-
Toby and Elinor, brother and sister, friends and confidants, are sharers of a dark secret, carried from the summer of 1912 into the battlefields of France and wartime London in 1917. -
A would-be author has taken time out from life in the city to live in a cabin by a river and write a novel. And not just any novel. A novel that will avoid all the pitfalls and limitations of other novels, a novel that will include everything. At first these new surroundings are so idyllic that it's hard to find the motivation to get started. And then, in all its brutality, the outside world intervenes. Ranging constantly backwards and forwards in time and space, 'Tomorrow' becomes a restless search for meaning in a precarious and elusive world. -
Two kids meet in a hospital gaming room in 1987. One is visiting her sister, the other is recovering from a car crash. The days and months are long there. Their love of video games becomes a shared world - of joy, escape and fierce competition. But all too soon that time is over, fades from view. When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station, they are catapulted back to that moment. The spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love - making games to delight, challenge and immerse players, finding an intimacy in digital worlds that eludes them in their real lives. Their collaborations make them superstars. -
Driving with a donkey stuffed in the back seat; jackdaws pecking brains out through the roof of a confessional box; cat piss and astronauts. This is the world not as you see it, but as it is, twisted from the maverick mind of Blindboyboatclub. These are stories of the strange unsettlings in the souls of men caught in between the past and the possible; stories of heart-blinding rage and disquieting compassion. -
Each of the seven stories in 'Total' is a full world, painted with vivid strokes. From the comforting mundanities of motherhood to a technologically infected near future that mirrors our present with dark prescience, each life captured in this collection is unforgettable. Deftly navigating the fault lines of relationships - new, established or remembered - 'Total' is a powerful collection of brilliantly imaginative stories, and eloquent proof of Rebecca Miller's writing prowess. -
As a child Gifty would ask her parents to tell the story of their journey from Ghana to Alabama, seeking escape in myths of heroism and romance. When her father and brother succumb to the hard reality of immigrant life in the American South, their family of four becomes two - and the life Gifty dreamed of slips away. Years later, desperate to understand the opioid addiction that destroyed her brother's life, she turns to science for answers. But when her mother comes to stay, Gifty soon learns that the roots of their tangled traumas reach farther than she ever thought. Tracing her family's story through continents and generations will take her deep into the dark heart of modern America. -
From Hernán Diaz, Pulitzer finalist and author of In the Distance, Trust is a novel of extraordinary ambition and scope, told in four parts that slowly reveal the real woman behind the stories written about her by others. For fans of Kate Atkinson and Donna Tartt, Trust is an American classic in the making. -
Funny, unexpected, all-the-feels romance from bestselling author Emma Lord. -
Charming, deadly and smart enough to hide it, Christian Harper is a monster dressed in the perfectly tailored suits of a gentleman. He has little use for morals and even less use for love, but he can't deny the strange pull he feels toward the woman living just one floor below him. She's the object of his darkest desires, the only puzzle he can't solve. And when the opportunity to get closer to her arises, he breaks his own rules to offer her a deal she can't refuse. Every monster has their weakness. She's his. His obsession. His addiction. His only exception. -
A pair of novellas, set over two pivotal summers in the lives of two young men from Belfast, recall the constraints of the place where they were born and the times in which they are living. Capturing the innocence of adolescent boys, their passion, confusion and yearning, Two Summers is for anyone who has ever been young.Â
-
Although this was Thomas's only play, it is the culmination of his most spontaneous talents, combining the lyricism of the poems, the fantasy of the early tales, the comic realism of the short stories, and the scenic techniques of the filmscripts. -
Utopia Avenue might be the most curious British band you've never heard of. Emerging from London's psychedelic scene in 1967, folksinger Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss, guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet and jazz drummer Griff Griffin together created a unique sound, with lyrics that captured their turbulent times. The band produced only two albums in two years, yet their musical legacy lives on. This is the story of Utopia Avenue's brief, blazing journey from Soho clubs and draughty ballrooms to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was receding into something much darker - a multi-faceted tale of dreams, drugs, love, sexuality, madness and grief; of stardom's wobbly ladder and fame's Faustian pact; and of the collision between youthful idealism and jaded reality as the Sixties drew to a close. -
Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over and irreversibly etched into its history as an omniscient, somewhat crabby, presence keeps track of village life. In the late sixties a Californian musician blows through Underhill where he writes a set of haunting folk songs that will earn him a group of obsessive fans and a cult following. Two decades later, a couple of teenagers disturb a body on the local golf course. In 2019, a pair of lodgers discover a one-eyed rag doll hidden in the walls of their crumbling and neglected home. Connections are forged and broken across generations, but only the landscape itself can link them together. A landscape threatened by property development and superfast train corridors and speckled by the pylons whose feet have been buried across the moor. -
A spectacularly daring and original novel of our times, of the culture wars and cancel culture, Vladimir explores issues of sex, gender, power, and desire from its own unique perspective. -
In her second collection, Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past, and it is against this landscape that the stories so beautifully articulate all the yearnings of the human heart. -
WAY OUT WESTÂ is a gentle coming-of-age story that will enthral with its texture and world-building, the many delicately and affectionately observed characters and its subtle reflections on trauma, loss and a hope that somehow renews.
-
Ben Brennan, is 17, gay, and happy most of the time. He's finished school and is on track to a great career - all that's missing is falling in love. Can Ben navigate the pitfalls of modern gay dating, with all its expectations, and be true to himself?
-
Five toasts. Five people. One lifetime. Tonight will be the most important night in the life of 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan. Over the course of one evening, at the bar of the Rainsford House Hotel in Ireland, he will raise five toasts to five different people. All five changed him, in their own way, and all five are now gone. Tonight, he will finally lay bare his own life, with all its loves and triumphs, regrets and tragedies. And before the sun comes up, he must work out how his story ends. -
How long can you protect your heart? For years, rumours of the 'Marsh Girl' have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life - until the unthinkable happens. -
Discover how to reconnect with the child in you and unlock the transformative power of play to live a more joyful life. Can you remember the utter delight of playing chase, flying a kite, or getting messy with a box of paints? As children, playing is how we make sense of the world and our place in it. Why then, as adults, do we forget how to play? Drawing on over twenty years of neuroscientific research and clinical practice, psychotherapist Joanna Fortune has discovered that play is central to the human experience - and is the key to living a happier, joyful life. -
As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo's fraternal enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night he finds Doll - Cillian's bruised, sullen, teenage brother - in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins, goaded by his dead mother's dog and struck by spinning lights, Dev is unwillingly drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy. Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can't shake the feeling something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina. -
Sifting through memories, simple scenes nestled into one another like her own beloved wooden doll, the Matryoshka, Maja struggles to unearth her identity. She is marked by a lingering absence - of homeland, mother tongue, mother, warmth. Raised in an unfamiliar country by her taciturn aunt, Maja has brief moments of connection with her fading past such as through her childhood friendship with Marek, a Polish refugee with his own stories of love and loss in the face of war and displacement. An adult Maja finds herself again and again on the outside of her relationships with others, and with herself. This poetic, yet unadorned, account invites an open-ended exploration of the relationship between language and identity. -
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
The first book in Hilary Mantel's award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, with a new cover design to celebrate the publication of the much anticipated The Mirror and the Light
-
This is no ordinary apocalypse...
Hannah wakes up to silence. The entire city around her is empty, except for one other person: Leo.Â
Together, they search for answers amid crushing isolation. But while their empty world may appear harmless, it's not. Perfect for fans of John Green.