Archives: Book

A mesmerising and unsettling novel from a powerful new voice Seeking release from their small-town existence, two teenagers drive north on a vaguely plotted road trip.

Adam and Teddy hope to leave boyhood behind. But they carry with them all the upsets and resentments they have accrued in their unhappy lives to date.

As the pair’s journey progresses, the mood fluctuates as each of them sets out to prove himself. The dynamics of their friendship begin to unravel, culminating in an act of devastating – and all too familiar – violence.

In taut and stylish prose, The Passenger Seat examines how men learn and perform masculinity. Rejecting easy answers, it keeps our eyes trained on the vanishing point where vulnerability edges into violence, alienation into aggression.

Meet Goldie and Vee: sisters, dreamers, grafters. In their forties, both appear to have it all…

Until Goldie finds the courage to leave Benedict. Once upon a time their faux marriage worked, but when the magnetic Wolfie comes on the scene, her world of pretending falls apart.

Vee’s neat world is spiraling, too. Since her ex-husband Jamie started dating Julia her cruel school bully, Vee’s long-buried insecurities are out of control. She needs to get away, and fast.

So when Goldie suggests a holiday in France, Vee leaps at the idea. A curiously well-timed invitation – just as speculations around Goldie’s brilliantly brief pop career back in the nineties are beginning to resurface. Escaping’s one thing, but nothing stays secret forever, and as Vee and Goldie’s unresolved pasts make surprise returns, the stories them girls once told themselves begin to look very different…

It’s the ultimate test of endurance: two-hundred-and-fifty miles in the brutal heat of the Sahara, with only the supplies you can carry on your back.

Adri is ready. Returning to ultra-running in the wake of a scandal, she needs to prove to herself – and her young son – that she’s a winner.

When a fellow runner is badly injured, Adri knows something isn’t right. Yet in a race this extreme, even a dead body can be explained away.

But there’s a killer stalking the hot sand. And the problem with running faster than everyone else, is that you’re miles ahead of anyone who can save you…

Michelle lives a quiet life in Amsterdam with her husband Daniel and their family. But when Daniel’s twin, the President of Kazichia, suddenly dies in a car crash, Daniel has no choice but to return home for the first time in twenty years, and Michelle follows along.

From the moment they arrive, Daniel is pressured to succeed his brother as President. Kazichia, a former Soviet state, has been ruled by his family for three generations, and now that the throne is empty, the country is left teetering on a knife-edge.

As tensions begin to rise, Michelle feels more and more that they should flee. But when an anonymous rebel leader – known only as The Man With a Thousand Faces – initiates a full-blown attack, Daniel decides to step in. But will he be able to lead the country through the crisis? And if he does, will he be able to give up his newfound power? Or will Michelle lose her husband to his own hunger for greater political reign?

It is September 1974 and two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realising the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. A young – and beautiful – apprentice is just what he needs.

He sweeps Nicholas to Rome, into the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism.

But Nicholas has a secret and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amidst the rising tensions of Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn’t intend.

The Silver Book is at once a queer love story and a noirish thriller, set in the dream factory of cinema. It’s a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.

Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. Their books include The Lonely City, Everybody and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time. They are represented for books by Rebecca Carter Literary.

What if your perfect life was a charade?

It is August, and eight old friends have gathered at a country house for a writers’ retreat. By day, there is reading beside the pool or writing in the shady corners of the estate. In the evenings – drinks, dinner outdoors, games, midnight swimming.

But as temperatures rise in the stifling last days of summer, tensions do too. Old jealousies, new temptations and bitter rivalries bubble to the surface. By the end of the week, friendships – and lives – will have changed forever.

Astute, witty and page-turning, The Book Game is a novel about ambition, competition, regret and desire; about paths not taken and last chances suddenly seized; about the games people play. It asks what it means, in all senses, to be in the middle of life.

‘Glitters with secret agendas, hidden lies and sun-soaked desires’ Emma Stonex

‘Whip-smart and made me laugh out loud. Magnificent’ Joanna Cannon

‘Thorny and sexy’ Beth Morrey

‘Pulsing with heat and intrigue’ Marianne Levy

When Dr. Gul Delani receives a call in the middle of the night from the Sindh police, she thinks they may have finally found her niece, Mahnaz – a precocious, politically conscious teenage girl who went missing three years prior. Gul has been racked with grief since Mahnaz’s disappearance, and distracts herself through work: she’s a talented curator at the Museum of Heritage and History in Karachi, one of the country’s leading experts in archaeology and ancient civilizations, a hard-won position for a woman. But there is no news of Mahnaz.

Instead, Gul is summoned to a narcotics investigation in a remote desert region in western Pakistan. In her wildest dreams, Gul couldn’t have imagined what she’d find there: amid a drug bust gone wrong, there is a mummy – life-size, seemingly authentic, its sarcophagus decorated with symbols from Persepolis, the capital of the Achaemenid Empire. The discovery confounds everyone. It is both too good to be true, and for Gul, too precious to leave in careless or corrupt hands. Aided by her team of unlikely misfits, Gul will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of it, even as her quest for the truth puts her in the throes of a dangerous conspiracy and threatens to collide with her ongoing search for Mahnaz.

A portrait of a city fueled by corruption and a woman relentlessly in pursuit of justice, The Museum Detective is an exciting, gritty new crime thriller that announces a whip-smart and brilliant sleuth and builds to a stunning, emotional conclusion that readers won’t soon forget.

Clarrie Brooks isn’t just having a bad day – her life seems to be falling apart. She’s struggling to keep her beloved grandmother’s bookshop afloat, her boyfriend has just dumped her and now it’s, quite literally, raining inside her run-down apartment.

To top it off, the bookshop loses power for the tenth time this week . . . just as new author Declan Archer walks in to sign stock. Declan advises Clarrie to invest in better lighting. Clarrie suggests to him that he write a better book…

Two years later, Declan’s new book is on its way to becoming a bestselling cult classic – and he’s dedicated it to the bookseller who told him to write a better one. As speculation builds over the identity of the bookseller, Clarrie finds herself thrown into the spotlight. Could it be time to open her heart and draft a brand-new love story?