summer after high school graduation. But now, old friends seem to be suspects and authority figures part of a cover-up.

400 pages

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

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.  Costa First Novel Book Award winner 2017.

400 pages

High Fidelity 

Hornby's narrator is a thirty-something bloke who runs a London record store, selling albums recorded the old-fashioned way on vinyl - and he is having a tough time making other transitions as well, specifically to adulthood. Part love story, most entertaining, though, are the hilarious arguments over arcane matters of pop music.

253 pages 

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, and lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism. A chronicle of Afghan history, and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, and the salvation to be found in love.

384 pages

The Loney

Two brothers. One mute, the other his lifelong protector. Year after year, their family visits the same sacred shrine on a desolate strip of coastline known as the Loney, in desperate hope of a cure. In the long hours of waiting, the boys are left alone. And they cannot resist the causeway revealed with every turn of the treacherous tide, the old house they glimpse at its end. Many years on, Hanny is a grown man no longer in need of his brother's care. But then the child's body is found. And the Loney always gives up its secrets, in the end.

368 pages

The Buried Giant

The new novel from the author of 'Never Let Me Go' and the Booker Prize winning .The Remains of the Day'. The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin, but at least the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased. The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards - some strange and other-worldly - but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another. Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge and war.

384 pages

Shylock is My Name

'Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?' With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire's Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It's the beginning of a remarkable friendship.

288 pages

The Known World

Winner of both IMPAC and Pulitzer prizes, this masterful epic centres on slave life on a Southern plantation. Regarded as ‘an utterly original exploration of race, trust and the cruel truths of human nature’, this has been hailed as a landmark in modern American literature.

400 pages

Hand Me Down World

This is a story about a woman. And the truck driver who mistook her for a prostitute. The old man she robbed and the hunters who smuggled her across the border. The woman whose name she stole, the wife who turned a blind eye. This is the story of a mother searching for her child. This is a novel you cannot stop thinking about.

320 pages

The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals

Everyone has to make decisions about love. Wilfred Price, overcome with emotion on a sunny spring day, proposes to a girl he barely knows at a picnic. The girl, Grace, joyfully accepts and rushes to tell her family of Wilfred's intentions. But by this time Wilfred has realised his mistake. He does not love Grace. On the verge of extricating himself, Wilfred's situation suddenly becomes more serious when Grace's father steps in. Up until this point in his life, Wilfred's existence has been blissfully simple, and the young undertaker seems unable to stop the swirling mess that now surrounds him. To add to Wilfred's emotional turmoil, he thinks he may just have met the perfect girl for him. As Wilfred struggles in an increasingly tangled web of expectation and duty, love and lies, Grace reveals a long-held secret that changes everything. Wendy Jones's charming first novel is a moving depiction of love and secrecy, set against the rural backdrop of a 1920s Welsh village.

272 pages

The Alphabet of Heart’s Desire

In 1802 Thomas de Quincey, a young man from a comfortable middle-class background who would go on to become one of the most celebrated writers of his day, collapsed on Oxford Street and was discovered by a teenage prostitute who brought him back to her room and nursed him to health. It was the beginning of a relationship that would introduce Thomas to a world just below the surface of London's polite society, where pleasure was a tradeable commodity and opium could seem the only relief from poverty. Yet it is also a world where love might blossom, and goodness survive. The lives of a street girl, an aspiring writer, and a freed slave cross and re-cross the slums of London in this novel about the birth of passion, the burden of addiction, and the consolations of literature.

392 pages

Pigeon English

Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats on an inner-city housing estate. The second best runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised trainers - the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen, blissfully unaware of the very real threat all around him. With equal fascination for the local gang - the Dell Farm Crew - and the pigeon who visits his balcony.  Harri absorbs the many strange elements of his new life in England: watching, listening, and learning the tricks of urban survival. But when a boy is knifed to death on the high street and a police appeal for witnesses draws only silence, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. In doing so, he unwittingly endangers the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to try and keep them safe. A story of innocence and experience, hope and harsh reality, Pigeon English is a spellbinding portrayal of a boy balancing on the edge of manhood and of the forces around him that try to shape the way he falls.

263 pages

Burial Rites

Northern Iceland, 1829, a woman condemned to death for murdering her lover. A family forced to take her in. A priest tasked with absolving her. But all is not as it seems, and time is running out. Winter is coming, and with it the execution date. Only she can know the truth. This is Agnes's story. Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014.

355 pages

Calling Me Home

A moving love story inspired by a true story and perfect for fans of The Help. In a time of hate, would you stand up for love? Shalerville, Kentucky, 1939, A world where black maids and handymen are trusted to raise white children and tend to white houses, but from which they are banished after dark. Sixteen-year-old Isabelle McAllister, born into wealth and privilege, finds her ordered life turned upside down when she becomes attracted to Robert, the ambitious black son of her family's housekeeper. Before long Isabelle and Robert are crossing extraordinary, dangerous boundaries and falling deeply in love. Many years later, eighty nine-year-old Isabelle will travel from her home in Arlington, Texas, to Ohio for a funeral. With Isabelle is her hairstylist and friend, Dorrie Curtis, a black single mother with her own problems. Along the way, Isabelle will finally reveal to Dorrie the truth of her painful past, a tale of forbidden love, the consequences of which will resound for decades.

336 pages

English Passengers

A big, ambitious novel with a rich historical sweep, and a host of narrative voices. Its subject is a vicar's ludicrous expedition in 1857 to the Garden of Eden in Tasmania. Meanwhile in Tasmania itself, the British settlers are alternately trying to civilise and eliminate the Aboriginal population.

480 pages

Death and the Penguin

Set in post-soviet Ukraine, Viktor is an aspiring writer with only Misha, his pet penguin, for company. Viktor turns to writing obituaries in order to make a living, When Viktor’s subjects start to die, he inadvertently gets caught up in the underworld. This is a darkly comic, satirical tale, but underneath the humour, makes serious comment on contemporary Ukraine.

240 pages

The Wall 

Kavanagh begins his life patrolling the Wall. If he's lucky, if nothing goes wrong, he only has two years of this, 729 more nights. The best thing that can happen is that he survives and gets off the Wall and never has to spend another day of his life anywhere near it. He longs for this to be over; longs to be somewhere else. He will soon find out what Defenders do and who the Others are. Along with the rest of his squad, he will endure cold and fear day after day, night after night. But somewhere, in the dark cave of his mind, he thinks: wouldn't it be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if you had to fight for your life? Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2019.

288 pages

Go Set a Watchman 

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch ‘Scout’ returns home from New York City to visit her ageing father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise’s homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'Go Set a Watchman' perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past, a journey that can be guided only by one’s own conscience.

288 pages

Beekeeper of Aleppo

Nuri is a beekeeper; his wife, Afra, an artist. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo, until the unthinkable happens. When all they care for is destroyed by war, they are forced to escape. But what Afra has seen is so terrible she has gone blind, and so they must embark on a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece towards an uncertain future in Britain. On the way, Nuri is sustained by the knowledge that waiting for them is Mustafa, his cousin and business partner, who has started an apiary and is teaching fellow refugees in Yorkshire to keep bees. As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss, but dangers that would overwhelm the bravest of souls.

384 pages

The Mountain Can Wait

For fans of 'Brokeback Mountain' and 'Legend of a Suicide', a story of a father's attempt to save his wayward son. Tom Berry has always been a loner, a man content to live out his days in the wilderness with just enough ammunition and kerosene to last out the winter. A single father, he has raised his children with the same quiet and absolute dedication he brings to his forestry business, but now he's discovering that might not have been enough. When his son, Curtis, on the brink of adulthood, disappears after a tragic accident, it falls to Tom, the hunter, to track him down. Whether he can truly reach Curtis is another matter.

320 pages

The Girl Who Came Back

When Jules Bright hears a knock on the door, the last person she expects to find is a detective bringing her the news she’s feared for the last three years. Amelia Quentin is being released from prison. Jules’s life is very different now to the one she’d known before Amelia shattered it completely. Knowing the girl is coming back she needs to decide what to do. Friends and family gather round, fearing for Jules’s safety. They know that justice was never served; every one of them wants to make the Quentin girl pay. The question is, what will Jules do; and which of them, her or Amelia, has the most to fear?

416 pages

Oh Marina Girl

The claustrophobic editor of a newspaper’s letters page receives a note from a kidnapper informing him that ‘intolerance will not be tolerated’ and that a hostage will be executed unless he arranges for a letter to be published on the front page of the next morning’s paper. So begins the narrator’s tale, within which we encounter strange characters – such as Chris The Crossword Compiler and Mark Twain (or at least, his namesake) – and hear of an enigmatic organisation of moral vigilantes called The Amino. But who is the kidnapper? What are his/her motives? And why would he/she wish to pass a death sentence on the narrator?

176 pages

The Memory Wood 

Elijah has lived in the Memory Wood for as long as he can remember. It's the only home he's ever known. Elissa has only just arrived. And she'll do everything she can to escape. When Elijah stumbles across 13-year-old Elissa, in the woods where her abductor is hiding her, he refuses to alert the police. Because in his 12 years, Elijah has never had a proper friend. And he doesn't want Elissa to leave. 

416 pages

The Kids

Hannah Lowe taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of this book of compassionate and energetic sonnets are 'The Kids', her students, the teenagers she nurtured. But the poems go further, meeting her own child self as she comes of age in the riotous 80s and 90s. . These boisterous and musical poems explore the universal experience of what it is to be taught, to learn and to teach. Winner of the Costa Poetry Award, going on to win Costa Book of the Year 2021.

80 pages

Underland

Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland's glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet's past and future. Global in its geography, gripping in its voice and haunting in its implications, it is a new chapter in Macfarlane's long-term exploration of landscape and the human heart. 

487 pages

I Let You Go

A tragic accident. It all happened so quickly. She couldn't have prevented it. Could she? In a split second, Jenna Gray's world descends into a nightmare. Her only hope of moving on is to walk away from everything she knows to start afresh. Desperate to escape, Jenna moves to a remote cottage on the Welsh coast, but she is haunted by her fears, her grief and her memories of a cruel November night that changed her life forever. Slowly, Jenna begins to glimpse the potential for happiness in her future. But her past is about to catch up with her, and the consequences will be devastating.

384 pages

Grandad’s Letters

Local author Janice Madden has compiled her father George’s letters to his young grandchildren. The letters were written between 1974 and 1977, and convey his love of nature and the Cheshire countryside.

165 pages

Tiger Hills

When a flock of herons wheeled overhead at the moment of Devi's birth, it seemed that her life would be touched by fate... As a child, Devi befriends a young boy whose mother has died in tragic circumstances. Over the years, Devi and Devanna become inseparable as they go to school together and learn more about the extended family that surrounds them. However things change when Devi meets Muthi, a young man who has killed a tiger and is feted as a hero. Although she is still a child and Muthi is a man, Devi vows that one day she will marry him. It is this love that will gradually drive a wedge between her and her friend Devanna. For Devi is blind to the fact that Devanna himself has fallen for her. 

624 page

Wolf Hall

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2009. England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man, the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages. From one of our finest living writers, 'Wolf Hall' is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion, suffering and courage.

400 pages 

Dead Pretty

Hannah Kelly has been missing for nine months. Ava Delaney has been dead for five days. One girl to find, one girl to avenge, and DS Aector McAvoy won't let either of them go until justice can be done –but some people have their own ideas of what justice means. 

322 pages

The Night Gate

In a sleepy French village, the body of a man shot through the head is disinterred by the roots of a fallen tree. A week later a famous art critic is viciously murdered in a nearby house. The deaths occurred more than 70 years apart. Two extraordinary narratives are set in train - one historical, unfolding in the treacherous wartime years of Occupied France; the other contemporary, set in the autumn of 2020 as France re-enters Covid lockdown.

496 pages

Machines Like Me 

Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding. 'Machines Like Me' occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he co-designs Adam's personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever - a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma.

305 pages

Reservoir 13

Midwinter in the early years of this century. A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done, cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. As it must. Reservoir 13 explores the rhythms of the natural world and the repeated human gift for violence, unfolding over thirteen years as the aftershocks of a stranger’s tragedy refuse to subside. Winner of the 2017 Costa Novel Award. 

336 pages

The One I Love

Once Jane and Alexandra were inseparable - sharing adventures, secrets and big dreams for the future. But when Jane got pregnant at seventeen, they drifted apart. Seventeen years later, Jane discovers Alexandra has disappeared and she sets about helping Alexandra's broken-hearted husband, Tom, to find his wife. But in searching for Alexandra, Jane is about to confront some big questions about herself. Like, what happened to the high-spirited seventeen-year-old she once was? What will happen if she stops trying to control the world? And does love really mean letting people go? Two fractured people come together accidentally and in one another they find strength, friendship, and even the beginnings of hope.

368 pages

16 tales, penned by 16 accomplished writers, weave a tapestry of contemporary migration to the UK. As the globe shrinks, modern armed conflict, natural disasters and global economic imbalances have impacted on every nation of the world, including Britain. This anthology weaves a tapestry of these disparate voices, giving fictional and fictionalised voices to UK migrants of both recent times and the more distant past.

182 pages

The Song of Achillies

Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus. Here he is nobody, just another unwanted boy living in the shadow of King Peleus and his golden son, Achilles. Despite their differences, Achilles befriends the shamed prince, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something deeper. But when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, Achilles must go to war in distant Troy and fulfil his destiny. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus goes with him, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear. Profoundly moving and breathtakingly original, this rendering of the epic Trojan War is a dazzling feat of the imagination, a devastating love story, and an almighty battle between gods and kings, peace and glory, immortal fame and the human heart.

368 pages

The Night Circus

In 1886, a mysterious travelling circus becomes an international sensation. Open only at night, constructed entirely in black and white, Le Cirque des Rves delights all who wander its circular paths and warm themselves at its bonfire. Although there are acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists, the Circus of Dreams is no conventional spectacle. Some tents contain clouds, some ice. The circus seems almost to cast a spell over its aficionados, who call themselves the rveurs - the dreamers. At the heart of the story is the tangled relationship between two young magicians, Celia, the enchanter's daughter, and Marco, the sorcerer's apprentice. At the behest of their shadowy masters, they find themselves locked in a deadly contest, forced to test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love. The Night Circus is a captivating novel that will make the real world seem fantastical and a fantasy world real.

512 page

Big Little Lies 

Jane hasn't lived anywhere longer than six months since her son was born five years ago. She keeps moving in an attempt to escape her past. Now the idyllic seaside town of Pirriwee has pulled her to its shores and Jane finally feels like she belongs. She has friends in the feisty Madeline and the incredibly beautiful Celeste - two women with seemingly perfect lives, and their own secrets behind closed doors. But then a small incident involving the children of all three women occurs in the playground causing a rift between them and the other parents of the school. Minor at first but escalating fast, until whispers and rumours become vicious and spiteful, it was always going to end in tears, but no one thought it would end in murder.

466 pages

Ghost Wall

Teenage Silvie is living in a remote Northumberland camp as an exercise in experimental archaeology. Her father is an abusive man, obsessed with recreating the discomfort, brutality, and harshness of Iron Age life. As Silvie glimpses new freedoms with the students, her relationship with her overbearing father deteriorates, until the haunting rites of the past begin to bleed into the present. Behind and ahead of Silvie's narrative is a story of a Bog Girl, a woman killed by those closest to her, and as the hot summer builds to a terrifying climax, Silvie and the Bog Girl become inter-twined.

160 pages

The Winter Ghosts 

The Great War took much more than lives. It robbed a generation of friends, lovers and futures. In Freddie Watson's case, it took his beloved brother and, at times, his peace of mind. Unable to cope with his grief, Freddie has spent much of the time since in a sanatorium. In the winter of 1928, still seeking resolution, Freddie is travelling through the French Pyrenees - another region that has seen too much bloodshed over the years. During a snowstorm, his car spins off the mountain road. Shaken, he stumbles into the woods, emerging by a tiny village. There he meets Fabrissa, a beautiful local woman, also mourning a lost generation. Over the course of one night, Fabrissa and Freddie share their stories of remembrance and loss. By the time dawn breaks, he will have stumbled across a tragic mystery that goes back through the centuries. This is a story of two lives touched by war and transformed by courage.

304 pages 

Me Before You

Lou Clark knows lots of things. She knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home. She knows she likes working in The Buttered Bun tea shop and she knows she might not love her boyfriend Patrick. What Lou doesn't know is she's about to lose her job or that knowing what's coming is what keeps her sane. Will Traynor knows his motorcycle accident took away his desire to live. He knows everything feels very small and rather joyless now and he knows exactly how he's going to put a stop to that. What Will doesn't know is that Lou is about to burst into his world in a riot of colour. And neither of them knows they're going to change the other for all time.

512 pages

The Girl You Left Behind

France, 1916. Sophie Lefevre must keep her family safe whilst her adored husband Edouard fights at the front. When she is ordered to serve the German officers who descend on her hotel each evening, her home becomes riven by fierce tensions. And from the moment the new Kommandant sets eyes on Sophie's portrait - painted by Edouard - a dangerous obsession is born, which will lead Sophie to make a dark and terrible decision. Almost a century later, and Sophie's portrait hangs in the home of Liv Halston, a wedding gift from her young husband before he died. A chance encounter reveals the painting's true worth, and its troubled history. In The Girl You Left Behind two young women, separated by a century, are united in their determination to fight for what they love most, whatever the cost.

544 pages

Dear Life 

Alice Munro captures the essence of life in this collection of stories. Moments of change, chance encounters, the twist of fate that leads a person to a new way of thinking or being. The stories in 'Dear Life' build to form a radiant, indelible portrait of just how dangerous and strange ordinary life can be.

336 pages

Convenience Store Woman 

Keiko has never really fitted in. At school and university people find her odd and her family worries she'll never be normal. To appease them, Keiko takes a job at a newly opened convenience store. Here, she finds peace and purpose in the simple, daily tasks and routine interactions. She is, she comes to understand, happiest as a convenience store worker. But in Keiko's social circle it just won't do for an unmarried woman to spend all her time stacking shelves and re-ordering green tea.

176 pages

Everything I Never Told You 

Lydia is the favourite child of Marilyn and James. They are determined that Lydia will fulfil the dreams they were unable to pursue - in Marilyn's case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James's case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the centre of every party. But Lydia is under pressures that have nothing to do with growing up in 1970s small town Ohio. When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, James is consumed by guilt and sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage. Everything I Never Told You is a gripping page-turner, about secrets, love, longing, lies and race.

304 pages

Living Our Best Lives: Cannon Hall Farm

In the 60 years that Yorkshire farmer Roger Nicholson has lived at Cannon Hall Farm near Barnsley, he has turned what was once a humble small family farm into a multi-million-pound success story. This book covers the history of the family and their farming dynasty, which dates back to the 1600s. This is a story of dedication and optimism.

320 pages

84k

Theo Miller knows the value of human life, to the very last penny. Working in the Criminal Audit Office, he assesses each crime that crosses his desk and makes sure the correct debt to society is paid in full. But when his ex-lover is killed, it's different. This is one death he can't let become merely an entry on a balance sheet. Because when the richest in the world are getting away with murder, sometimes the numbers just don't add up.

452 pages

He Is Mine and I Have No Other 

In 1990s-small-town Ireland, amid the sweaty school discos and first fumbling's of adolescence, 15-year-old Lani Devine falls in love with Leon Brady, whose mother is buried in the cemetery next to Lani's house. Lani is haunted by the stories of 35 orphaned girls, buried in an unmarked grave near Leon's mother. As the love story unfolds, and then unravels, it becomes clear that Leon too is haunted by a brutal family tragedy that has left scars much more than skin-deep.

231 pages

After You’d Gone

A distraught young woman boards a train at King's Cross to return to her family in Scotland. Six hours later, she catches sight of something so terrible in a mirror at Waverley Station that she gets on the next train back to London. 'After You’d Gone' follows Alice's mental journey through her own past, after a traffic accident has left her in a coma. A love story that is also a story of absence, and of how our choices can reverberate through the generations, it slowly draws us closer to a dark secret at the family's heart.

384 pages

Hamnet

On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home? Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week. Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright: a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written. Winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction

384 pages

Daydreams of Angels

A cherub breaks all the rules when he spends one night with a girl on earth. Snow White and Rose Red forge a unique way to survive the Paris occupation. A soldier is brought back to life by a toymaker, but he's not grateful. And a child begins the story of a Gypsy and a bear, who have to finish it themselves. These are old stories, but not as you know them. These are set not in the forests of Europe or fantasy worlds, but on the battlefields of World War Two and the wilderness of downtown Montreal. With her blazing imagination, irreverent humour and arresting prose, Heather O'Neill twists them anew: more magical for their realism, more profound for their darkness; captivating, witty and wicked.

384 pages

Shadowplay 

The Lyceum Theatre, London, 1878, and three extraordinary people begin their life together, a life that will be full of drama. Henry Irving, the Chief, is the volcanic leading man and impresario; Ellen Terry is the most lauded and desired actress of her generation, outspoken and generous of heart - and ever following along behind them in the shadows is the unremarkable theatre manager, Bram Stoker. Fresh from life in Dublin as a clerk, Bram may seem the least colourful of the trio, but he is wrestling with dark demons in a new city, in a new marriage, and with his own literary aspirations. As he walks the London streets at night, streets haunted by the Ripper and the gossip which swirls around his friend Oscar Wilde, he finds new inspiration. Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2019

399 pages

Inland 

Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life - her husband who has gone in search of water for the parched household, and her elder sons who have vanished after an explosive argument. Nora is biding her time with her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home, and her husband's 17-year-old cousin, who communes with spirits. Lurie is a former outlaw and a man haunted by ghosts. He sees lost souls who want something from him, and he finds reprieve from their longing in an unexpected relationship that inspires a momentous expedition across the West.

370 pages

Burning the Books

Opening with the notorious bonfires of 'un-German' and Jewish literature in 1933 that offered such a clear signal of Nazi intentions, 'Burning the Books' takes us on a 3000-year journey through the destruction of knowledge and the fight against all the odds to preserve it.

320 pages

Where the Crawdads Sing 

How long can you protect your heart? For years, rumours of the 'Marsh Girl' have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life - until the unthinkable happens.

370 pages

A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery. Weaving across continents and decades, and exploring the relationship between reader and writer, fact and fiction, 'A Tale for the Time Being' is an extraordinary novel about our shared humanity and the search for home.

432 pages

Wonder 

'My name is August. I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.' Auggie wants to be an ordinary ten-year-old. He does ordinary things - eating ice cream, playing on his Xbox. He feels ordinary - inside. But ordinary kids don't make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds. Ordinary kids aren't stared at wherever they go. Born with a terrible facial abnormality, Auggie has been home-schooled by his parents his whole life. Now, for the first time, he's being sent to a real school - and he's dreading it. All he wants is to be accepted - but can he convince his new classmates that he's just like them, underneath it all? 'Wonder' is a funny, frank, astonishingly moving debut to read in one sitting, pass on to others, and remember long after the final page.

316 pages

Behind Closed Doors 

Everyone knows a couple like Jack and Grace. He has looks and wealth, she has charm and elegance. You might not want to like them, but you do. You’d like to get to know Grace better, but it’s difficult, because you realise Jack and Grace are never apart. Some might call this true love. Others might ask why Grace never answers the phone. Or how she can never meet for coffee, even though she doesn’t work. How she can cook such elaborate meals but remain so slim. And why there are bars on one of the bedroom windows. Sometimes, the perfect marriage is the perfect lie. 

352 pages

Man and Boy

Harry Silver has it all and in one moment of madness throws it all away. Harry's wife walks out on him when he is unfaithful, leaving him to cope with the care of their young son. He has to grow up and decide what love and family mean to him. A very well written book which is, pacy, funny, and at times heart-breaking.

352 pages

Commonwealth 

It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited and notices a heart stopping beautiful woman. When he kisses Beverly Keating, his host's wife, he sets in motion the joining of two families, whose shared fate will be defined on a day 7 years later. In 1988, Franny Keating, now 24, is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets the famous author Leon Posen one night at the bar, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story.

322 pages

The Storyteller 

Sage Singer has a past that makes her want to hide from the world. Sleeping by day and working in a bakery by night, she kneads her emotion into the beautiful bread she bakes. But when she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Josef Weber, a quiet man old enough to be her grandfather, and respected pillar of the community, she feels that finally, she may have found someone she can open up to. Until Josef tells her the evil secret he's kept for sixty years. Caught between Josef's search for redemption and her shattered illusions, Sage turns to her family history and her own life for answers. 

 464 pages

Ariel 

The poems in Sylvia Plath's Ariel, including many of her best-known such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy' and 'Fever 103 degrees', were all written between the publication in 1960 of Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963.

81 pages

Lanny 

There is a village outside London, no different from many others. Everyday lives conjure a tapestry of fabulism and domesticity. This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England's mysterious past and its confounding present. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort who has woken from his slumber and is listening, and watching. He is watching Mad Pete the village artist. He is listening to ancient Peggy gossiping at her gate, to families recently moved here and to families dead for generations. Dead Papa Toothwort hears them all as he searches, intently, for his favourite. Looking for the boy, Lanny.

213 pages

The Revenant 

Blood Lost. Life Found. Hugh Glass isn’t afraid to die. He’s done it once already. Rocky Mountains, 1823 - when expert tracker Glass is viciously mauled by a bear, death seems inevitable. The two men ordered to remain with him until he dies flee, stripping him of his rifle and hatchet and leaving him to die alone. But soon a grim, horribly scarred figure is seen wandering, asking after two men. The Revenant is a remarkable tale of obsession and the lengths that one man will go to for retribution.

320 pages

Quartet in Autumn 

In 1970s London, Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia work in the same office and suffer the same problem - loneliness. Lovingly and with delightful humour, Pym conducts us through their day-to-day existence: their preoccupations, their irritations, their judgements, and -perhaps most keenly felt - their worries about having somehow missed out on life as post-war Britain shifted around them With poignant humour, Barbara Pym takes us through their small lives and the facades they erect to defend themselves against the outside world.

186 pages

The Mermaid of Black Conch

March 1976: St Constance, a tiny Caribbean village on the island of Black Conch. A fisherman sings to himself, waiting for a catch - but attracts a sea-dweller he doesn't expect. A beautiful young woman cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid has been swimming the Caribbean Sea for centuries. And she is entranced by the fisherman and his song. But her fascination is her undoing. She hears his boat's engine again, follows it, and finds herself at the mercy of American tourists. Winner of the Costa Book Award 2020.

176 pages

Red Joan

Cambridge University in 1937 is awash with ideas and idealists - to unworldly Joan it is dazzling. After a chance meeting with Russian-born Sonya and Leo, Joan is swept up in the glamour and energy of the duo, and finds herself growing closer and closer to them both. But allegiance is a slippery thing. Out of university and working in a government ministry with access to top-secret information, Joan finds her loyalty tested as she is faced with the most difficult question of all: what price would you pay to remain true to yourself?

400 pages

Normal People 

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years. This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person's life - a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel. It tells us how difficult it is to talk about how we feel and it tells us about cycles of domination, legitimacy and privilege.

288 pages

The Satanic Verses

This Whitbread Prize winner continues to cause controversy.

560 pages

Persepolis (Graphic novel)

The story of a childhood, and the story of a return. The intelligent and outspoken child of radical Marxists, and the great-granddaughter of Iran's last emperor, Satrapi bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran, and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. This is a beautiful and intimate story full of tragedy and humour - raw, honest and incredibly illuminating.

352 pages

Lincoln in the Bardo

The American Civil War rages while President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son lies gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy's body. From this seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of realism, entering a thrilling, supernatural domain both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself trapped in a transitional realm - called, in Tibetan tradition, the bardo - and as ghosts mingle, squabble, gripe, and commiserate, and stony tendrils creep towards the boy, a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul. Unfolding over a single night, 'Lincoln in the Bardo' is written with George Saunders' inimitable humour, pathos, and grace. Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2017.

304 pages

The Reader 

This short novel by a professor of law at Berlin University, the author of several thrillers, is surprisingly affecting. In it, a schoolboy in post-war Germany has an affair with an older woman, who disappears. They meet again when she is a defendant in a war crimes trial. 

224 pages 

A Whole Life

Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn't ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, Andreas' heart is broken. He leaves his valley just once more, to fight in WWII - where he is taken prisoner in the Caucasus - and returns to find that modernity has reached his remote haven. An exquisite novel about a simple life.

160 pages

The Bookseller of Kabul

Seierstad, an award winning journalist has developed a fascinating portrait of the life of a family in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. This rich story is based on real events observed during her stay with the bookseller and his family. The narrative is concerned with everyday occurrences in family life set against a backdrop of political change.

288 pages

The Book of Dave

London cabbie Dave Rudman writes a book to his estranged son to give him some fatherly advice? Hundreds of years later, when rising sea levels have put London underwater, the discovery of the Book of Dave spawns a religion. Shuttling between the recent past and a far-off future where England is terribly altered, The Book of Dave is a troubling mirror held up to our times: disturbing, satirizing and vilifying who and what we think we are.

512 pages

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

Our brains stay active for ten minutes after our heart stops beating. For Leila, each minute brings with it a new memory: growing up with her father and his wives in a grand old house in a quiet Turkish town; watching the women gossip and wax their legs while the men went to mosque; sneaking cigarettes and Western magazines on her way home from school; running away to Istanbul to escape an unwelcome marriage; falling in love with a student who seeks shelter from a riot in the brothel where she works. Most importantly, each memory reminds Leila of the five friends she met along the way - friends who are now desperately trying to find her.

320 pages

The Holy Woman

Set in contemporary Pakistan, London and Egypt. Zarrie Bano is a glamorous 28 year-old daughter of a wealthy Muslim landowner who falls in love with a business tycoon and plans to marry him. Her father takes an instant irrational dislike to her choice and vetoes the match and when his only son is killed in a freak riding accident, decides to make Zarri his heiress, resurrecting an ancient tradition which decrees that an heiress must remain celibate.

559 pages 

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives

To the dismay of her overbearingly ambitious mother, Bolanle marries into a polygamous family, where she is the fourth wife of a rich, rotund patriarch, Baba Segi. She is a graduate and therefore a great prize, but even graduates must produce children and her husband's persistent bellyache is a sign that things are not as they should be. So Baba takes her to hospital trying to discover the cause of her barrenness. Weaving the voices of Baba Segi and his four competing wives into a portrait of a clamorous household of twelve, Shoneyin evokes an extraordinary Nigerian family in a riotous domestic African novel about rivalry, secrets and jealous wives.

256 pages

Should We Stay or Should We Go

When her father dies, Kay Wilkinson can't cry. Over ten years, Alzheimer's had steadily eroded this erudite man. Surely one's own father passing should never come as such a relief. Both healthy and vital medical professionals in their early fifties, Kay and her husband Cyril have seen too many of their elderly NHS patients in similar states of decay. Determined to die with dignity, Cyril makes a modest proposal: they should agree to commit suicide together once they've both turned eighty. When their deal is sealed in 1991, the spouses are blithely looking forward to another three decades together. But then they turn eighty. Hilarious and touching, playful and grave, 'Should We Stay or Should We Go' portrays twelve parallel universes, each exploring a possible future for Kay and Cyril.

288 pages

The Good Immigrant

We're told that we live in a multicultural melting pot - that we're post-racial, yet it's a hard time to be an immigrant, or the child of one, or even the grandchild of one. 'The Good Immigrant' brings together twenty emerging British BAME writers, poets, journalists, and artists to confront this issue. In these essays about race and immigration, they paint a picture of what it means to be 'other' in a country that wants you, doesn't want you, doesn't accept you, needs you for its equality monitoring forms and would prefer you if you won a major reality show competition.

238 pages

The Story of Beautiful Girl

On a stormy night in small-town America, a couple, desperate and soaked to the skin, knock on a stranger's door. When Martha, a retired schoolteacher, answers their knock, her world changes for ever. Her visitors are Lynnie and Homan, who have fled The School for the Incurable and Feebleminded with their newborn baby. But the police are closing in and their freedom is about to be snatched away. Moments before she is taken back to the School, bound and tied, Lynnie utters two words to Martha: 'Hide her.' And so begins the heart-rending story of Lynnie, Homan, Martha and baby Julia - lives divided by seemingly insurmountable obstacles, but drawn together by a secret pact and extraordinary love.

352pages 

The Land Agent

Palestine 1920s. Working as a land agent for one of the richest men in the world, Polish-Jewish immigrant Lev Sela finds himself swept into a passionate relationship with Celia Kahn, a beautiful Scottish pioneer, after stumbling upon a strategic area of land that doesn’t exist on any map. The resultant struggle for ownership involves the Jews, the Arabs, the Zionists, the British, a Russian engineer with ambitions to build a hydro-electric power station and the Bedouin living there.

240 pages

The Rosie Project

Meet Don Tillman. Don is getting married. He just doesn't know who to yet. But he has designed a very detailed questionnaire to help him find the perfect woman. One thing he already knows, though, is that it's not Rosie. Absolutely, completely, definitely not. Sometimes, though, you don't find love, love finds you. Telling the story of Rosie and Don, Graeme Simsion's 'The Rosie Project' is an international phenomenon, sold in over thirty countries - and counting. 

368 pages

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Born a poor black tobacco farmer, her cancer cells -- taken without her knowledge -- became a multimillion-dollar industry and one of the most important tools in medicine. Yet Henrietta's family did not learn of her 'immortality' until more than twenty years after her death, with devastating consequences. Balancing the beauty and drama of scientific discovery with dark questions about who owns the stuff our bodies are made of, 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks' is an extraordinary journey in search of the soul and story of a real woman, whose cells live on today in all four corners of the world.

384 pages

Public Library and Other Stories

Why are books so very powerful? What do the books we've read over our lives - our own personal libraries - make of us? What does the unravelling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us? The stories in Ali Smith's new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make.

240 pages

Golden Hill 

New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan Island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat pitches up at a counting-house door in Golden Hill Street with a suspicious yet compelling proposition. He has an order for a thousand pounds in his pocket that he wishes to cash. A huge amount, and he won't explain why, or where he comes from, or what he is planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. This is New York in its infancy; should the merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him - maybe even kill him. Winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2016.

352 pages

Witness - four bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time. Witnesses to the shocking shooting of a teenage boy. A moment that changes their lives forever. Fiona, a midwife, is plagued by panic attacks and unable to work. Has she the strength to testify? Mike, a delivery driver and family man, faces an impossible decision when his frightened wife forces him to choose - us or the court case. Cheryl, a single-mother, doesn't want her child to grow up in the same climate of fear. Dare she speak out and risk her own life? Zak, a homeless man, offers to talk in exchange for witness protection and the chance of a new start. Ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. Will the witnesses stand firm or be prevented from giving evidence? How will they cope with the emotional trauma of reliving the murder under pitiless cross examination? A compassionate, suspenseful and illuminating story exploring the real human cost of bearing witness.

340 pages 

Jambusters

The compelling true story that inspired the ITV drama series Home Fires. The Second World War was arguably the WI's finest hour. The whole of its previous history - educating, entertaining and supporting women and campaigning on women's issues - culminated in the enormous collective responsibility felt by the members to 'do their bit' for Britain. A third of a million country women set out to make their lives and the lives of those around them, more bearable in what they described as 'a period of insanity'. Through archive material and interviews, Julie Summers takes us behind the scenes, revealing their nitty-gritty approach to the daily problems presented by the conflict. Jambusters is the fascinating story of how the Women's Institute pulled rural Britain through the war with pots of jam and a spirit of make-do-and-mend.

333 pages

Bread and Heaven

During the late nineteenth century, life in the Rhondda village of Wattstown was a struggle. Poverty was ever-present, and a future at the coalface for sons, or domestic service for daughters was the custom for most. For one family, however, that life would not do. The successful marriage of Margaret Ann and the Reverend Morgan Humphrey Jones was a mystery to many. His quiet, book-loving nature and devotion to the chapel contrasted strongly with her dynamism and dislike of chapel-going. Fuelled by ambition for her nine children, Margaret Ann generated an independent force which drove the family onwards and upwards, surpassing even her own aspirations.

304 pages 

A Gentleman in Moscow

In 1922 Count Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal. He is sentenced to house arrest in The Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

462 pages

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

A classic representation of the impoverished and politically powerless underclass of British society in Edwardian England. ruthlessly exploited by the institutionalised corruption of their employers, and the civic and religious authorities. Epic in scale, it is a timeless work whose political message is as relevant today as it was in Tressell’s time. For this it has long been honoured by the Trade Union movement, and across the political spectrum.

609 pages

These is my words

Inspired by stories of her great grandmother who retired from running a cattle ranch at the age of 85, Nancy Turner's debut novel tells the story of Sarah Prine, pioneer woman and settler of America's western frontier. Sarah begins her diary in 1881, when at the age of 18 her family begins their arduous journey from the dry, dusty heat of Arizona to the greener pastures of Texas. The wagon trail meets danger at every step; rattlesnakes and Indian attacks rip out the heart of Sarah's world. Yet she proves herself strong and faithful, and in times of greatest trouble her family turn to her for support--both physical and emotional.

384 pages

The Cut Out Girl

The story of a man's search for the astonishing truth about his family's past. The last time Lien saw her parents was in The Hague when she was collected at the door by a stranger and taken to a city far away to be hidden from the Nazis. She was raised by her foster family as one of their own, but a falling out well after the war meant they were no longer in touch. What was her side of the story, Bart van Es - a grandson of the couple who looked after Lien - wondered? What really happened during the war, and after? So began an investigation that would consume and transform both Bart van Es's life and Lien's. Lien was now in her 80s and living in Amsterdam. Reluctantly, she agreed to meet him, and eventually they struck up a remarkable friendship.

280 pages

Don’t Skip Out on Me

Meet Horace Hopper, a 21-year-old farm hand in Tonopah, Nevada, who works for Mr Reece and his wife, the nearest thing he's had to family in years. But Horace, half-white half-Paiute Indian, dreams of bigger things. Leaving behind the farm and its fragile stability, he heads South to re-invent himself as the Mexican boxer Hector Hidalgo. Slowly, painfully, the possibility emerges that his dreams might not just be the delusions of a lost soul. But at what cost, and what of those he's left behind?

304 pages

Cat’s Cradle

Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut’s cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and worse still, surviving it. Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world; ‘ice-nine’, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. Writer Jonah's search for his whereabouts leads him to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to an island republic in the Caribbean. Felix Hoenikker’s death wish comes true when his latest, fatal gift to mankind brings about the end, that for all of us, is nigh.

224 pages

The Color Purple

Set in the deep American south between the wars, this is the classic tale of Celie, a young poor black girl. Raped repeatedly by her father, she loses two children and then is married off to a man who treats her no better than a slave. She is separated from her sister Nettie and dreams of becoming like the glamorous Shug Avery, a singer and rebellious black woman who has taken charge of her own destiny. Gradually Celie discovers the support of women that enables her to leave the past behind and begin a new life.

272 pages

The Dying Season

The Dordogne town of St Denis may be picturesque and sleepy, but it has more than its fair share of mysteries. When Bruno, Chief of Police is invited to the ninetieth birthday party of a powerful local patriarch - a war hero with high-level political connections in France, Russia and Israel - he encounters a family hiding many secrets. When one of the other guests is found dead the next morning and the family try to cover it up, Bruno knows it's his duty to prevent the victim from becoming just another skeleton in their closet. Even if his digging reveals things Bruno himself would rather keep buried.

352 pages

Fingersmith

Winner of the Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, this is Waters’ third offering of Victorian crime inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins with a cast of orphans, villains, pickpockets and lunatics. London 1862. Sue Trinder, orphaned at birth, grows up among petty thieves - fingersmiths - under the rough but loving care of Mrs Sucksby and her 'family'. But from the moment she draws breath, Sue's fate is linked to that of another orphan growing up in a gloomy mansion not too many miles away.

560 pages

The Martian

I’m stranded on Mars. I have no way to communicate with Earth. I’m in a habitat designed to last 31 days. If the Oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the habitat breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So yeah, I’m screwed.

384 pages

Patch Work

Claire Wilcox has worked as a curator in fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum for most of her working life. Down cool, dark corridors and in quiet storerooms, she and her colleagues care for, catalogue and conserve clothes, the inscrutable remnants of lives long lost to history. Common-place or remarkable things, that survive the bodies they once encircled or adorned. In 'Patch Work', Wilcox deftly stitches together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes. From her mother's black wedding suit to the swirling patterns of her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in luminous prose the spellbinding power of the things we wear.

288 pages

Stealing People

London, January 2014. In the space of 32 hours, in a well-planned and highly organised operation, six billionaires' children are taken off the streets in a series of slickly well-executed kidnaps. The gang demands 25 million per hostage for 'expenses' - not ransom. And when your child goes missing, you need Charles Boxer: a man with little left to lose who'll stop at nothing to save the families’ suffering.

384 pages

The Salt Path

In one devastating week, Raynor and her husband Moth lost their home of 20 years, just as a terminal diagnosis took away their future together. With nowhere else to go, they decided to walk the South West Coast Path: a 630-mile sea-swept trail from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall. This ancient, wind-battered landscape strips them of every comfort they had previously known. With very little money for food or shelter, Raynor and Moth carry everything on their backs and wild camp on beaches and clifftops. But slowly, with every step, every encounter, and every test along the way, the walk sets them on a remarkable journey. They don't know how far they will travel, but - to their surprise - they find themselves on a path to freedom.

274 pages

Why be Happy when You Could be Normal?

When Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, left home at 16 because she was in love with a woman, Mrs. Winterson asked her: "Why be happy when you could be normal?" This book is the story of a life's work to find happiness. It is the story of how the painful past returned to haunt Jeanette's later life, and send her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her real mother. It is also a book about other people's stories, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life raft which supports us when we are sinking.

240 pages 

Carry on Jeeves / The Code of the Woosters

Carry on Jeeves: A classic collection of Jeeves and Wooster stories from P.G. Wodehouse, the great comic writer of the 20th century. In his new role as valet to Bertie Wooster, Jeeves's first duty is to create a miracle hangover cure. From that moment, the partnership that is Jeeves and Wooster never looks back.

288 pages

The Code of the Woosters: A classic Jeeves and Wooster novel. Purloining an antique cow creamer under the instruction of the indomitable Aunt Dahlia is the least of Bertie's tasks, for he has to play Cupid while feuding with Spode.

304 pages

The One in a Million Boy

Miss Ona Vitkus has - aside from three months in the summer of 1914 - lived unobtrusively, her secrets fiercely protected. The boy, with his passion for world records, changes all that. He is 11. She is 104 years, 133 days old (they are counting). And he makes her feel like she might be really special after all.

432 pages