Contemporary Fiction Books

Book SynopsisI''ve never read a writer with a more fertile imagination'' DIANA GABALDONAn Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, novella from the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author.FOR FANS OF CHARLAINE HARRIS AND ANNE RICE.My name is Anita Blake. I''m a U. S. Marshal for the Preternatural Branch, and I always have my friend''s back. Even when they ask me to risk everything...Rafael, king of the wererats, is facing a challenge to his crown. He wants me, one of his closest allies, to help him take down a dangerous opponent unlike any he''s fought before. But some of the wererats fear that Rafael is too dependent on me and my ties to the vampire world. They believe that there is only room in America for one supernatural king, and that Rafael will abandon them as prey for the bloodsuckers.A new challenger has arisen among Rafael''s enemies... one who is younger, hungrier and has dark secrets that could destroy both th

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Book SynopsisWould you choose a different life if you had the chance?''Spellbinding from start to finish'' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐''If you read nothing else this year - read this'' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐''A beautiful, heart-warming and heart-breaking read'' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐Cosy up with the unforgettable new novel from the author of The Songs of Us. If you love Cecilia Ahern and Holly Miller, you''ll adore this heart-warming novel.''Absolutely magical! So romantic and heartfelt'' JOSIE SILVEROn the last night in October 1999 the clocks went back, and Ella and Will''s love began.A teenage Ella sat around a bonfire drinking with her future husband and her oldest friend Cole.As Ella wandered away from the group, she found herself leaning against a derelict archway before passing out.The next day, Ella remembered fractured imTrade ReviewThis book had me hooked from the beginning . . . Equal parts funny, sad and poignant, and as a teen of the 1990s too, I absolutely loved the nostalgia. A complete triumph -- Clare SwatmanTHIS BOOK! My favourite Emma Cooper book to date. It's romantic, heart-breaking and a real page-turner. I had no idea what was going to happen and I loved every second. It's left me with a book hangover. I LOVED IT! -- Olivia BeirneA beautiful, moving, and heart wrenching book to give you all the feels. A real page-turning plot, but it's the characters who make it: Will, Ella and Cole are three brilliantly real characters who you can't help but want to spend time with, all the way to the heart stopping conclusion. -- Emily StoneAbsolutely magical! Emma always creates such wonderfully compelling characters, they jump off the page and into your heart. So romantic and heartfelt, I didn't want it to end -- Josie SilverPraise for Emma Cooper:A poignant story about love, loss and letting go. . . sensitively handled and beautifully written -- Holly MillerGorgeous, tender, spine-tingling storytelling - an absolute hear-rending joy -- Miranda DickinsonFans of authors Jojo Moyes and Lucy Dillon will love this touching read * Hello *Heartwarming and uplifting * Bella *An evocative, warm and character-driven read that is truly memorable * Woman & Home *A gorgeous heart-breaking rollercoaster of a love story that made me laugh and cry in equal measures -- Fiona Harper

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Book SynopsisNO ONE IS EVER INNOCENT IN PARADISE.**THE TIMES CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH**A small town. A closely guarded secret, stretching back decades. And blood in the water.''A masterful, stunning thriller. A twisting mystery epic in scale yet intricate in detail. Irresistible.'' Chris Whitaker''Epic. Shakespearean in depth and range'' The Times''Fierce, gripping and spine-chilling.'' Daily MailA body has washed up in an irrigation canal, the artery running through Yuwonderie, a man-made paradise on the border of the Outback. Stabbed through the heart, electrocuted and dumped under cover of night, there is no doubt that detectives Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan are dealing with a vicious homicide. The victim is Athol Hasluck, member of one of the seven dynasties who have controlled every slice of bountiful land in this modern-day Eden for generations.Trade ReviewA masterful, stunning thriller. A twisting mystery epic in scale yet intricate in detail. Irresistible. * Chris Whitaker *A complex storyline handled masterfully, it's a gripping mystery with a very satisfying conclusion. Another fantastic mystery from Chris Hammer. * Harriet Tyce *A hefty thriller that is Shakespearean in depth and range. Epic. * The Times - Crime Book of the Month *Fierce, gripping and spine-chilling. * Daily Mail *Expertly plotted and utterly absorbing, this nails down Hammer's reputation as one of the finest new voices in Australian Noir. * Irish Independent *A compelling crime saga with masterful plotting and a thrilling finale. * Sunday Express *Complex and twisty with a genius finale. * Woman's Weekly *Searing * Crime Scene Magazine *Terrific. A magnificent portrait of modern Australia. * The Literary Review *Chris Hammer-the absolute master of setting, is at it again with his latest, Cover the Bones, a twisting mystery that spans decades. Immersive, taut, and exquisitely written, I couldn't put it down. * Ashley Tate, author of Twenty-Seven Minutes *A searing, seamlessly plotted thriller - complex and compelling, powered by a sense of anger, injustice and compassion. Hammer may hail from 'down under', but he's head and shoulders above most writers in the genre. * Robbie Morrison, author of Edge of the Grave *An ambitious, masterfully told story of both scope and intimacy. Keenly picks through the bones of a nation's past, while deftly sketching the personal dramas of its characters. The consistency of his excellence elevates him into that top tier of Australian crime with Peter Temple and Garry Disher. * Dom Nolan, author of Vine Street *Chris Hammer is creating a magnificent portrait of modern Australia through his stories of crimes committed in different parts of the country. Terrific. * Literary Review *An immersive, sweeping and vivid read that has everything you look for in a murder mystery. Chris Hammer is one great storyteller. * Live and Deadly *

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Book SynopsisThe powerful, moving and turbulent novel of Sally Porter and the multiple personalities she has no idea she lives with... From the award-winning bestselling author of FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON: ''Heartbreaking, and utterly, completely brilliant'' GUARDIANSally Porter is perfectly ''ordinary''. A waitress, divorcee, and loner in the great city. But, though she is unaware of it, she is also four other, quite different people: Nola, the cold independent artist who has a studio in Greenwich Village; Derry, the happy-go-lucky tomboy; Bella, the highly-sexed live wire with a talent for singing and dancing; and finally Jinx, the hate-filled killer. Whenever events put too much of a strain on Sally Porter, she feels a headache and a blackout coming on - and a new character takes over. If there is a man to be fascinated, she will become Bella. If there is an intellectual problem, she will become Nola. And - as happens in the opening scene of the novel - if there is a rapistTrade ReviewDaniel Keyes has demonstrated a fine sensitivity to the pain of a damaged and disordered personality, and is firm and lucid in presenting what is far more than merely case history. As in Flowers for Algernon, he has made apparent the suffering of a damaged person through a clear reporting of the particulars. I congratulate him for the seriousness of his intent and the skill of its execution -- Walter Tevis, author of The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to EarthKeyes has shown himself as a master craftsman. He moulds words like a woodworker works with wood. ... What Keyes has pulled off with this new book is the creation of a new point of view * CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER *This is a compelling novel about a fictional Sybil. The story, though imagined, is convincing as the case history of a multiple personality. There is a true rendition of the volatile, divided, and conflicted self, by turns dull, tough, brilliant, cheerful, and depraved. The portrait of the psychiatrist, combining professionalism with a capacity for human suffering and compassion, also has the ring of truth. A tale of a multiple personality, this is also a modern morality novel, revealing five facets of everywoman. And it is a good read -- Flora Rheta Schreiber, author of SYBIL

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE''An authentic, moving story that brings to vivid life the deep family connections that lie at the core of Korean culture''Gary Shteyngart''Kyung-Sook Shin''s tale... has hit a nerve''Guardian''A raw tribute to the mysteries of motherhood''New York Times''The most moving and accomplished, and often startling, novel''Wall Street JournalWhen sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mother?Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOTHER is at once an authentic picture of contemporary lifTrade ReviewA moving Korean novel questions the reliability of memory * FINANCIAL TIMES *Kyung-Sook Shin's tale... has hit a nerve' * GUARDIAN *shin's prose, intimate, and hauntingly spare, powerfully conveys grief's bewildering immediately . . . A raw tribute to the mysteries of motherhood * NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW *A moving portrayal of the surprising nature, sudden sacrifices, and secret reveries of motherhood * ELLE *The most moving and accomplished, and often startling, novel in translation I've read in many seasons ... Every sentence is saturated in detail ... It tells an almost unbearably affecting story of remorse and belated wisdom that reminds us how globalism-at the human level-can tear souls apart and leave them uncertain of where to turn * WALL STREET JOURNAL *A captivating story, written with an understanding of the shortcomings of traditional ways of modern life. It is nostalgic but unsentimental, brutally well observed and, in this flawlessly smooth translation by Chi-Young Kim, it offers a sobering account of a vanished past. ... We must hope there will be more translations to follow * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *An extraodinary novel about regret and our relations with those we love * HARPER'S BAZAAR *Affecting . . . Poignant and psychologically revealing . . . Readers should find resonance in this family story, a runaway bestseller poised for a similar run here * PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY *Kyung-Sook Shin's tale of an elderly woman who goes missing on the Seoul underground has hit a nerve * GUARDIAN *Please Look After Mother made me want to phone my mum * THE TIMES *This story about family, hope and guilt has universal reach. * Big Issue in the North *Tender, thoughtful and well-crafted... -- Boyd Tonkin * The Independent *I found what is in one sense a terribly sad book, life-affirming, portraying the sorrows and joys of the parent-child relationship, familiar whether you live in rural South Korea, or South London * THE TIMES *Full of emotion, this beautifully written book is like nothing I have ever read before and I thoroughly recommend it. * South Wales Argus *a captivating story, written with an understanding of the shortcomings of traditional ways and modern life. It is nostalgic but unsentimental, brutally well observed and, in this flawlessly smooth translation by Chi-Young Kim, it offers a sobering account of a vanished past... We must hope there are more translations to follow. * THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *The universal resonance of family life lifts a novel rooted in the experience of Korean modernity to international success. A best-seller in her native South Korea, Shin's Please Look After Mom tells the story of Park So-nyo, a devoted, do-all wife and mother who mysteriously goes missing... the book-Shin's first to be translated into English- is a moving portrayal of the surprising nature, sudden sacrifices, and secret reveries of motherhood. -- Lisa Shea * Elle *An enormous publishing success in South Korea, this simple portrait of a family shocked into acknowledging the strength and heroic self-sacrifice of the woman at its center is both universal and socially specific... Partly a metaphor for Korea's social shift from rural to urban, partly an elegy to the intensity of family bonds as constructed and maintained by self-denying women, this is tender writing. * Kirkus Reviews *ndelible... Shin's breathtaking novel is an acute reminder of how easily a family can fracture, how little we truly know one another, and how desperate need can sometimes overshadow even the deepest love.... Already a prominent writer in Korea, Shin makes her English-language debut with what will appeal to all readers who appreciate compelling, page-turning prose. Stay tuned: [Please Look After Mother] should be one of this year's most deserving bestsellers. -- Terry Hong * Library Journal *what the characters and readers of... South Korean author Kyung-sook Shin discover is that in the mother's absence she is only more powerfully present. * REUTERS *Kyung-Sook Shin's tale.. has hit a nerve.. it certainlytaps the universal tendency to take one's mother for granted. * THE GUARDIAN *

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Book SynopsisIn the first installment of bestselling author Carlene O''Connor''s new Home to Ireland Mystery series, New York Tara Meehan''s first trip to Galway, Ireland may be her last.Jump right into the beauty and splendor--and murder--of Tara''s Irish adventure! With a gorgeous setting, suspicious characters, and a deadly mystery--Murder in Galway will have you packing your bags... Tara never imagined her introduction to Ireland like this--carrying her mam''s ashes to honor her final request: Tell Johnny I''m sorry...Take me home. She''s never met her mam''s estranged brother, Johnny Meehan, who owns an architectural salvage business in Galway. Although Tara is immediately charmed by the medieval city, the locals seem wary of strangers and a gypsy warns her that death is all around.When Tara arrives at her uncle''s stone cottage, the prophesy seems true. A dead man lies sprawled over the threshold in a pool of blood. The victim turns out to be Johnn

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Book SynopsisA riveting story of World War II and the courage of one young woman as she is drafted into Churchill’s overseas spy network, aiding the French Resistance behind enemy lines and working to liberate Nazi-occupied Paris… London, 1941: In a cramped bunker in Winston Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms, underneath Westminster’s Treasury building, civilian women huddle at desks, typing up confidential documents and reports. Since her parents were killed in a bombing raid, Rose Teasdale has spent more hours than usual in Room 60, working double shifts, growing accustomed to the burnt scent of the Prime Minister’s cigars permeating the stale air. Winning the war is the only thing that matters, and she will gladly do her part. And when Rose’s fluency in French comes to the attention of Churchill himself, it brings a rare yet dangerous opportunity. Rose is recruited for the Special Operations Executive, a secret British organization

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Book SynopsisThe undisputed originator of urban lit, Donald Goines ups the ante with one of his most enduring characters, as he continues the gripping, gritty story of crime in the black ghetto that he began in Crime Partners. Now reissued for the first time in a decade with a fresh new look!Kenyatta has it good. The gang lord’s got the ladies, the clubs, the guns, and an army of deadly brothers at the ready when he says the word. The only problem is the shady dealers who are running the drugs in Detroit. It’s time to get them out, even if means making a deal with the men in blue. Once the plan is in place, nobody’s safe, everybody’s a target, and the streets are about to flood with blood.

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Book SynopsisPacked with recipes and now in paperback, in this scrumptious culinary mystery from New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Joanne Fluke, Minnesota’s favorite professional baker and amateur sleuth, Hannah Swensen, is tempted by a high-profile tournament that quickly turns deadly . . .“Fluke reinforces her place as the queen of culinary cozies.” —Publishers Weekly A New York Times, USA Today Bestseller, Publishers Weekly and Wall Street Journal Bestseller! Embracing a sweet escape from her usual routine at The Cookie Jar, Hannah gets asked for her help in baking pastries at the local inn for a flashy fishing competition with big prizes and even bigger names. But the fun stops when she spots a runway boat on the water and, on board, the lifeless body of the event’s renowned celebrity spokesperson… Famed TV show host Sonny Bowman wasn

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Book Synopsis'An engrossing and inspiring story of loss, love and hope, set against a backdrop of art, activism and addiction.' – ObserverMoving from the Tompkins Square Riots and attempts by activists to galvanize a response to the AIDS epidemic, to the New York City of the future, Tim Murphy's Christodora recounts the heartbreak wrought by AIDS, illustrates the allure and destructive power of hard drugs, and brings to life the ever-changing city itself.The Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple with artistic ambitions. Their neighbour, Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who was once a celebrated AIDS activist but is now a lonely addict, becomes connected to Milly's and Jared's lives in ways none of them can anticipate. Meanwhile, the couple's adopted son, Mateo, grows to appreciate the opportunities for both self-realization and oblivion that New York offers.As the junkies and protestors of the 1980s give way to the hipsters of the 2000s and they, in turn, to the wealthy residents of the crowded, glass-towered city of the 2020s, enormous changes rock the personal lives of Milly and Jared and the constellation of people around them.'An impassioned, big-hearted, and ultimately hopeful chronicle of a changing New York that authoritatively evokes the despair and panic in the city at the height of the plague.' – Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little LifeTrade ReviewBrilliantly kaleidoscopic . . . Murphy is exceptionally skilled at writing about addiction, the intertwining of bliss and abjection... What makes this novel remarkable, though, is the way it captures the full arc of Aids in New York . . . There have been several whopping New York novels in the last couple of years, but none of them possesses Christodora’s generosity, its weathered and unflinching faith in what people can achieve. -- Olivia Laing * Guardian *This novel is your next must-read . . . A captivating, multi-stranded New York epic about the AIDs crisis . . . An engrossing and inspiring story of loss, love and hope, set against a backdrop of art, activism and addiction. * Observer *This thrillingly accomplished novel... [Its] varied minds and voices are realized so convincingly that Christodora sometimes seems the product of spirit possession. And it is joyous despite its subject matter... Murphy's skills are most nakedly on display as he describes the addictions in which Mateo and others find solace, and their electrical-shocking, soul-warping, mind-annihilating trips. Desperately intense, it is the kind of scene that requires putting a book down for a moment to take a breather. * New York Times *Hugely ambitious . . . this rich, complicated story . . . compelling . . . The richness of Murphy's account . . . the most moving sections of the book deal not with the height of the [AIDS] crisis but with its aftermath . . . The book's overwhelmingly powerful final sections... the last hundred [pages] have a rare narrative sweep and force. For all the despair it documents, [it is] a book about hope -- Garth Greenwell * Washington Post *An impassioned, big-hearted, and ultimately hopeful chronicle of a changing New York that authoritatively evokes the despair and panic in the city at the height of the plague. -- Hanya Yanagihara[Murphy] writes about addiction with undeniable fluency and power. * Sunday Times *A moving portrait of New York in the time of AIDS, Tim Murphy's honest and insightful writing gives Christodora a particular vibrancy that causes the characters to leap, whole, into the reader's imagination. This spectacular novel is an important addition to literature that captures New York in all its glory and despair. -- Candace BushnellMurphy injects fresh vim into this tale . . . [He] jumps back and forth through the decades here, creating a fractured structure that neatly reflects the fractured lives of those caught up in the epidemic and its aftermath. And it’s the latter, in the end, that proves Murphy’s most poignant subject. * Daily Mail *An intimate portrait of a bohemian family, Christodora is also a capacious historical novel that vividly recreates the lost world of downtown Manhattan in the eighties - a nuanced portrait of an era in which artists were unwitting agents of gentrification and the bright dawn of gay liberation was brutally interrupted by the AIDS epidemic. -- Jay McInerneyAn ambitious, time-traveling novel textured with the detail and depth of a writer who spent years reporting from the front * New York magazine *A magnificent novel . . . I was struck by the unflinching generosity of Tim Murphy's vision. -- Olivia LaingAn impassioned and "devastating" story set in a real-life building . . . the breathtaking new novel from Brooklyn writer Tim Murphy . . . a powerful and rewarding reading experience. Stylistically challenging, emotionally devastating (both positive and negative), realistic (even when it shifts into an imagined future) and impassioned, it is one of the finest novels we are likely to encounter this year. * Toronto Star *Tim Murphy's rich saga of New York in the age of AIDS . . . To write a novel as full of truth as Christodora . . . Tim Murphy had to know Manhattan; he had to know AIDS; he had to be fluent in the languages of visual art, addiction, activism, bipolar disease and depression; he had to have American cultural history from 1981 at his fingertips . . . Then he had to make all that information disappear, more or less, by seamlessly embodying it in characters and plot . . . He pulls it off with very few lapses, developing a rich and complicated New York saga . . . An exciting read . . . While Christodora has the scope of other New York epics, such as Bonfire of the Vanities, The Goldfinch and City on Fire, it is slimmer than any of these by several hundred pages. Capacious yet streamlined, it is a very fine book. * New York Newsday *Brilliant . . . this year's most ambitious and devastating contribution to the New York City realist novel * Interview *Murphy has written The Bonfire of the Vanities for the age of AIDS, using the same reportorial skills as Tom Wolfe to re-create the changing decades, complete with a pitch-perfect deployment of period detail . . . A powerful evocation of the plague years. * Publishers' Weekly *An ambitious social novel informed by an extended perspective on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, from the early 1980s to the near future . . . A poignant . . . exploration of a health crisis that hasn't yet ended. * Kirkus Reviews *A textured, layered, tightly woven exploration of the AIDS epidemic and its impact on a community linked by proximity, love, drugs, and pain. -- Barnes and Noble blogOutstanding and judicious . . . This breathtakingly panoramic saga feels lithe and refreshingly current . . . Christodora is the most exciting New York novel since Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. * Attitude *Christodora . . . has got it all: drugs, sex, music, race, class, art, activism, adoption, and tears. It’s a gut-wrenching, happy-ending story . . . Murphy’s troubled characters move deliberately toward but instinctively away from each other, too unsettled and sad to be comfortably together, too human and hopeful to stay apart for long. -- Salon.comSeveral times a year, a few books are published that are so compelling and immersive they simply demand the unadulterated free time of the reader. Tim Murphy's Christodora is one of those powerful, ambitious sagas . . . The folks who populate his pages are difficult to forget, and their legacy fully dramatizes the devastation and frenzied panic of the epidemic . . . Each scene is filled with atmospheric detail, period dialogue, and the intricate nuances of a character's movement, attitude, and emotion . . . A novel that reads like a contemporary motion picture beautifully acted by a durable cast with a been-there-done-that caliber of experience. Murphy has truly outdone himself with a perceptive and accomplished novel that is captivating and immensely entertaining. * Bay Area Reporter *Although it’s epic in scope, ultimately [Christodora] is about loneliness and the struggle to find love, accept love and to arrive at a state of self-love. A tremendous achievement. * Winq *Reminiscent of [Jay] McInerney at his peak, concerning itself with young Manhattanites and their relationships with sex, drugs, psychologists, art and real estate . . . There is no denying the quality of the writing and the deep integrity of this novel. -- John Boyne * Irish Times *

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Book SynopsisDr Finlay's Casebook brings together Adventures of a Black Bag and Dr Finlay of Tannochbrae, A. J. Cronin's two hugely popular collections featuring his most famous creation, Dr Finlay.Set in and around the fictional Scottish town of Levenford and village of Tannochbrae during the inter-war years, the stories found here are heart-warming, funny and touching, full of fascinating characters and unforgettable encounters. Made famous by the much-loved adaptations for radio and television, this edition features all the classic tales of Dr Finlay, his senior colleague Dr Cameron, and their unruffled housekeeper Janet, remain as fresh and entertaining now as they were upon first publication.

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Book SynopsisIndulge in the perfect winter's day treat and escape to the snow-fringed fjords of Norway with The Christmas Lights, a delicious tale full of drama and mystery, heartache and hope by Sunday Times bestseller Karen Swan.Bo lives a life most people can only dream of. She and her boyfriend Zac are paid to travel the globe, sharing their adventures with their online followers. And when Zac proposes, Bo's happiness is complete. With Christmas coming up, Bo can't wait to head to the snow-fringed fjords of Norway. Arriving at the picturesque and remote hillside farmhouse that will be their home for the next few weeks, Bo's determined to enjoy a romantic Christmas under the Northern Lights. Everything should be perfect.But the mountains hold secrets from the past and as temperatures plunge and tensions rise, Bo must face up to the fact that a life which looks perfect to the outside world may not be the life she should be living . . .What readers are saying:'This is a perfect winter's day read, that will have you utterly absorbed''Full of intrigue, secrets, heartbreak, love''If you're after a book with a truly Christmas feel, full of drama, mystery, heart and hope then The Christmas Lights is a book for you''Crammed with love, heartbreak and powerful secrets this Christmas story with substance is not to be missed!''The Christmas Lights is the perfect Christmas read . . . The festive season can now commence!'Trade ReviewAnother epic tale of love, loss, and secrets, this new book from the always-excellent Karen Swan . . . tuck yourself in under a blanket and get lost in the adventure -- Heat on The Christmas SecretThe most unlikely of romances is only part of a moving story of loss and the promise of second chances -- Sunday Mirror on The Christmas SecretI devoured it like a tray of warm mince pies. A delicious winter tale -- Sarah Morgan, bestselling author of Moonlight Over Manhattan on The Christmas SecretI’m shouting from the rooftops about what a lovely warm, intriguing romantic drama this is! -- My Weekly on The Christmas SecretFun and great escapism -- Tracy Rees, author of The Hourglass, on The Christmas Secret

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Book SynopsisThe Break explodes into the gangland world of 90s Soho, by snooker world champion and national superstar, Ronnie O'Sullivan.It’s 1997 and Cool Britannia’s in full swing. Oasis and Blur are top of the pops and it feels like the whole country’s sorted out for E’s and wizz.But it’s not just UK plc that’s on a high. Life’s looking up for Frankie James too. He’s paid off his debts to London’s fiercest gang lord, Tommy Riley. His Soho Open snooker tournament is about to kick off at his club. The future looks bright.But then Frankie finds himself being blackmailed by a face from his past. They want him to steal something worth millions. It's enough to get him killed. Or banged up for life if he says no.Frankie’s going to need every ounce of luck and guile that he’s got if he’s going to pull off the heist of the century and get out of this in one piece.The Break is the third, fast-paced Soho Nights thriller, by snooker champion Ronnie O’Sullivan.Trade ReviewA fast-paced tale of the sordid underworld of Soho -- Kelly Allen, Sunday LifeA cracking read -- Francine White, The PeopleRonnie’s first crime novel draws on his early years . . . a world of gangsters and bent coppers which he writes about with uncomfortable authenticity -- Choice on FramedRunning is a chaotic race through O’Sullivan’s life, but this does little to dethrone him as the people’s champion – it simply adds further to his legend -- Press Association on RunningLike O’Sullivan playing at his best, the book is tight, pacey and keeps you guessing -- The Big Issue on FramedPacked with intrigue, action, brutal villains and a beguiling hero, this is a cracking first novel delivered with all the sidespin and clever swerves one would expect from the king of the trick shots! -- Lancashire Evening Post on Framed

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Book Synopsis'The chance to join "the Revival of the Great Lucia Berlin"' New York Times'Raw, elliptical, devilishly funny tales' ObserverRanging from Texas, to Chile, to New Mexico and New York, in Evening in Paradise Berlin writes about the good, the bad and everything in between: struggling young mothers, husbands who pack their bags and leave in the middle of the night, wives looking back at their first marriage from the distance of their second . . .The publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin’s dazzling collection of short stories, marked the rediscovery of a writer whose talent had gone unremarked by many. The incredible reaction to Lucia’s writing – her ability to capture the beauty and ugliness that coexist in everyday lives, the extraordinary honesty and magnetism with which she draws on her own history to breathe life into her characters – included calls for her contribution to American literature to be as celebrated as that of Raymond Carver.Evening in Paradise is a careful selection from Lucia Berlin’s remaining stories – a jewel-box follow-up for her hungry fans.Trade ReviewWonderful . . . Brilliant * Times *[Evening in Paradise] shines with compassion and dark wit . . . raw, elliptical, devilishly funny tales. * Observer *A writer of tender, chaotic and careworn short stories. Her work can remind you of Raymond Carver's or Grace Paley's or Denis Johnson's . . . One thing that makes Berlin so valuable is her gift for evoking the sweetness and earnestness of young women who fall in love . . . Berlin probably deserved a Pulitzer Prize. -- Dwight Garner * New York Times *A fearless storyteller . . . [Berlin's] work is testimony to a kaleidoscopic life that would scare the sh*t out of most writers alive today. I adore her. -- Eli Goldstone, author of Strange Heart BeatingLucia Berlin is a genius and the swerves of her sentences sublime. -- Lucy CaldwellThank god for the posthumous revival of Lucia Berlin – how sad it would be to have never experienced her distinctive, vibrant voice . . . utterly captivating. * Buzzfeed (Best Books of Fall 2018) *Berlin’s stories, largely autobiographical tales of working class life in the American West, slipped beneath the radar in her lifetime but galvanized contemporary readers. Now we have a second, smaller volume that is every bit as good as its predecessor. If you’ve never read Berlin, now’s your chance. * Newsday *Berlin . . . is a master at capturing women in states of disintegration: those who are being damaged, physically or emotionally, by men; those who are immersed in scandal or disdained by society; and those who are intentionally self-destructing. Her oeuvre contains, among lots of other things, a profound record of what shame, trauma, and hanging on by your fingernails looked like on a particular woman—or a particular kind of woman—half a century ago. * Atlantic *Wonderful . . . Berlin’s writing achieves a dreamy, delightful effect as it provides a look back through time. This collection should further bolster Berlin’s reputation as one of the strongest short story writers of the 20th century. * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *Blessedly, a second volume with 22 more stories is in no way second rate but rather features more seductive, sparkling autofiction with narrators whose names echo the author's in settings and situations that come from her roller-coaster biography . . . No dead author is more alive on the page than Berlin: funny, dark, and so in love with the world. * Kirkus (starred review) *Any publication of hers is a major cause for celebration, as far as I’m concerned. -- Maggie O’Farrell * Guardian, Best summer books 2018 *[Berlin's] spare evocative language and lithe turn of phrase make each phrase quietly extraordinary. * The Scotsman *In Evening in Paradise – which reads like novel-in-stories—Berlin shows that she was a master of the short story . . . This book is so transportative, so wonderful. -- Favourite Books of 2018 * LitHub *There’s always an audacious humour and humanity to [Berlin's] writing. * Red *Berlin expertly balances beauty and bleakness, and finds drama, joy or revelation in humdrum experiences . . . Berlin once again makes original art from her chequered life . . . When the words flowed, Berlin managed to perform small miracles with them. * Economist *You might assume that these represent the crumbs from the table, the ones not good enough to make the first volume, but that’s not the case . . . you can’t keep a good stylist down, and an authentic voice begins to come through. -- John Self * Irish Times *Lucia Berlin writes in colour. Not wishy-washy pastels, or hues described with copious adjectives, but instead saturated colour . . . Berlin looks for other ways to think about women’s lives, freed from simple explanations. * TLS *Berlin’s fiction subtly complicates what it meant to be an American in the latter half of the last century . . . The stories in Evening in Paradise, Berlin’s second posthumous collection, are filled again with shabby rooms and shabbier lives . . . There is no wallowing, no bathos. Instead there is an acute and varied awareness of the meaning of America, both at home and in the world. * Guardian *More marvellous musical stories from Lucia Berlin who has an eye for the unexpected loveliness in ordinary lives as vivid, vital, impulsive women pitch themselves into the merry, melancholy, messy business of living. * Sunday Express *There is something withholding about the way she mixes minimalism with excess that keeps those of us with the taste for it coming back . . . Berlin’s gifts are not ones you have ever tried or been told to cultivate. The details she chooses are those you have purposely eliminated, with that hitch in your ear that tells you to keep everything timeless . . . It’s the reason I felt so resentful at first to be shut out, because the intimacy on offer was so great. -- Patricia Lockwood * London Review of Books *Berlin is not only a soulful chronicler of the lost corners of America, whose semi-autobiographical stories brim with red caliche clay, arroyos, drainage ditches and smelter towns. She is not only a writer of vivid bursts of language . . . She is also a distinctly female voice, a raspy Marlene Dietrich. * New York Times Book Review *There’s still plenty in Evening in Paradise to conjure the original thrill of reading Berlin. * Financial Times *Long before the current autofiction craze, Lucia Berlin was spinning her day-to-day into powerfully spare prose that ached with brutal authenticity . . . these new volumes become a jigsaw-puzzle portrait of a long-neglected literary legend, baring the autobiographical material that filtered so forcefully into her fiction. The mystery of her fiction is not, it turns out, in the source of its inspiration. It is in how Berlin transformed her life into art that is as vital as the thing itself. * Vogue *[Evening in Paradise] reveals just how full a body of rich work Berlin left behind . . . Time and again, the stories reveal that her subject wasn’t domestic life but life itself, which for her often happened to be filtered through the domestic. * Los Angeles Times *What molds the fiction is Berlin’s artistic sensibility – her global perspective, the shrewd compassion with which she scrutinizes her characters, and the absurdity – not to mention the flora – that populates the many landscapes of her world. * San Francisco Chronicle *This never-before-published memoir and new collection are cause for jubilation. In part because they make it clear Berlin's gifts were vast, complex, and full of tonal warmths . . . Like Chekhov, Berlin was a beautiful framer of stories. * Boston Globe *Prepare to fall in love all over again . . . the cunning, beautiful creation of a genius of the form. * NYLON *Table of ContentsUnit - 1: The Musical Vanity Boxes Unit - 2: Sometimes in Summer Unit - 3: Andado: A Gothic Romance Unit - 4: Dust to Dust Unit - 5: Itinerary Unit - 6: Lead Street, Albuquerque Unit - 7: Noël. Texas. 1956 Unit - 8: The Adobe House with a Tin Roof Unit - 9: A Foggy Day Unit - Cherry Blossom Time: 10 Unit - 11: Evening in Paradise Unit - 12: La Barca de la Ilusión Unit - 13: My Life Is an Open Book Unit - 14: The Wives Unit - 15: Noël, 1974 Unit - 16: The Pony Bar, Oakland Unit - 17: Daughters Unit - 18: Rainy Day Unit - 19: Our Brother’s Keeper Unit - 20: Lost in the Louvre Unit - 21: Luna Nueva Unit - 22: Sombra

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Book SynopsisWith an introduction by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James.Oreo has been raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note. Oreo’s quest is to find her father, and discover the secret of her birth.What ensues in Fran Ross's opus is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb.Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.'Oreo's satire on racial identity reads like a story for our times . . . Could Oreo be this year's Stoner? – Observer‘A rollicking little masterpiece . . . one of the most delightful, hilarious, intelligent novels I’ve stumbled across in recent years’ – Paul Auster, author of The New York Trilogy.Trade ReviewWhat a rollicking little masterpiece this book is, truly one of the most delightful, hilarious, intelligent novels I've stumbled across in recent years, a wholly original work . . . I must have laughed out loud a hundred times, and it's a short book, just over 200 pages, which averages out to one booming gut-laugh every other page -- Paul Auster, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of 4 3 2 1I'm usually very slow to come around to things . . . but I couldn't believe Fran Ross's hilarious 1974 novel Oreo hadn't been on my cultural radar -- Paul Beatty, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sellout Wild, satirical and pathbreaking . . . flat-out fearless and funny and sexy and sublime . . . a nonstop outbound flight to a certain kind of readerly bliss. It may have been first published more than forty years ago, but its time is now * New York Times *Brilliant -- Sam Baker * The Pool *Setting out from her black household in Philadelphia to find her deadbeat Jewish father in New York, Oreo proceeds through one of the funniest journeys ever, amid a whirlwind of wisecracks in a churning mix of Yiddish, black vernacular, and every sort of English * Guardian *Its satire on racial identity reads like a story for our times . . . Could Oreo be this year's Stoner? * Observer *In an alternative world she should have been one of the great American satirists . . . Ross never came across a subject she wouldn't laugh at . . . hilarious -- Marlon James, BBC Radio 4I laughed out loud many times while reading Fran Ross's brilliant 1974 novel, Oreo . . . a tour de force retelling of the Theseus myth. Our half black, half Jewish feminist super-heroine is an invigorating mixture of street smarts, linguisitc acrobatics and erudition -- Siri Hustvedt, author of What I Loved Think: Thomas Pynchon meets Don Quixote, mixed with a crack joke crafter. I'm not sure I've ever admired a book's inventiveness and soul more * Chicago Tribune *A brilliant and biting satire, a feminist picaresque, absurd, unsettling, and hilarious . . . Ross' novel, with its Joycean language games and keen social critique, is as playful as it is profound. Criminally overlooked. A knockout * Kirkus *Funny, brilliant and whip-smart, Oreo is a modern parody of the myth of Theseus in the shape of a memorable self-discovery story filled with 70s pop culture * Elle Magazine *Oreo sings with linguistic inventiveness, subverting and sidestepping the tropes that would have been expected of an African-American novel of the 1970s. It’s also hilarious, Ross seemingly loath to let a paragraph slip by without adding a joke. Oreo marks the emergence of an original and singular voice who, sadly, never wrote another book * Sunday Herald *The brilliant, hilarious, multilingual, brash, tender, bawdy, and unsentimental voice of Ross’s heroine equals the rare and outrageous voice of Ross herself * Women's Review of Books *With its mix of vernacular dialects, bilingual and ethnic humor, aside jokes, neologisms, verbal quirks, and linguistic oddities, Ross's novel dazzles . . . -- Harryette MullenOreo is one of the funniest books I've ever read. To convey Oreo's humor effectively, I would have to use the comedic graphs, menus, and quizzes Ross uses in the novel. So instead, I just settle for, 'You have to read this' -- Mat Johnson, NPR BooksReaders who enjoy play-on-words and post-modern novels will love this book * The Report *A ground-breaking satire * The Offing *Hilariously offbeat * Essence Magazine *Fran Ross’ voice and bravado threads this inexhaustibly inventive first novel. The author, who died at age 50 in 1985, didn’t release another novel. Still, we can delight in the masterpiece that she created that is just as urgent now as was it was then, if not more so * NY1 *Boisterous, frisky and dazzlingly clever. An absolute gem -- Megan Bradbury, author of Everyone is WatchingNow published in Britain for first time, Oreo's satire on racial identity reads like a story for our times. "Oreo" is Christine, the daughter of a black mother who leaves home in search of her estranged Jewish father. "Christine is a black woman on a mission to find her whiteness," writes Marlon James in his introduction. Could Oreo be this year's Stoner? * Observer *Oreo is an overlooked, funny feminist classic following the title heroine as she searches for her father in New York. Add [it] to your holiday reading list immediately. * Stylist *

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Book SynopsisFor fans of Scandinavian crime, Intrigo is the gripping collection of Håkan Nesser’s best novellas and short stories, three of which have been adapted into major motion pictures.Set in the fictional city of Maardam, each story is linked by themes of secrets coming to light, lies being exposed, and pasts coming back to haunt the people who thought they had fled them – all told in Håkan Nesser’s signature style of dark, cutting prose that displays a true understanding of human nature.The collection is the basis for a trilogy of international films - Dear Agnes, Death of an Author and Samaria - directed by Daniel Alfredson and starring Ben Kingsley and Gemma Chan.Trade ReviewOne of Sweden’s best crime writers * Mail on Sunday *The godfather of Swedish crime * Metro *A master of suspense * Sunday Times *One of the best of the Nordic Noir writers * Guardian *Table of ContentsChapter - 1: Tom Chapter - 2: Rein Chapter - 3: Dear Agnes Chapter - 4: The Flower from Samaria Chapter - 5: All the Information in the Case

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Book SynopsisNEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER ? The million-copy bestsellerLilac Girlsintroduced the real-life heroine Caroline Ferriday. NowLost Roses, set a generation earlier and also inspired by true events, features Caroline?s mother, Eliza, and follows three equally indomitable women from St. Petersburg to Paris under the shadow of World War I. ?Not only a brilliant historical tale, but a love song to all the ways our friendships carry us through the worst of times.??Lisa Wingate,#1 New York Timesbestselling author ofBefore We Were Yours It is 1914, and the world has been on the brink of war so often, many New Yorkers treat the subject with only passing interest. Eliza Ferriday is thrilled to be traveling to St. Petersburg with Sofya Streshnayva, a cousin of the Romanovs. The two met years ago one summer in Paris and became close confidantes. Now Eliza embarks on the trip of a lifetime, home with Sofya to see the splendors of Russia: the church with the interior covered in jeweled mosaics, the Rembrandts at the tsar?s Winter Palace, the famous ballet. But when Austria declares war on Serbia and Russia?s imperial dynasty begins to fall, Eliza escapes back to America, while Sofya and her family flee to their country estate. In need of domestic help, they hire the local fortune-teller?s daughter, Varinka, unknowingly bringing intense danger into their household. On the other side of the Atlantic, Eliza is doing her part to help the White Russian families find safety as they escape the revolution. But when Sofya?s letters suddenly stop coming, she fears the worst for her best friend. From the turbulent streets of St. Petersburg and aristocratic countryside estates to the avenues of Paris where a society of fallen Russian émigrés live to the mansions of Long Island, the lives of Eliza, Sofya, and Varinka will intersect in profound ways.In her newest powerful tale told through female-driven perspectives, Martha Hall Kelly celebrates the unbreakable bonds of women?s friendship, especially during the darkest days of history.

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Book Synopsis'Imagine Evelyn Waugh meets Nancy Mitford, with some Jilly Cooper thrown in, and you have this splendid romp ... Hilarious, escapist bliss' YOU ‘Delights from start to finish’ Mail on Sunday ‘Irresistible’ Guardian ‘Sheer escapist bliss’ Nigella Lawson ‘Pure joy’ India Knight, Sunday Times Shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize For Comic Fiction The Earls of Trelawney have inhabited the same castle for 800 years – but recent generations have been better at spending than making money. Now living in isolated penury, unable to communicate with each other or the rest of the world, the family are running out of options. Three unexpected events will hasten their demise: the sudden appearance of a new relation, an illegitimate, headstrong, beautiful girl; an unscrupulous American hedge fund manager determined to exact revenge; and the crash of 2008. Deliciously escapist and gloriously funny, House of Trelawney is a novel about family and forgiveness, chaos and crisis – and finding yourself in the most unexpected ways.Trade ReviewThis is Jilly Cooper territory, with a whiff of Joanna Trollope; a lavish saga about privileged people behaving badly * The Times *Pure pleasure … If you’re in need of a Succession replacement then this tale of a crumbling English dynasty is for you * Stylist *Fun of this kind is irresistible * Guardian *Jilly Cooper fans (and who isn’t?) will love the unashamedly upmarket settings and posh characters. A romcom to beat the winter blues: funny, sharply-observed and boho-chic glamorous * Daily Mail *Waspish yet generous-hearted, it delights from start to finish * Mail on Sunday *Rothschild … is a witty, stylish storyteller and her overall message definitely feels timely * Sunday Times *Curl up and lose yourself in this hugely entertaining satire of a deeply dysfunctional family of aristocrats desperate to save their crumbling Cornwall home * i paper *This slyly comic novel is a great dissection of class and privilege * Red *A satisfying read, with plenty of good one-liners and a sly twist * Sunday Telegraph *The madcap nature of the story; the clichés, and clever way they are rendered, make this a thoroughly enjoyable read – or, to use the correct terminology, a jolly good show. Yet the larger issues this satire plays on are equally fascinating * Irish Times *Rothschild’s engaging tale House of Trelawney cleverly satirises an unconventional aristocratic clan who have run into money troubles * independent.co.uk *Wraps up a story of love and friendship in a gentle satire of entitlement … Good fun * Observer *A sparkling satire * Image Magazine *In their crumbling Cornish castle, the impoverished and eccentric aristocratic Trelawneys live on their wits and value-pack mince. But the fallout of the 2008 financial crash brings even more change in its wake. A wryly witty and sharp social satire * The People *Imagine Evelyn Waugh meets Nancy Mitford, with some Jilly Cooper thrown in, and you have this splendid romp * YOU *

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Book Synopsis_______________ 'In the vein of Agatha Christie herself. Startling' - Irish Times 'Magical in every way ... One of the best novels I’ve ever read’ - Fearne Cotton 'As much a coming-of-age tale as a murder mystery ... An impressive debut' - The Times _______________ AN OBSERVER, i AND NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR _______________ During the first year of university, a group of friends discover the cost of an extraordinary life in this captivating debut about obsession, rivalry and coming of age Jess Walker, middle child of a middle class family, has perfected the art of vanishing in plain sight. But when she arrives at a concrete university campus under flat, grey, East Anglian skies, her world flares with colour. Drawn into a tightly-knit group of rule breakers – led by their maverick teacher, Lorna Clay – Jess begins to experiment with a new version of herself. But the dynamic between the friends begins to darken as they share secrets, lovers and finally a tragedy. Soon Jess is thrown up against the question she fears most: what is the true cost of an extraordinary life? _______________ 'Hypnotic . . . An uncommonly clever whodunnit' New York Times Book Review 'Deftly plotted with vivid, compelling characters' Jojo Moyes 'One of the standout books of the summer' StylistTrade ReviewThe Truants marks Weinberg out as a natural storyteller, in the vein of Agatha Christie herself. Startling * Irish Times *A coming-of-age story and campus novel rolled into one . . . With deft characterisation, plenty of mystery and twists in the tale, it had me gripped * Daily Mail *As much a coming-of-age tale as a murder mystery . . . An impressive debut * The Times *Smart and exciting and funny and mysterious -- Dawn O’PorterLike a wickedly brilliant Donna Tartt, Agatha Christie and Liane Moriarty all mixed into one -- Scarlett CurtisWeinberg's debut is a page-turning tale of love, death and betrayal on a university campus that riffs on Donna Tartt's The Secret History while exerting a subtle pull of its own * i, Books of the Year *After surprising twists, Kate Weinberg provides a satisfying conclusion while asking the question: does a mystery lose its magic once it’s solved? * Guardian *Think The Secret History meets Agatha Christie * Red *A must read for fans of mystery novels . . . Cleverly written and relentlessly intriguing, The Truants is the perfect novel for inquisitive minds to escape into * Marie Claire *In this mesmerising debut, Kate Weinberg confidently combines literary suspense and deftly executed narrative, slowly unravelling a tangled tale about first love, obsession and the boundaries of self-identity . . . A riveting read * Scotsman *This satisfying coming-of-age novel jives to a thriller-like beat. It’s a debut, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from its assured tone. While Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is a clear influence, it’s Agatha Christie whose work is most explicitly referenced, stoking an ominous sense of impending calamity * Mail on Sunday *There are more than a few nods to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History here – the band of student misfits with dysfunctional backgrounds, the professor with oddly intimate student-teacher bonds, plus an overall sense, skilfully seeded by Weinberg, that things are about to take a wrong turn … Threaded into the story are references to Agatha Christie’s novels, with their mysteries and murders and love triangles. The Truants borrows some of these murder mystery tropes, leading us to a dark conclusion that feels satisfying to reach * Evening Standard *Set to be the book of the summer * Town & Country *The book you’ll fall in love with. With a small band of overly intimate students, a mysterious-yet-inspiring tutor, obsession and a whodunit, there’s much to place it in the same bracket as Donna Tartt but there are also nods to a much-mentioned Agatha Christie. There’s also an ending that’ll leave you thinking and thinking about this plot for weeks, if not months, later; one of the standout books of the summer * Stylist *You know those summer books which draw you in immediately and unyieldingly into their world? That bury you into the characters so nose-deep that when you’re finished, they leave you yearning for the intimate world you’ve just left. Well, The Truants, a debut novel by Kate Weinberg, is exactly one of these. We couldn't put it down -- A Little BirdThis is a remarkably assured debut, deftly plotted and with vivid, compelling characters that leap off the page. I had no idea where it was going to end up – but I knew I would be satisfied, and I was. I look forward to seeing what Kate Weinberg writes next * Jojo Moyes *In this mesmerising debut, Kate Weinberg confidently combines literary suspense and deftly executed narrative, slowly unravelling each thread that tangles first-love, obsession and the boundaries of self-identity. The Truants is as charismatic as the characters within. A riveting read * The Herald *Weinberg weaves intrigue worthy of Agatha Christie – you'll love getting lost in The Truants' web of mystery, desire and deceit * M. L. Rio, author of If We Were Villains *The Truants teases, seduces and thrills but ultimately it's about the best kind of love affair – allowing for the freedom to be yourself * Miranda Hart *Lays bare the lengths to which we will go to feel seen … At once thrilling and heartbreaking * Meghan MacLean Weir, author of The Book of Essie *Reminiscent of Muriel Spark and Donna Tartt. A stunning debut! * Carol Goodman, author of The Lake of Dead Languages and The Night Visitors *

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Book Synopsis_______________ 'Beautifully written in cunning, punning, glancing prose' - Independent 'A whirlwind … Owes plenty to Salman Rushdie and some to Hollywood … Exuberant, knowingly exotic and deceptively serious' - Guardian 'Kamila Shamsie has created a rich, bright world' - Times Literary Supplement _______________ BY THE ACCLAIMED WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION The Dard-e-Dils are characterised by their prominent clavicles and love of stories. Aliya may not have inherited her family’s patrician looks, but she is prey to their legends that stretch back to the days of Timur Lang. There is a sting to most of these tales, for the Dard-e-Dils consider themselves cursed by their ‘not-quite’ twins. Amidst her growing attraction to a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, Aliya begins to believe that she is another ‘not-quite’ twin, linked to her scandalous aunt Mariam in a way that hardly bodes well… _______________ 'A funny, clever and romantic story' - Barbara Trapido 'The stories within the stories describe Pakistani society, its peoples and its mores, better than anything that has come from the Other Side for a long time. This is a good read' - India TodayTrade ReviewBeautifully written in cunning, punning, glancing prose * Independent *A whirlwind … Owes plenty to Salman Rushdie and some to Hollywood … Exuberant, knowingly exotic and deceptively serious * Guardian *Kamila Shamsie has created a rich, bright world * Times Literary Supplement *A funny, clever and romantic story … perhaps Kamila Shamsie is our new multi-culti Nancy Mitford; a global girl who does love in both hot and cold climates -- Barbara TrapidoThe stories within the stories describe Pakistani society, its peoples and its mores, better than anything that has come from the Other Side for a long time. This is a good read * India Today *

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Book Synopsis_______________ 'A boisterous tribute to her home town that crackles with the chaos of Pakistani political life' - The Times 'Deftly woven and provocative ... Shamsie's blistering humour and ear for dialogue scorches through their whirl of whisky and witticisms' - Observer 'You will notice very quickly that you're reading a book by someone who can write … Above all, Kartography is a love story. And if you're not sniffling by, or in fact on, page 113, you're reading the wrong book' - Guardian _______________ BY THE ACCLAIMED WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE JOHN LLEWELLYN RHYS PRIZE _______________ Soul mates from birth, Karim and Raheen finish one another's sentences, speak in anagrams and lie spine to spine. They are irrevocably bound to one another and to Karachi, Pakistan. It beats in their hearts - violent, polluted, corrupt, vibrant, brave and ultimately, home. As the years go by they let a barrier of silence build between them until, finally, they are brought together during a dry summer of strikes and ethnic violence and their relationship is poised between strained friendship and fated love. _______________ 'Perceptive, funny and poignant' - Times Literary Supplement 'A touching love story, with the city of Karachi beating at its heart' - Daily Mail 'A gorgeous novel of perimeters and boundaries, of the regions – literal and figurative – in which we’re comfortable moving about and those through which we’d rather not travel' - Los Angeles TimesTrade ReviewA touching love story, with the city of Karachi beating at its heart * Daily Mail *Deftly woven and provocative ... Shamsie's blistering humour and ear for dialogue scorches through their whirl of whisky and witticisms * Observer *A boisterous tribute to her home town that crackles with the chaos of Pakistani political life * The Times *You will notice very quickly that you're reading a book by someone who can write … Above all, Kartography is a love story. And if you're not sniffling by, or in fact on, page 113, you're reading the wrong book * Guardian *Perceptive, funny and poignant * Times Literary Supplement *A gorgeous novel of perimeters and boundaries, of the regions – literal and figurative – in which we’re comfortable moving about and those through which we’d rather not travel * Los Angeles Times *

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Book Synopsis‘Every word makes me ache ... Written with exquisite empathy and grace’ Roxane Gay ‘Singularly beautiful and psychologically harrowing ... One of the best American novels of this century’ Boston Globe Twelve-year-old Fee is a shy Korean American boy and a newly named section leader of the first sopranos in his local boys’ choir. At their summer camp, situated in an idyllic and secluded lakeside retreat, Fee grapples with his complicated feelings towards his best friend, Peter. But as Fee comes to learn how the director treats his section leaders, he is so ashamed he says nothing of the abuse, not even when Peter is in line to be next. When the director is arrested, Fee tries to forgive himself for his silence. Yet the actions of the director have vast consequences, and in their wake, Fee blames only himself. In the years that follow he slowly builds a new life, teaching near his hometown. There, he meets a young student who is the picture of Peter – and is forced to confront the past he believed was gone.Trade ReviewExquisite … Heavy with portent, the narrative unspools with the somnambulant, hypnotic heft of a myth hurtling towards its heady denouement … Achingly beautiful * Financial Times *A bold and hard-hitting novel, but one written with sensitivity and held together with delicately threaded imagery * Glasgow Herald *Edinburgh has the force of a dream and the heft of a life * Annie Dillard *Impressionistic, palpable, nuanced, beautifully written and challenging * Attitude *Haunting ... Complex ... Sophisticated ... [Chee] says volumes with just a few incendiary words * New York Times *Beautifully imagined and executed ... Profound and poetic … Chee's is a voice worth listening to * San Francisco Chronicle *Alexander Chee gets my vote for the best new novelist I've read in some time. Edinburgh is moody, dramatic – and pure * Edmund White *A coming-of-age novel in the grand Romantic tradition, where passions run high, Cupid stalks Psyche, and love shares the dance floor with death … A lovely, nuanced, never predictable portrait of a creative soul in the throes of becoming * Washington Post *Few coming-of-age novels truly stir one’s emotions or lead readers to consider the trauma of their own lives. Edinburgh does both * Newsday *

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Portico Prize for Literature and the Northern Writers’ Award ‘A brilliant, brutal novel’ ROBERT MACFARLANE A girl and a baby. A priest and a poacher. A savage pursuit through the landscape of a changing rural England. When a teenage girl leaves the workhouse and abducts a child placed in her care, the local priest is called upon to retrieve them. Chased through the Cumbrian mountains of a distant past, the girl fights starvation and the elements, encountering the hermits, farmers and hunters who occupy the remote hillside communities. An American Southern Gothic tale set against the violent beauty of Northern England, Beastings is a sparse and poetic novel about morality, motherhood and corruption.Trade ReviewIntimate and elemental … Myers has the potential to become a true tragedian of the fells * Guardian *This bitter, alarming, occasionally visionary novel of the British wilderness is likely to linger in the mind for some time * New Statesman *Myers is quite simply an excellent and already accomplished writer. His prose is taut, confident, professionally polished but at the same time maintaining a sense of rustic and unrefined authenticity, that which is truly hewn -- Sarah HallI don’t know if I have encountered such a strong, engaging character in a book for some time: this is startling, sublime writing * Caught by the River *A story that will grip you to the final word and a tour de force * Loud & Quiet *A gripping ride through an imagined heart of Lake District darkness. I couldn't have writ it better myself * Hamilton, British Sea Power *Wonderful – tough and generous and beautiful -- Will Atkins

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Book Synopsis'Beautiful, thoughtful … sharp and scintillatingly sensual' Independent 'With this haunting, poetic work McCann has surely earned his place among the country’s greats' Metro __________________ The life of Zoli Novotna begins on the leafy backroads of Slovakia, when she and her grandfather come upon a quiet lake where their family has been drowned by Fascist guards. Zoli and her grandfather flee to join up with another clan of travelling harpists. So begins an epic tale of song, intimacy and betrayal. Based loosely on the true story of the Gypsy poet Papusza, and set against the backdrop of the Second World War, Zoli is a love story, a tale of loss, and a parable of modern-day Europe.Trade ReviewBeautiful, thoughtful … sharp and scintillatingly sensual * Independent *Zoli is such a wonderful novel. McCann is as fine, and persuasive a storyteller as any other working in English today * Scotsman *If a writer’s higher calling is to imagine what it is to be “other”, then Colum McCann is a giant amongst us – fearless, huge-hearted, a poet with every living breath * Peter Carey *McCann has offered us an unforgettable picture of this world * Scotland on Sunday *A wonderful novel … McCann is as fine, and persuasive, a storyteller as any other working in English today * Scotsman *With this haunting, poetic work McCann has surely earned his place among the country’s greats * Metro *Zoli is an assiduously crafted and beautifully haunting story of Europe from one of Ireland’s very best novelists. Every book from Colum McCann extends his range and excavates new territories. He is an audacious and wonderfully skilled writer -- Joseph O'ConnorThere is great warmth in the novel, sparked by the author’s genuine sense of commitment to this woman in both her actual and fictional forms. The story of Zoli deserves to be told, and with his gift for unpicking the seams of history, McCann brings to the fore its sad keynotes of manipulation and betrayal * Irish Times *

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Book Synopsis‘A gifted and determined stylist, Colum McCann seems to have taken a vow never to write a dull line’ New York Times Book Review 'Orwell would have been proud to journey with a writer as good as Colum McCann' Irish Sunday Independent ______________________ An ageing nun is tracked to ground by her sister; a garrulous beautician must lay out the corpse of a loved one. These are eloquent tales of exile and displacement, of characters always in search of a way back home or of a way to leave it. Mischievous, assured and versatile, Colum McCann's collection of short stories marks him out as one of our best contemporary writers.Trade ReviewOrwell would have been proud to journey with a writer as good as Colum McCann * Irish Sunday Independent *A mesmeric find * Observer *His stories are the work of a most vivid imagination, perpetually finding new shapes and ways of examining the world * Sunday Tribune *Rich, powerful stories that place McCann at the front ranks of contemporary Irish writers * San Francisco Chronicle *Beautiful … These well-made stories, written with fierce beauty, are sure of their effect and power * Washington Post Book World *There is magic in this McCann, and he brings to each page a special sorcery with the voices he conjures … No one can read through and not emerge feeling changed, somehow ennobled by it * Baltimore Sun *

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Book Synopsis‘Just the right mixture of doomed fun, melancholy and faintly lascivious despair’ Observer ‘I am afraid I have something to tell you. It is that we are all about to be destroyed.’ 1914. The old standards are going. There is bitterness in politics, talk of civil war in Ireland. But all this means little to Cynthia Weston, attractive wife of cabinet member Aylmer Weston, and her nephew by marriage Philip. They are caught up in the charmed, perilous toils of a mutual passion that will destroy all they hold most dear – while the shadow of war lengthens and darkens, ready to swallow their world whole. A captivating portrait of a lost world, Statues in a Garden is a rediscovered masterpiece by one of the most important and neglected British female writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Trade ReviewColegate’s novels offer readers clear-eyed, illuminating windows onto this now bygone world ... Colegate has no equal ... In shining a light on the past, Colegate also illuminates the present * Paris Review *She should be a household name -- Eleanor CattonAn extraordinary achievement -- Frances Wilson * Times Literary Supplement, Summer Reading Picks 2020 *Stylish, funny, as vivid and brilliant as a painting on glass * Daily Telegraph *Combine the slightly offbeat sensibility of Muriel Spark with the milieu of an Iris Murdoch novel and you’ll have something of an idea about this witty tale * BBC Culture *She writes so gracefully and with such skill that her “private fable” acquires a truly fabulous quality * Times Literary Supplement *Threads of romance, social comment, country lore and intrigue both above and below stairs are cunningly worked together to create a brilliant tapestry * Sunday Telegraph *Remarkable … I can think of no work of fiction that brings [this period] to life so fully and subtly * Washington Post *‘Isabel Colegate is not afraid of ideas nor of using fiction to express them … In this rich and fascinating book, someone is hiding something - possibly everyone is. Time itself obscures the truth. Can the past be known? Or is what we call history the best of recollection, not absolute but consensual, and always subject to interpretation? * Los Angeles Times *

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Book Synopsis‘The god of small stories … A set of polished gems from a master craftsman’ Sunday Times ‘An American master’ Daily Telegraph A woman and man, parted a quarter of a century, reunite in a bar in New Orleans as the St Patrick’s Day parade goes by. A group of friends, all once promising, reunite for dinner when one of their number loses her husband, but the gathering splinters when bitter revelations about their shared past emerge. Two teenage boys sit in a drive-in, the air thick with the scent of gin and popcorn and longing. A visionary collection of luminous stories, imprinting landscape, and great moments in small lives – and of the people we carry with us long after they are gone – Sorry For Your Trouble reconfirms Richard Ford as the master of contemporary American fiction. ‘He writes about human beings and their disappointments with unfailing insight and, while he never mocks his characters, is keenly aware of the absurdity involved in being alive … Exemplary in its nuanced understanding of the relationships between men and women’ ObserverTrade ReviewFord has a gift for nimble interior monologues and a superb ear for the varieties and vagaries of human speech. His prose can strike a Hemingwayesque cadence … One page later, a sparkling note of Fitzgerald … Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked * New York Times Book Review *I can't think of many other writers, living or dead, who have given me so many reasons over the years to slow down on the page and pay attention * Times Literary Supplement *The god of small stories … A set of polished gems from a master craftsman … The prose is terse, the craftsmanship, as always, fine. The reader feels cradled in the capable hands of an expert * Sunday Times *One of the great masters of American literature -- Andrew Marr, BBC Radio 4 ‘Start the Week’He writes about human beings and their disappointments with unfailing insight and, while he never mocks his characters, is keenly aware of the absurdity involved in being alive … Sorry for Your Trouble , is exemplary in its nuanced understanding of the relationships between men and women * Observer *Finely crafted * Mail on Sunday *American master * Daily Telegraph *Late style, in Ford, is loose-limbed, allusive, jokey in a rueful way, and mutedly elegiac … A marvellous writer -- John Banville * Guardian *As you read Richard Ford, the harder you look, the sadder and funnier it gets * Observer *Work of understated power, intelligence and not a little mischief, but one that leaves one wanting – craving – more * Independent *The incomparable Mississippian Richard Ford is a great writer, no question about that. More importantly, he is a great American writer. Throughout his novels and short stories, as well as his astute critical reading of literature, he has fulfilled the main objective of art: the exploration of the self. He has also consistently chiselled away, ever closer to the heart of the United States … He is a writer who has nailed exactly what it is to be alive – no mean feat – and to be alive in the US -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times *His journalistic eye for the revealing detail, his knack for tracing the connections between the public and the personal, his gift for capturing the precariousness of daily life * The Times *

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Book Synopsis'A dazzling, heartbreaking debut collection' Guardian 'Kennedy's voice, and her unforgiving gaze, are electric' Sunday Times 'These stories sing, haunt and inspire laughter ... One of the best collections I've read in years' Sinead Gleeson A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE JOHN MCGAHERN PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE KATE O'BRIEN AWARD 2022 The secrets people kept, the lies they told. In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories, people are effortlessly cruel to one another, and the natural world is a primitive salve. Here, women are domestically trapped by predatorial men, Ireland’s folklore and politics loom large, and poverty – material, emotional, sexual – seeps through every crack. A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a ghost estate, with blood on her hands; a young woman is tormented by visions of the man murdered by her brother during the Troubles; a pregnant mother fears the worst as her husband grows illegal cannabis with the help of a vulnerable teenage girl; a woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage. Announcing a major new voice in literary fiction for the twenty-first century, these sharp shocks of stories offer flashes of beauty, and even humour, amidst the harshest of truths.Trade Review[A] dazzling, heartbreaking debut collection . . .With their sensitivity to people’s vulnerabilities and failings, and their sharpness of imagery, these fifteen taut tales recall Annie Proulx at her best: salty, wise, droll and keen to share the lessons of a lifetime * Guardian *Gritty, bitter, hard-won, the fifteen stories in this first collection feel a world away from the seeming solipsism of the younger generation of female Irish writers who are conquering the literary world … Kennedy’s voice, and her unforgiving gaze, are electric * Sunday Times *To carve such gilded stories as these from such fathomless gorges of despair would be an accomplishment for an old master, let alone for a relative newbie. Yet Kennedy’s spritz of humour, as black as the holes these women are in, elevates her stories from downbeat to transcendent . . . [A] marvellous collection * Independent *Like fifteen novels squeezed between two covers, ready to blow your mind. The only other writer I can think of who packs this much moving, terrible life into each story is Alice Munro -- Emma DonoghueI am haunted by these unforgettable short stories and believed every single line of every one of them. Louise Kennedy is a very major talent -- Joseph O'Connor * Irish Times *[A] dark, funny, brilliantly downbeat Irish debut. Bitterness, beauty and a caustic wit colour Kennedy’s stories, as the past makes itself unforgettably present in the lives of her vividly drawn characters * Daily Mail *Masterful . . . [Kennedy] can make you laugh and wince all at once . . . A writer very much in control of her craft * Irish Independent *I love Kennedy’s vividly conjured reality. Her prose is so alive, I am surprised that the book stays shut when you close it. These stories breathe, talk, kick-up: they have a pulse -- Anne EnrightDarkly funny, beautifully crafted, intense - this is an outstanding first collection from a natural story writer -- Kevin BarryThese stories are devastating, deadly funny, hauntingly recognisable, wise, brutal, lucent and gloriously refreshing. Kennedy has brought an army of complex, contradictory, haywire women into Irish literature. Prepare to be wrecked. -- Caoilinn HughesLouise Kennedy is a wonderful writer: her characterization is compelling, her style a stimulating mix of the plainspoken and luminous, and her sense of place assured. In The End of the World is a Cul-De-Sac, she has produced a remarkable collection of short stories. -- Nick LairdWhat a collection of stories! One of the best I’ve ever read: funny and searing and true -- Sarah CrossanLouise Kennedy’s collection will stop you in your tracks . . . Profound, beautiful and essential -- Liz NugentA hugely impressive and memorable collection. I adored these downbeat, stirring, disconcerting, punchy, touching, believable short stories, so skilfully and beautifully executed -- Joseph O'Connor

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Book SynopsisThe outstanding new thriller from the author of international bestseller, Greenwich Park ''This is The Undoing meets Big Little Lies'' Abigail Dean''The elevated, devourable thriller you''ve been looking for'' Ashley Audrain''Relentlessly twisty'' Sarah Vaughan ''Next-level mum noir'' Ellery Lloyd _______________ You want to be one of them. Until you know them.You''ve been desperate for a story to launch your freelance career. But you want something else even more: new friends to help you navigate motherhood. And then you see them at your son''s new playgroup. The other mothers. Those sleek, sophisticated mothers. The women you want to be. One of them welcomes them into their circle. And, on the other side of glass, their lives are exactly like the one you''ve always dreamt of; their elegant London townhouses a world away from your c

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Book SynopsisA SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR _______________ 'A work of extraordinary ambition, brilliantly realised’ OBSERVER 'A mesmerising journey down the byways of English folklore' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'Verbally dextrous, inventive, and hugely entertaining’ THE TIMES _______________ Herne the hunter, mischief-maker, spirit of the forest, leader of the wild hunt, hurtles through the centuries pursued by his creator. A shapeshifter, Herne dons many guises as he slips and ripples through time – at candlelit Twelfth Night revels, at the spectacular burning of the Crystal Palace, at an acid-laced Sixties party. Wherever he goes, transgression, debauch and enchantment always follow in his wake. But as the forest is increasingly encroached upon by urban sprawl and gentrification, and the world slides into crisis, Herne must find a way to survive – or exact his revenge.Trade ReviewWeaving together prose and poetry, myth and history, the past, present and future, it’s a work of extraordinary ambition, brilliantly realised * OBSERVER *A dark-dazzling archive of enchantments, pursuit, and desire -- ELEY WILLIAMSInventive and subversive ... A mesmerising journey down the byways of English folklore * MAIL ON SUNDAY *Verbally dextrous, inventive, and hugely entertaining * THE TIMES *This is the most adventurous, stylistically magnificent thing I’ve read for years. Nobody does fantasy like Zoe Gilbert -- NATASHA PULLEYMischief Acts is a deeply lyrical, century-spanning polyphony of voices; a dazzling new take on an ancient myth, reminding us of the wildness within. I adored it -- KERRY ANDREWMischief Acts is brimming with magic - full of wild hunts, river spirits and revelry. The story of Herne, like the forest itself, transforms, entangles and enchants -- LUCY WOODSuperb. A work of shimmering allure. By turns beguiling and mercurial, Gilbert takes British folklore to new heights -- IRENOSEN OKOJIEPraise for Folk: 'An extraordinary debut novel … It feels both ancient – drawing on deep seams of myth and folklore – and strikingly contemporary, pushing at the edges of what we mean when we call a book a novel. In Folk, Zoe Gilbert has made a thing of strange and enduring beauty -- ALEX PRESTON * FINANCIAL TIMES *Folk is a special book: immersive and dripping with life, each story a spell, an allegory, a dark, smoky poem divined from the landscape of our ancient kingdom … It reads like a dream that, once visited, is difficult to leave behind -- BEN MYERS * GUARDIAN *Genuinely original, disturbing, beautiful and gripping ... Folk can be read as a map of the British mythic imagination: of the river under the river. Starkly original and expertly written, it draws you, like a faerie song, into a kingdom from which you may never escape, and may not want to * NEW STATESMAN *Dazzling and unsettling, much like the best and darkest of fairy tales * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *A dark, often discomforting debut … Gilbert’s sensuous prose conjures fantastical figures including a man born with a wing for an arm, and a girl who’s abducted by a water bull … Bewitching * MAIL ON SUNDAY, BEST NEW FICTION *Folk is absolutely stunning. I loved it. With gorgeous, incantatory prose, it submerges you in a mysterious and utterly compelling world. Its illumination lingers long after you close the book -- MADELINE MILLERI was thoroughly absorbed. Zoe Gilbert’s invented folk-world is sensuous and dangerous and thick with magic -- TESSA HADLEYThat rare thing: genuinely unique. It’s part-myth, part-allegory, wholly wonderful * OBSERVER, BOOKS OF THE YEAR *A captivating mythical, magical and haunting debut which draws on fascinating folklore * I PAPER *

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Book SynopsisSOON TO BE A MAJOR GLOBAL NETFLIX ADAPTATION STARRING JULIA ROBERTS, KEVIN BACON, ETHAN HAWKE AND MAHERSHALA ALI *A THE TIMES #1 BESTSELLER* *THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* *A BARACK OBAMA SUMMER READING PICK 2021* 'Easily the best thing I have read all year' KILEY REID, AUTHOR OF SUCH A FUN AGE 'Intense, incisive, I loved this and have still not quite shaken off the unease' DAVID NICHOLLS 'I was hooked from the opening pages' CLARE MACKINTOSH 'Simply breathtaking . . . An extraordinary book, at once smart, gripping and hallucinatory’ OBSERVER _______ A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a holiday: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and - with nowhere else to turn - they have come to the country in search of shelter. But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple - and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another? _______ FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2020 FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2021 A DAILY TELEGRAPH, GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, IRISH TIMES AND TIME BOOK OF THE YEAR Everyone is talking about LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND 'You will probably need to read it in as close to one sitting as possible’ Sunday Times 'A page-turner taking in themes of isolation, race and class’ Guardian ‘A book that could have been tailor-made for our times’ The Times ‘A literary page-turner that will keep you awake even after it ends’ Mail on Sunday 'An exceptional examination of race and class and what the world looks like when it's ending' Roxane Gay 'A thrilling book - one that will speak to readers who have felt the terror of isolation in these recent months and one that will simultaneously, as great books do, lift them out of it' Vogue 'Explores complex ideas about privilege and fate with miraculous wit and grace' Jenny Offill ‘For the reader, the invisible terror outside in Leave the World Behind echoes the sense of disquiet today in a world convulsed by the pandemic’ Financial Times 'Alam's achievement is to see that his genre's traditional arc, which relies on the idea of aftermath, no longer makes sense. Today, disaster novels call for something different' New Yorker 'Read it with the lights on' Jenna Bush Hager, October Book Club pickTrade ReviewStupendously good . . . Simply breathtaking, full of moments of exquisite recognition, as terrifying and prescient as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road . . . Leave the World Behind is an extraordinary book, at once smart, gripping and hallucinatory . . . When future generations (if that term doesn’t sound over-optimistic at the moment) want to know what it was like to live through the nightmare of 2020, this is the novel they’ll reach for * Observer *Would be resonant and terrifying even in a more normal year . . . In his dazzling prose, his fascination with catastrophe and his apparent ability to portend the future, Alam is a worthy descendant of Don DeLillo . . . You will probably need to read it in as close to one sitting as possible * Sunday Times *A sensation . . . A tense, atmospheric, splendidly written attempt to grapple with impending doom … Even in its infancy, Leave the World Behind was well poised to become the book of an era . . . A striking, unsettling novel * Independent *Without any exaggeration, I can honestly say that I devoured Leave the World Behind, in one greedy, uneasy gulp. It’s a taut page-turner – one that starts out as a smart, knowing, contemporary comedy of manners, but quickly spirals into an apocalyptic nightmare so terrifyingly realistic that it sent shivers down my spine * Daily Telegraph *For the reader, the invisible terror outside in Leave the World Behind echoes the sense of disquiet today in a world convulsed by the pandemic. There are intense parallels between the unreality of life in the Long Island bolt-hole described in the book and lockdown . . . The novel excels in its dissection of modern liberal America and forces the reader to confront the limits of their own heroism in the face of disaster * Financial Times *A book that could have been tailor-made for our times, with its tale of racial tensions and an unnatural disaster . . . It’s a close-up narrative, and its strength lies in the emotional pull . . . There’s something for everyone: that is, to terrify everyone, from parents to nature lovers to hypochondriacs * The Times *A page-turner, taking in themes of isolation, race and class . . . As the author of a book about people trapped inside a house by a huge event, desperate for information, Alam is a curious prophet . . . Alam has an almost anthropological eye for the absurdities of the upper-middle class, for the blindness of white people . . . Leave the World Behind was influenced by Jordan Peele’s film Get Out, apparent in Alam’s acuity on whiteness. But the closest literary comparison could be Shirley Jackson, whose cold, detached voice can be heard in Alam’s narrator when we are shown glimpses of what is happening in the wider world * Guardian *Rumaan Alam creates an atmosphere of dread so convincing and prescient that it stays with the reader long after reading . . . Explores issues of race, class and identity in the face of overwhelming disaster * Irish Times *Alam has built an apocalyptic thriller around a single concept: what would you do if the world was crumbling around you? . . . This novel is catching hold of its readers, and it’s easy to see why . . . A bracing read. The story is crafted with a deft lightness of touch and, at a mere 240 pages, it’s brisk and unfaltering. But it’s the eeriness of the burgeoning apocalypse, and the paralytic inability of the protagonists to help themselves, that will stay with you the longest * Irish Independent *An exacting and dread-inducing story of suspicion, prejudice and hysteria . . . It feels so entwined with the DNA of 2020, capturing the hallucinatory quality which time takes on when stuck inside not knowing what the future holds * Esquire *Once you read this topical and gripping novel, it’s all you’ll want to talk about * Stylist *Rumaan Alam’s elegant novel presents a scenario familiar to many readers of contemporary fiction in 2020: a mass power meltdown . . . Alam controls the tension by almost imperceptible degrees . . . A wonderful novel about the figurative walls we build to keep the world outside * Metro *If the first half can turn a mirror on you, the second half will shatter it . . . Undeniably haunting * New York Times *Poised to be one of the biggest titles of the fall . . . A comedy of manners wrapped inside a tense disaster plot * New York Magazine *A slippery and duplicitous marvel of a novel . . . Leave the World Behind is atmospheric and prescient: its rhythms of comedy alternating with shock and despair mimic so much of the rhythms of life right now . . . A signature novel for this blasted year * NPR *Rarely have I encountered a book so cuttingly prescient about the current emotional atmosphere . . . Alam’s deployment of creepy, inexplicable detail is masterful . . . This is a thrilling book - one that will speak to readers who have felt the terror of isolation in these recent, torturous months and one that will simultaneously, as great books do, lift them out of it * Vogue *Alam has written a genuine literary thriller, one that is also a disturbing window into our precarious age * Independent *The fall's biggest novel * Entertainment Weekly *Enthralling . . . Alam keeps close to his characters, who, like insects in acrylic, remain trapped in a state of suspended unease. This, he suggests, is the modern disaster – the precarity of American life, which leaves us unsure, always, if things can get worse . . . Alam’s achievement is to see that his genre’s traditional arc, which relies on the idea of aftermath, no longer makes sense. Today, disaster novels call for something different, a recognition that we won’t find a new normal * New Yorker *Like Stephen King’s 1980 novella The Mist, Leave the World Behind expertly illustrates the horror of the unknown, the almost painful humanity we feel when facing down the end and, of course, human nature under duress. During an era of plague, racism, hatred, and division, this tale of a vacation gone awry is terrifyingly prescient * Rolling Stone *One of the eeriest, most disturbing stories I've read in some time . . . The contours of everything might be recognisable, but what's contained within is wholly deranged * Refinery 29 *Riveting and claustrophobic, Leave the World Behind invites us to sit with our discomfort and reflect on our own rushed judgments, delivering a dazzling and dark examination of family, race, class and what matters most when the impossible becomes possible * Esquire *Leave the World Behind is that rarest of things: a beautifully written, emotionally resonant page-turner. Alam explores complex ideas about privilege and fate with miraculous wit and grace * Jenny Offill, author of Weather *Perfectly paced, clever and haunting . . . This is one of those stories that inspires a hungry turn of pages, preceded by that desperate and lovely need to come up for air. So easily the best thing I've read all year * Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age *This is an exceptional examination of race and class and what the world looks like when it’s ending – not at all different from the world we are in now * Roxane Gay, author of Hunger *Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind is a canny Trojan horse of a novel, and also a Pandora's Box. Like the family at its center, we're seduced utterly by the bounty and insularity of its world, only to find ourselves, inch by inch, approaching a larger darkness lurking just beyond. With a potent Shirley Jackson energy, it is both eerily timeless and sharply prescient at once, and lingers long after its final page * Megan Abbott, author of Give Me Your Hand *Leave the World Behind is so many things--funny, sharp, insightful about modernity and race and parenthood and home--but at its core it's a story of our shared apocalypse; a steady look at humanity in the moment it tumbles from a great height. I have not been this profoundly unnerved by a science fiction novel since Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. * Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties *Here in your hands, wrapped in the delicious cloth of suspense, Rumaan Alam begs us to ask the most important questions. How do we let the other in? Where do we draw the borders of home? A prescient book, built for these strange times, sure to entrance and electrify * Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark *Suspenseful and provocative, Rumaan Alam's third novel is keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped--and unexpected new ones are forged--in moments of crisis * Laura Lippman, author of Lady in the Lake *

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Book SynopsisTHE UNMISSABLE NEW NOVEL FROM THE AUTHOR OF BESTSELLING PHENOMENON SUCH A FUN AGE * THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * * FEARNE COTTON'S HAPPY PLACE BOOK CLUB PICK FOR FEBRUARY * ‘I couldn’t put it down, and I didn't want to either’ EMILY HENRY ‘The drama is just too juicy – how could anyone resist a binge?’ GUARDIAN ‘Razor-sharp … Packs a huge emotional punch’ DAILY MAIL Everything comes at a price. But not everything can be paid for… Millie wants to graduate, get a job and buy a house. She’s slowly saving up from her job on campus, but when a visiting professor offers her an unusual opportunity to make some extra money, she jumps at the chance. Agatha is a writer, recovering from a break-up while researching attitudes towards weddings and money for her new book. She strikes gold when interviewing the girls in Millie’s dorm, but her plans take a turn when she realises that the best material is unfolding behind closed doors. As the two women form an unlikely relationship, they soon become embroiled in a world of roommate theatrics, vengeful pranks and illicit intrigue – and are forced to question just how much of themselves they are willing to trade to get what they want. Sharp, intimate and provocative, Come and Get It takes a lens to our money-obsessed society in a tension-filled story about desire, consumption and bad behaviour. ‘Smart, funny and perceptive’ i ‘A perfect read’ STYLIST ‘Wonderfully immersive, propulsive and beautifully paced’ PAUL HARDING ‘Quiet and intense … A joy to read’ JESSICA GEORGE ‘Witty and nuanced’ RED ‘[An] incisive novel everyone will be talking about’ TOWN AND COUNTRYTrade ReviewA brilliant book ... Really interesting, looks at the lengths we’ll go to get money, and how it informs our decision making and also our relationships. It’s a really good read -- Fearne Cotton, Happy Place Book ClubAn utter joy * Sunday Times *A deliciously chewy, politically charged novel ... The kind of book I want to debate with a room full of women drinking fishbowl-sized glasses of cheap Pinot Grigio with too much ice in it * Vogue *A zippy, laugh-out-loud campus novel ... Reid’s writing is so very funny, always rooted in the everyday * i *Reading Kiley Reid’s fiction feels a bit like watching a prestige TV series. There are expansive casts of characters ... The plots are pacy and compelling, motored by flashbacks and cliffhangers and twists, while also dealing with social issues – particularly race and class – that add intellectual heft. Dialogue is hyper-realistic ... so that you can hear it aloud in your head ... Reid is a talented comic writer. But it also raises deeper questions about how we view the lives of other people, as material for our own consumption. Are the attractions of books and TV so different from those of eavesdropping? * Guardian *A master storyteller ... As fun to read as it is thought-provoking ... In heart-breaking and deeply recognisable details ... we see Reid’s pen at its sharpest * Stylist *A master plotter who’s engineering a spectacular intersection of class, racism, academic politics and journalistic ethics. Reid spots all the grains of irritation and deceit that get caught in the machinery of social life until the whole contraption suddenly lurches to a calamitous halt. Come and get it, indeed! * Washington Post *A biting comedy of campus manners * Mail on Sunday *With her perceptive eye and ear, Reid imbues her novel with the stuff, literally and figuratively, of life ... As I read Come and Get It I found myself thinking of certain writers who have, over the years, elected themselves as “capital C” Chroniclers of contemporary America. With this book, Reid demonstrates that she deserves a place in the running * New York Times Book Review *At once highly readable and an important comment on the lose-lose decisions millennials face in a bleak economy, this is a book you'll devour in days * Harper's Bazaar *It gets to the heart of what Reid is: a consummate storyteller * Service 95 *Reid brings her sharp gaze to the classic campus novel, and university life provides her with similarly rich material when it comes to deconstructing privilege ... She also cleverly turns some of the genre’s dustier tropes on their heads ... Part of what has always made campus stories so captivating is that they show us character as a work in progress – because our university days have always been about working out our sense of self. But contemporary tales like Reid’s are a necessary reminder: this leisurely exploration is a luxury not everyone can afford * Independent *Reid has an excellent ear for speech: you get the impression that she, like Agatha, has put in the hours listening to 20-year-olds chatter, bitch and plot. She’s also a sharp observer of the way in which money confers power or withholds it, and how this can intersect with race ... The decision to foreground money is unusual, yet Reid pulls it off * Telegraph *A wonderfully written and intimate portrayal of entwined lives on campus. Quiet and intense all at the same time, it was a joy to read -- Jessica George, author of MY NAME IS MAAMEExploring hustle culture and capitalist attitudes, it weaves a compelling story that confronts the consequences of insatiable appetites for success * Elle *Kiley Reid is an expert at teasing apart the messy, complicated, nuanced layers of social dynamics, and has a rare gift for making the unknown feel intimately familiar and the familiar feel brand new. In Come and Get It, she's crafted a story that moves with the momentum and inevitability of a snowball rolling down a mountain. I couldn't put it down, and I didn’t want to either’ -- Emily Henry, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of HAPPY PLACEKiley Reid’s books make me feel lucky to be a reader. I’m in awe – Come and Get It is a page-turning pleasure – stylish, sharp and breathtakingly smart. I can’t believe that one book can be this clever, cool and this much fun to read -- Daisy Buchanan, author of INSATIABLEAnother razor-sharp, character-driven, coming-of-age story, which packs a huge emotional punch * Daily Mail *Smart, funny and perceptive * i news, Best Books to Read in January *Multi-layered and complex relationships between seriously flawed characters once again take centre stage as its narrative smartly delves into racism, social and economic status, and university campus politics in the 21st century. A perfect read for anyone who loved Netflix’s brilliant The Chair and Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Admission * Stylist *Wonderfully immersive, propulsive, and beautifully paced. On page one, there is a story that is already happening, and you’re plunged right into the novel’s world, already up and running, full of real people, and complicated – that is, substantive – as all hell. Just great -- Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THIS OTHER EDEN and TINKERSCome and Get It is an engrossing novel full of intimately portrayed characters and the seemingly innocuous choices that lead to life-altering mistakes -- Elizabeth Acevedo, author of FAMILY LORE and THE POET XThe book has a Netflix box-set breezy pace and knowing tone as it satirises staff and student attitudes towards money, hierarchy and status … An absorbingly twisty page-turner * i paper *The pleasure of Come and Get It lies in its plunge into the unfamiliar. This is a society in which poorer students work for richer ones — the Tyler types can call up Millie at all hours to settle dorm disputes or shift furniture — or save money by camping overnight outside a new branch of Chick-fil-A to win a year’s worth of free fried chicken. The tone is breezy and comic, but what’s really happening is shocking * The Times *Reid...masterfully captures the quiet misalignments that stem from a varying sense of what’s at stake…[A] novel of manners that acutely captures the modern moment * Vogue, The Best Books of 2024 So Far *A witty and nuanced exploration of race and female-occupied spaces – I loved the thread of menace running through it * Red *Kiley Reid's next must-read ... It's packed with those awkward moments Reid is so talented at creating, making your toes curl as you read * Grazia, Hot to Drop *A brilliant author who creates ultra-memorable characters * Glamour, Best New Books of January 2024 *If you loved the smash hit Such a Fun Age, don't sleep on Reid's newest ... This is a story of indiscretions and gray areas, power dynamics and privilege that's wound as tight as a violin string. Just don't forget to breathe while you're reading (go ahead and thank us later) * Good Housekeeping *A deft exploration of how microaggressions can lead to macro consequences, Reid’s second outing will appeal to readers who enjoy slow-burn, character-driven novels * Booklist *Kiley Reid returns with another incisive novel everyone will be talking about … A riveting and fascinating tale * Town & Country, Best Books of Winter *Kiley Reid's characters are always layered with ethical dilemmas … Subterfuge, sex and self-seeking make things compellingly messy * Sainsbury’s Magazine *A sardonic and no-holds-barred comedy of manners ... Reid is a keen observer­ – every page sparkles with sharp analysis of her characters. This blistering send-up of academia is interlaced with piercing moral clarity * Publishers Weekly, starred review *An illuminating study of power, responsibility, and the bad choices we sometimes make, written in the fresh, bright language for which she’s known * Library Journal *Reid’s fiction, which highlights the ordinary social interactions in which larger forces – of class and racial inequality, financial and cultural capital – make themselves known. There are few outright villains in her stories; her characters often blunder along with good intentions, to comic and disastrous effect * Guardian *Reading a Kiley Reid novel is like watching a docuseries designed exactly for you. She captures those exceedingly awkward and real human interactions with such precision and specificity that you’re fully invested by the first page. Come and Get It is genius. It’s perfect -- Liz Moore, author of LONG BRIGHT RIVER[A] sharp, edgy social novel … Reid is a genius of mimicry and social observation * Kirkus *Beautifully told through the eyes of multiple characters, this intimate and revealing story from the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age is not to be missed * BookBub, The 22 Best Books of Winter *An exciting new portrait of desire, consumption and recklessness, we have no doubt Reid’s new novel will be just as popular as the first * Luxury London, Best New Books *Come and Get It is a festival of micro-aggressions; it’s uneasy, and Reid doesn’t give any character a free ride. She skewers mean girls, mummy’s girls and freeloaders with both clarity and subtlety ... The dialogue and little details [are] so excruciatingly accurate * AnOther magazine, Best Fiction for 2024 *Come and Get It is a page-turning read filled with vengeful pranks and intrigue, but at its heart, it is a fascinating portrait of our obsession with material wealth * Chicago Review of Books, Must-Read Books of January 2024 *It’s a perfect recipe ... in a college setting, about discretion and desire, about money, want, and, most importantly, it’s by Kiley Reid * LitHub, Most Anticipated Books of 2024 *The result is heartbreak that money can’t fix, and a smart novel that says a lot about race, money and female friendships * Heat *A thrilling, delectable look at wealth, privilege and desire * People Magazine, Best Books To Read in January 2024 *The book is funny …The dialogue is particularly snappy … Most importantly, “Come and Get It” offers a deft examination of how young people negotiate their first brushes with independence and responsibility. Reid is particularly attuned to how her characters navigate matters of money and consumption… Reid’s novel carves its own path, capturing a sort of tragic malaise that itself suggests a state of young adulthood * Arkansas Times *

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Book SynopsisBy the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature ‘Demands to be read and reread, for its humour, generosity of spirit and clear-sighted vision’ Evening Standard ‘Gurnah zooms in on individual acts of violence ... and unexpected acts of kindness’ Daily Telegraph ________________________ Demoralised by small persecutions and the squalor and poverty of his life, Daud takes refuge in his imagination. He composes wry, sardonic letters hectoring friends and enemies, and invents a lurid colonial past for every old man he encounters. His greatest solace is cricket and the symbolic defeat of the empire at the hands of the mighty West Indies. Although subject to attacks of bitterness and remorse, his captivating sense of humour never deserts him as he struggles to come to terms with the horror of his past and the meaning of his pilgrimage to England.Trade ReviewExile has given Gurnah a perspective on the “balance between things” that is astonishing, superb * Observer *[A] captivating storyteller, with a voice both lyrical and mordant, and an oeuvre haunted by memory and loss. His intricate novels of arrival and departure … reveal, with flashes of acerbic humour, the lingering ties that bind continents, and how competing versions of history collide * Guardian *Gurnah is a master storyteller -- Aminatta Forna * Financial Times *Gurnah etches with biting incisiveness the experiences of immigrants exposed to contempt, hostility or patronising indifference on their arrival in Britain * Spectator *Gurnah writes with wonderful insight about family relationships and he folds in the layers of history with elegance and warmth * The Times *

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Book SynopsisA stunning new edition of the second novel in the bestselling Bone Season series with gorgeous new cover artwork and updated text, by the bestselling author of The Priory of the Orange Tree.Paige Mahoney has escaped the secret prison city of Oxford. Now a fugitive in London, she nurtures a new taste for revolution. Oxford may be behind her, but the Republic of Scion is undefeated. As Scion turns its all-seeing eye on Paige, she is forced to return to Jaxon Hall, her charismatic and brutal employer, to keep her foothold in the underworld. But Paige will bow to only one now, and not even Jaxon will stop her exposing the corruption in the syndicate. As she plots to with the fabled Rose Crown, both sides of an ancient conflict seek her talents for themselves.

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Book SynopsisA stunning new edition of the fourth novel in the bestselling Bone Season series with gorgeous new cover artwork and updated text, by the bestselling author of The Priory of the Orange Tree.Paige Mahoney has eluded death again. Snatched from the jaws of captivity and sent to a safe house in the Scion Citadel of Paris, she finds herself caught between factions that seek Scion's downfall and those who would kill to protect the puppet empire.The mysterious Domino Programme has plans for Paige, but she has ambitions of her own in this new citadel. With Arcturus Mesarthim at her side, she embarks on an adventure that will lead her from the catacombs of Paris to the glittering hallways of Versailles. As Scion widens its bounds and the free world trembles in its shadow, Paige strives to understand her bond with Arcturus, which grows stronger by the day. But just as the revolution began with them it could end with them too...

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Book SynopsisTHE REESE''S BOOK CLUB PICK FOR MARCH 2024I have goosebumps just talking about this story' REESE WITHERSPOONSmart, funny and furious' MARIE CLAIREGenre-busting ... A clear-eyed deconstruction of skewed value systems' FINANCIAL TIMES--------------------------------------------Who gets to leave a legacy?1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn't. By 1998 Anita's name has been all but forgotten certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by progeny of film producers, C-Suite executives, and international art-dealers, most of whom float through life knowing that their futures are secured, Raquel feels herself an outsider. Students of colour, like Raquel, are t

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Book Synopsis'A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. It's brutal—and brilliant.' - Zadie SmithWinner of the Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Fiction Debut of the YearLonglisted for the Women's Prize For FictionEdie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, is sleeping with all the wrong men, and has failed at the only thing that meant anything to her, painting. No one seems to care that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing with her life beyond looking for her next hook-up.And then she meets Eric, a white middle-aged archivist with a suburban family, including a wife who has sort-of-agreed to an open marriage and an adopted black daughter who doesn’t have a single person in her life who can show her how to do her hair. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscape of sexual and racial politics as a young black woman wasn’t already hard enough, with nowhere else left to go, Edie finds herself falling head-first into Eric’s home and family.Razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.‘A book of pure fineness, exceptional.’ – Diana Evans, GuardianA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Guardian, New York Times, New Yorker, Boston Globe, Literary Hub, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Time, Good Housekeeping, InStyle, NPR, O Magazine, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, Town & Country, Wired, New Statesman, Vox, Shelf Awareness, i-D, BookPage and more.One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of the Year.Trade ReviewLeilani’s story of Edie, a broke 23-year-old black woman who gets involved with a wealthy older white couple, cuts to the quick of the often grim realities of being young and black in the US today. But it’s wincingly funny, too . . . Leilani’s prose mesmerises; you go with her, wherever she decides to take you . . . A remarkable portrait of the artist as a young woman. * Observer *[Leilani] is a caustic, funny and skilful storyteller, taking us deeply and convincingly inside the head of a millennial woman frantically trying to make sense of the world and her place within it. * Sunday Times *In this cutting, hot-blooded book, the entanglements that unfold are as complicated as they are heartbreaking. * New Statesman *With deadpan wit and remarkable talent, Raven Leilani effortlessly exposes the chasms between generations, faces and genders. * Vogue *A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. It's brutal—and brilliant. -- Zadie Smith, author of Swing TimeLuster is entirely remarkable, and the most delicious novel I’ve read. I couldn’t get enough of Raven Leilani’s starkly accurate portrayal of the nuances of being a young woman today. -- Candice Carty-Williams, author of QueenieEvery so often, a debut novel so dazzling in its brilliance renders you unable to see the world in quite the same way for some time. Raven Leilani’s Luster illuminates the world anew, like a firework . . . it is truly a work of art. * i *A darkly funny, hilariously moving debut from a stunning new voice. Raven Leilani crafts a beautiful, bighearted story about intimacy and art that will astound and wound you. I couldn’t put this one down. -- Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing HalfI was blown away by this debut novel . . . Every sentence is a treat to read, even when it is plumbing the bleakest truths of society and humanity. It is political and emotional, tender and sharp, absurd and relatable, heartbreaking and funny. The writing is packed with sharp observations of the most eccentric human behaviour, all propelled with an addictively page-turning plot. It is exquisite. -- Dolly Alderton, author of GhostsWritten in cool prose as brittle as glass, Luster throws down the gauntlet to a politicised contemporary moment eager to see blazingly affirmative stories of black lives in literature . . . [Edie's] voice . . . is unforgettable. More novels like this please. * Daily Mail *This wild dark comedy is absolutely the real deal . . . Leilani’s live-wire sentences are a giddy joy, crafted with mischievous perfection and full of smart things to say on hot-button issues. * Mail on Sunday *You could stay in there all day, swathed in the magnificence of its language, the surprises of the sentences and their psychedelic, uncharted destinations . . . This is a book of pure fineness, exceptional. -- Diana Evans * Guardian *Raven Leilani is a writer of unusual daring, with a voice that is unique and fully formed. There is humor, intelligence, emotion, and power in her work. I cannot think of a writer better suited to capture our contemporary moment. -- Katie Kitamura, author of A SeparationLuster is ridiculously good: gorgeous, dark, and funny, with sentences that'll wreck you. I will follow this author anywhere she wants to take me. -- Carmen Maria Machado author of In the Dream HouseTension that keeps the reader hooked until the very last page . . . Leilani observes the dissatisfactions of Edie’s 21st-century life with a brutal and beautiful keenness. * Harper's Bazaar *The narrative voice of this startling novel is layered, complex, pitch-black comic, and deadly earnest, even ardent in its will to sift through the chaos and idiocy of our madhouse culture and find some glimpse of human reality. Raven Leilani has made a truly lustrous piece of art. -- Mary Gaitskill, author of This Is PleasureIf you like Normal People, you’ll love Luster . . . a squirm inducing marvel * Buzzfeed Books *Raven Leilani’s style is a truly original mix of the new and the wise, of wit and despair. She has poignantly captured the obsession that drives, and often destroys, every true artist. I adored Luster for its honesty and weird beauty. -- Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter WitherA beguiling fever dream of a novel, shot through with wistfulness, humor, and a kind of breathless, furious verve. You’ll find it impossible to put down. -- Ling Ma, author of SeveranceHilarious, honest, bursting with desire and cutting insight, Luster is absolutely captivating. I didn’t so much read it, as gulp it down. There’s so much to learn here, so much to admire. Leilani is an irreverent, impeccable stylist—a voice we need right now. -- Justin Torres, author of We the AnimalsA coming-of-age story that’s sure to keep you turning pages * Refinery29 *Spinning fresh commentary on both race and class, tensions in the house rise as Raven Leilani propels her lost protagonist on a darkly funny journey of self-discovery. * Time *Raw, racy, and utterly mesmerizing, Luster is among the most dazzling novels of the year, marking the arrival of a major new voice . . . Dreamlike, tender, and big-hearted, Luster is a must-read * Esquire *This book is luminous, glorious. From the first sentence I knew there was word-magic here and that I would read any sentence Leilani cares to write. What a marvel. -- Daisy Johnson, author of Everything UnderI adored this wry, vital, mesmeric novel. In glorious, exhilarating sentences, Leilani crafts a story that is both deeply moving and brimming with originality and insight. -- Megan Hunter, author of The HarpyLuster is a headlong carousel of a novel. With liquid prose and a painter's eye for colour, texture and light, Luster grapples vigorously with what it means to make art in a world pumping out racism-induced cortisol. -- Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting TimesLuster is as close to perfect a book as you’ll read this year. I promise you - Raven Leilani is about to become your new obsession. -- Louise O'Neill, author of Asking For ItA big, bold novel, visceral and unsettling, about a young Black woman desperate to find herself but looking in all the wrong places. * Red magazine *Brilliant in terms of voice, Luster is equally strong on plot and structure. In her leavening of cynicism with hope, Raven Leilani writes as if she were three books wise, at least. * TLS *

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Book SynopsisA cult classic of Italian literature published in English for the first time, with a foreword by André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name In the late 1960s, Leo Gazzara left his family in Milan and moved to Rome for work. Soon unemployed, he has spent his time in an alcoholic haze, bouncing between hotels, bars, romantic entanglements, and the homes of his rich and well-educated friends. Rome is indifferent. Leo drifts, aimless and alone.On the evening of his thirtieth birthday, he meets Arianna, a young woman who is both fragile and seductive. All night they drive the city in Leo’s run-down Alfa Romeo, talking and talking. They eat brioche for breakfast, drink through the dawn, drive to the sea and back. A whirlwind beginning. This is the story of the year Leo fell in love and lost everything.Intense, brief, witty and devastating, Last Summer in the City is a newly rediscovered classic of Italian literature. Translated into English for the first time by Howard Curtis, Gianfranco Calligarich’s romantic and despairing debut is reminiscent of The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises and The Catcher in the Rye.Trade ReviewThe true quality of this novel is the way it enlightens, with a desperate clearness, a relationship between a man and a city, that is, between crowd and loneliness -- Natalia GinzburgThe most beautiful love story of the year * Il Giornale *A masterpiece * Le Figaro *Dazzling in every detail * Elle *[A] sublime text, of extraordinary languid beauty and sadness * Sud Ouest *Calligarich’s time capsule of love and existential drift in a lost Rome, translated into sparkling prose by Curtis, is ripe for a rediscovery * New York Times Book Review *A sad, seductive declaration of love for Rome * Il Messaggero *Romantic, raw and lyrical, this is a novel of rare honesty which depicts with devastating accuracy a world of missed connections and failed intimacy -- Alice JollyA short, gorgeous, moving and magnificent story of love and solitude -- Il Sole 24 OreThis book, at once painful and ironic, remains a small gem * La Repubblica *A heartrending marvel * L’Echo *Charming, decadent, and emotionally ruthless . . . equal parts Fitzgerald and Antonioni . . . It's wonderful to have this devastating gem at large in the world again -- Andrew Martin, author of Cool for AmericaDeeply haunting . . . A marvel of a novel * Booklist *Calligarich’s rendering turns la dolce vita into something more akin to Camus’s L’Etranger in a contemporary-ish urban setting. Out of print for years, this welcome new translation is elegiac and heart-rending * Vogue, Best Books to Read This Summer 2021 *The account of a lost generation in Rome in the early 1970s (possibly the children of the children of Hemingway’s lost generation) carries the weight of both family history and generational saga * Kirkus *Evocative . . . Calligarich conjures Italy’s piazzas, parties, beaches, and bars with a mood reminiscent of A Movable Feast . . . the feeling that Leo is alone in the world is poignantly conveyed * Publishers Weekly *

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Book Synopsis'Fans of Elizabeth Strout and Anne Tyler will devour it.' - Daily MirrorDarkly witty, deeply moving – Jackie Polzin's Brood is a startlingly original debut novel about motherhood, marriage and grief, full of sorrow, joy and unrelenting hope.Over the course of a single year, our nameless narrator heroically tries to keep her small brood of four chickens alive despite the seemingly endless challenges that caring for another creature entails – and all the while struggling to confront her own recent loss. From the forty-below nights of a brutal Minnesota winter to a sweltering summer which brings a surprise tornado, she battles predators, bad luck, and the uncertainty of a future that may not look anything like the one she always imagined.'Full of surprise, humor, grief, and wisdom.' - Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves'The most vibrant and compelling slice of life I’ve been privy to in a great while.' - Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had'Splendidly unsentimental, quirky, witty, smart and a complete one-off.' - Clare Chambers, author of Small PleasuresTrade ReviewDarkly funny and poignant. -- Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the TrainFans of Elizabeth Strout and Anne Tyler will devour it. * Daily Mirror *Acutely observed . . . and the chickens provide metaphors for the world at large. * New Yorker *Some novelists floodlight the world; Polzin uses a penlight to beautifully illuminate the least glamorous corners of a quotidian life . . . Her observation of the fragility and loveliness of daily life is so sharp and her commentary so droll, trenchant and precise, that the modest world she describes becomes almost numinous. * Washington Post *Polzin writes beautifully about chickens; she is lovingly cleareyed about their “idiocy” and their dearness. She writes beautifully about everything: the sound of melting snow at the end of a Minnesota winter; a forgotten container of orange sherbet frosted over; private emotion. Her eye for physical detail is surprising, gimlet . . . It’s a pleasure to see what Polzin sees. -- Elizabeth McCracken * New York Times *Brood, which chronicles a year of grief subsumed through care, abounds in wit, charm, and the very mystery of being. -- Joy Williams, author of The Visiting PrivilegeOh, did I love this book and its magnificent cast of characters—human and avian alike. Brood is the most vibrant and compelling slice of life I’ve been privy to in a great while—it’s generous, original, and witty, an absolute treasure of a novel. -- Claire Lombardo, bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever HadA truly lovely book, and so perfectly balanced – it felt like a masterclass in how to tell a story through restraint. -- Jessie Greengrass, author of The High HouseI loved Polzin's philosophical way of writing and the narrator's stoicism in the face of one loss after another . . . Splendidly unsentimental, quirky, witty, smart and a complete one-off. -- Clare Chambers, author of Small PleasuresA beautiful book: sharp and funny and wonky in a way that only accentuates its depth of feeling, its clarity of thought, and its desperately human sadness. -- Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious HeresiesThis is the most wonderful book! Acutely observed and flawlessly conveyed. Completely original, full of surprise, humor, grief, and wisdom and just the right amount of chickens. I am hugely on board with Brood. -- Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside OurselvesWritten with such wry charm, such lightness of touch, you don’t realise how far it’s got under your skin until it’s too late to stop reading. I read Brood in one go. Very funny, very sad, very wise. * Lucy Caldwell *A profound, uniquely enchanting big hearted novel. Unforgettable and deeply affecting. -- Irenosen Okojie, author of NudibranchI have never read a book like this one. Written with such delicacy, such elegance, the prose made me feel that the narrator has opened her heart to me, even as she withholds so much. This was a book about everything—joy and love and beauty and loss. Marriage and motherhood and friendship and grief. All brought to life through the story of a little backyard flock. I was surprised at every turn, moved to laughter and tears both—I could not put it down. -- Emily Ruskovich, author of IdahoA book about caretaking, about trauma and loss, about keeping others and one’s self alive, with sentences so confident and exact they continually took my breath away, Brood is that rare book that lives inside of you long after it’s over, that reminds you of the vast amounts of life that language is capable of conjuring. -- Lynn Steger Strong, author of WantBrood is beautifully written in a sparse, elegant style and is sharply observed. It’s a compassionate portrait of a grieving woman. I absolutely loved her connection with the chickens, and although it is heartbreaking in places, I was left with a hopeful feeling. For me Brood is about beauty in the small things, those ordinary moments that make up a life. It strikes the perfect balance of tender and wry. -- Haleh Agar, author of Out of TouchWitty and profound . . . Told in short vignettes studded with breath-catching wisdom, this novel feels both delicate and sustaining from beginning to end. * Publisher's Weekly *What pleasant alchemy is this novel? Polzin’s debut conjures humors and sadness in Minnesota, where the narrator ponders the potential of motherhood, a pending move, and the strangeness of raising animals who force us to consider the world in a new, slower, sideways perspective (which leads us to wonder: maybe the strangeness is us?). -- Most Anticipated 2021 Preview * The Millions *

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022‘Remarkable' - Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn'Like Finnegans Wake, only readable' - The TimesIn A Shock, a clutch of more or less loosely connected characters appear, disappear and reappear. They are all of them on the fringes of London life, often clinging on – to sanity, solvency or a story – by their fingertips. With this deftly conjured high-wire act, Ridgway achieves a fine balance between drama and fidelity to his characters. The result is pin-sharp and breathtaking.Book of the Year Selection in the Guardian, New York Times, Spectator, Hot Press and The White ReviewShortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize Trade ReviewKeith Ridgway offers his London a luminous glow, but his competing narratives are also rooted in a real place, with a remarkable sense of character and the shifting systems that make up his contemporary urban space -- Colm TóibínLike Finnegans Wake, only readable. * The Times *Ingeniously slippery . . . an expertly constructed house of mirrors -- Lucy Scholes * New York Times Book Review *A sultry, steamy shock of a novel . . . a provocative collection of nine interlinked stories, jostled together like neighbours on a London street or regulars in a pub, which is where most of his characters cross paths * The Spectator *Keith Ridgway's gifts as a writer are many: his complex, vivid characters, his ability to create a humane and tender cityscape in an unfeeling metropolis, and to dig into our fallibilities and desires with such humour and compassion -- Sinéad GleesonEndlessly interesting -- Anthony Cummins * The Observer *Keith Ridgway is an incredible writer and A Shock is a wonder . . . There were times, reading this book, that I never wanted it to end -- Chris Power, author of Mothers A Shock is a meticulously crafted diorama * Vanity Fair *A great and generous book, an incomparable achievement -- Richard BeardSimply imagine being as good at anything as Keith Ridgway is at writing -- Nicole Flattery on Keith RidgwayReaders are instantly involved in the action of Ridgway's worlds, the characters he writes with great compassion and clarity, and always with an awareness of the fuzziness of being alive -- Sarah Gilmartin * Irish Times *Flows over with invention and imagination -- John Self * The Irish Times *In this playful yet deeply sincere novel, Ridgway squeezes into the gaps of realism and makes something beautifully new * Guardian *A Shock is a perfect, living circle of beauty and mystery; clear-sighted and compassionate, and, at times, wonderfully funny. The radiance and vitality of the writing, and its, frankly amazing, control and precision, reminded me of Henry Green but with a warmth and reflective quality that deserves to reach many readers -- David HaydenLike Lewis Carroll or Muriel Spark, the author is not content with the normal measly amount of dimensions: he goes in for bewitchment as a narrative art -- Barbara Epler * TANK Magazine *A Shock is an experiment that pays off: deeply funny, in a morose sort of way, oblique but never frustrating; and with a realism in dialogue that lends its characters depth and reliability * Business Post *Superb . . . Elizabeth Strout meets Bret Easton Ellis * Sunday Times Ireland on Hawthorn & Child *A Shock, Keith Ridgway’s mesmerizing new novel-in-stories, portrays a London on the edge of the edge, precarious, strange and enthralling. Haunting each other and life itself, these characters and their stories will haunt you too! -- John KeeneA masterful polyphonous portrait of modern London * Literary Review *Profane, god-dappled, transcendent, even gently poetic and funny – all those things at once -- Rivka GalchenThis modern look at (dis)connection is stunning, in all its story parts, and as a whole, it's a brilliant mind fuck. Political, pertinent, spunky and funny, A Shock is a grand sweep of modern storytelling. Hold out for the mice . . . -- June CaldwellOften hilarious, sometimes scary, always fearlessly assured. Each chapter is an intimate snapshot, a peek through the window into the life of one of the loosely linked characters living in one area of London . . . these characters vibrate at a frequency that we can all hear, feel, taste and see . . . Ridgway provides a crystal clear shot of grief, loss and loneliness * Irish Independent *There is a canny empathy running through A Shock. This is a masterfully crafted, highly intriguing novel that delivers the shock of its title with the slow, steady build-up of anxiety and dread that often characterizes dreams * Books Ireland *A fascinating and marvellously accomplished piece of work from a great and hugely under-rated Irish author -- Pat Carty * Hot Press *Once this novel clicks into place, its blend of the heady and the visceral is immersive and compelling * Kirkus *This novel will leave the reader with lots to think about, laugh about, cry about * Sunday Independent *Sex, lies, and drugs shape the interlocking and recursive narratives in Irish writer Ridgway’s marvelous latest (after Hawthorn & Child), revolving around a set of neighbouring London houses * Publishers Weekly *A Shock is a provocative collection of nine interlinked stories, set in south London’s sultry streets. In writing about characters many would overlook, Ridgway reminds us that everyone has a story * The i *

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Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Booker PrizeWinner of the Desmond Elliott PrizeShortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the YearShortlisted for the Goldsmiths PrizeLonglisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize'Original, memorable, shimmering' - Sarah Moss'Restlessly inventive . . . delicate and persuasive' - The GuardianSomething gleeful and malevolent is moving in Lia’s body, learning her life from the inside out. A shape-shifter. A disaster tourist. It’s travelling down the banks of her canals. It’s spreading.When a sudden diagnosis upends Lia’s world, the boundaries between her past and her present begin to collapse. Deeply buried secrets stir awake. As the voice prowling in Lia takes hold of her story, and the landscape around becomes indistinguishable from the one within, Lia and her family are faced with some of the hardest questions of all: how can we move on from the events that have shaped us, when our bodies harbour everything? And what does it mean to die with grace, when you’re simply not ready to let go?Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a story of coming-of-age at the end of a life. Utterly heart-breaking yet darkly funny, Maddie Mortimer’s astonishing debut is a symphonic journey through one woman’s body: a wild and lyrical celebration of desire, forgiveness, and the darkness within us all.Trade ReviewRemarkable . . . A tearjerker, but it's hopeful too . . . Brave, inventive and mature * Sunday Times *Here is a book to dance and sing about. An extraordinary, kaleidoscopic dive into language -- Daisy Johnson, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Everything, UnderCompelling and uplifting . . . undeniably impressive: Mortimer is clearly a talent to watch * Telegraph *An original and memorable novel written in shimmering prose. The characters stayed with me long after I’d finished reading -- Sarah Moss, Women's Prize-shortlisted author of Ghost Wall and SummerwaterLyrical and beautiful, this is a novel unlike anything else * Stylist *Both expansive and intimate, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is an intricate portrait of a life hurtling towards the inevitable. An extraordinary debut. -- Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Sunday Times bestselling author of The MerciesStriking . . . formally inventive . . . Sadness is not allowed to crowd out wit and joy * New Yorker *A beautiful novel about death that feels completely alive, pulsing with tenderness and wit -- Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From and The HarpyAn extraordinary debut, unlike anything I've read. Wildly inventive, poetic and poignant, this is a rare gem of a novel that took my imagination to new places and touched my heart. -- Emma Stonex, Sunday Times bestselling author of The LamplightersTechnically dazzling . . . Mortimer has the same felicity with language as Jon McGregor, combining an incantatory prose style with imagery so acute it almost burns * Daily Mail *Ambitious, sprawling . . . brings to mind Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing . . . restlessly inventive . . . delicate and persuasive . . . sharply funny * Guardian *It may move between different styles and moods, but underpinning it all is the book’s bursting energy and, in the face of death, its verve for life * i newspaper *This is a touching, eye-opening perspective on life and illness like you've never read before * Good Housekeeping *Using word placement, font, and shape to create images on the page, Mortimer deepens the reader’s engagement with the story and characters . . . Through breathtaking attention to detail, Mortimer crafts a stunning novel that touches on the expanses one life can contain * Booklist (starred) *Maddie Mortimer's dazzling debut novel about a woman with breast cancer is a life-affirming read - all the more so because of its proximity to death . . . While there are many books that explore these themes, it is rare to find one that does so in such an immersive and harrowing way * Straits Times *

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Book SynopsisThe streets of London's Soho hide a multitude of secrets in this hard-hitting gangland thriller from bestselling author Jacqui Rose.Ten years ago, Jo Martin was released from prison after serving twelve years of a life sentence – but she isn’t Jo anymore. Given a new identity by the courts, and with a different appearance, a ready-made history and even a change of age, Jo can pretend to be anyone . . .Cookie Mackenzie is not only Ned Reid’s lover – but she also works for him. She supplies the girls – and boys – for Ned’s clients. There’s always some runaway kid who needs shelter.Natalie Ellis works at Barney’s bar. A fierce and loyal friend, she’s a shoulder to cry on, a listening ear – but should everyone really trust her to keep their secrets?Lorni Duncan needs to keep running, always looking over her shoulder, especially with a young child in tow. But how will she survive? The refuges are full, and the last thing Lorni needs is the authorities getting involved. Who is she trying to escape from?Everyone has something to hide and a lot to lose, but which of them did Jo become?Trade ReviewPraise for Fatal: A captivating read from one of my favourite authors -- Mel SherrattPraise for Dishonour: A thrilling and gripping novel -- Roberta KrayPraise for Trapped: Gritty and gripping – by a star in the making -- Kimberley ChambersPraise for Poison: A cracking good read -- Jessie Keane

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Book SynopsisAs seen on Kay Burley at BreakfastThe Theory of (Not Quite) Everything by Kara Gnodde is a tender, intelligent and uplifting novel about brothers and sisters, true love in all its forms, and how life is more than just a numbers game . . .'Tender, unique and uplifting, it explores sibling love, romantic love and the love between friends. Such an accomplished debut' – Beth O'Leary, bestselling author of The Flat Share'[A] sunny debut, in which heart and mind must work together to shed light on a family secret' – Daily MailLike circles of a Venn diagram, Mimi and Art Brotherton have always come as a pair. Devoted siblings, they're bound together in their childhood home by the tragic death of their parents.Art believes that people - including his sister - are incapable of making sensible decisions when it comes to love. That’s what algorithms are for.Mimi knows that her brother is a mathematical genius. But she believes that maths isn’t the answer to everything. Not quite. Especially when it comes to love.Still, when Mimi begins her search for a soulmate, Art's insistence that she follow a strict mathematical plan seems reasonable. The arrival of Frank, however - a romantic stargazer who is definitely not algorithm-approved - challenges the siblings' relationship to breaking point. As their equilibrium falters, Art's mistrust of Frank grows, but so do Mimi's feelings. Something about Frank doesn't quite add up, and only Art can see it . . .'Gorgeous' – Rosie Walsh, bestselling author of The Man Who Didn't Call'My book of the year . . . Smart, funny, tender' – Kate Weinberg, bestselling author of The Truants'A delightfully clever tale of first love, loss and an unforgettable sibling relationship' – Marianne Cronin, author of The One Hundred Years of Lenni and MargotTrade ReviewThe Theory of (Not Quite) Everything is such a special novel. Tender, unique and uplifting, it explores sibling love, romantic love and the love between friends. Such an accomplished debut. -- Beth O'Leary, bestselling author of The Flat Share and The Road Trip[A] sunny debut, in which heart and mind must work together to shed light on a family secret * Daily Mail *Gorgeous -- Rosie Walsh, author of The Man Who Didn't Call and The Love of My LifeThe Theory of (Not Quite) Everything is (quite) wonderful. Happily, no maths is required to find Kara Gnodde’s writing – rich with metaphor and passion – totally absorbing. A delight -- Katherine Heiny, author of Early Morning RiserPoignant and compelling * Woman's Weekly *A perfectly balanced equation of head and heart. My book of the year. I fell in love with Mimi and Art, and the smart, funny, tender world that Gnodde creates -- Kate Weinberg, author of The TruantsI was thoroughly invested in both Art and Mimi and emotionally devastated by the twists that lay ahead. Debut author, Kara Gnodde, is one to watch * Red Magazine *Quirky, warm and uplifting, we loved this * Fabulous Magazine *A beautiful book full of life, love and maths -- Matson Taylor, bestselling author of The Miseducation of Evie HepworthIf this novel about mathematicians were a math problem, and Kara Gnodde set out to prove that love is varied, unpredictable, and infinite in its capacity to expand, then she's done it. I adored this quirky, big-hearted book -- Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, YesA delightfully clever tale of first love, loss and an unforgettable sibling relationship -- Marianne Cronin, author of The One Hundred Years of Lenni and MargotKara Gnodde’s debut novel is an exquisite piece of writing that is as intricate and beautiful as mathematics itself. Do not miss this one -- Annabel Monaghan, author of Nora Goes Off ScriptDrawing comparisons to The Rosie Project and Lessons in Chemistry, this debut is a poignant and uplifting tale of love, logic and the devotion between brothers and sisters * Culturefly *The Theory of (Not Quite) Everything is a moving exploration of the bond between siblings and the long shadow of tragic events on the way they navigate relationships. It's also a compelling novel about the many ways that we protect the people we love -- Balli Kaur Jaswal, author of Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows[A] feel-good novel that's meticulously researched, with quirky, well-rounded characters. Plot twists are woven in amongst astute psychological insights, making this a story I gobbled up in just a few sittings. -- Florence Knapp, author of The Names

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Book SynopsisFrom Sunday Times bestselling novelist Rose Tremain comes a gripping novel of murder and revenge set in Victorian England Nobody knows yet that she is a murderer... London, 1850. On a freezing winter's night, a baby is abandoned at the gates of a park only to be saved by a young policeman and taken to the Foundling Hospital.After suffering years of brutal hardship at the Hospital, Lily is released into the world of Victorian London. But she is hiding a dreadful secret...When Lily and the policeman meet again, Lily is convinced that he holds the key to her happiness. But might he also be the one to uncover her crime and so condemn her to death?'Enthralling... Tremain evokes Victorian London with visceral intensity in a gripping and deeply humane novel exploring themes of rejection, poverty, guilt and redemption' ObserverTrade ReviewLily, in addition to its pellucid prose, is shamelessly gripping -- Jake Kerridge * Daily Telegraph *Tremain's latest novel more than lives up to its atmospheric, riveting beginning... It's consummate storytelling, and finds room for redemption as well as revenge -- Hephzibah Anderson * Mail on Sunday *Another memorable and engrossing read from Tremain, which brings Victorian London, and especially courageous Lily, to life on the page -- Joanne Finney * Good Housekeeping *A heartbreaking story set in Victorian England from the pitch-perfect pen of Rose Tremain -- Antonia Senior * The Times, *Books of the Year* *Tremain's gift is to create characters whose experiences span every walk of life, but who are grounded in their author's understanding of the world * Harper's Bazaar *

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