When lauded writer Helen Van Noten is offered the exclusive story that could save her hard-won career, she must travel from London to sun-drenched Menorca to cover the opening of an exhibition by the mysterious Sophia Bamford. Sophia hasn’t been seen in public since her New York socialite parents died in a helicopter crash years earlier. Now, the eyes of the world are on her.
As Helena finds herself drawn into the spotlight, what began as a lifeline quickly becomes dangerous. The deeper she digs, the more she uncovers a web of lies, imaginary fortunes, and false identities constructed as carefully as the art she writes about. Long buried secrets are stirring, and someone will go to any length to keep them hidden.
Melody is anti-love. After turning down her boyfriend’s marriage proposal she swears to never fall in love again so she doesn’t break any more hearts. When all the lovers’ padlocks are removed from a beautiful Dublin bridge, and people start splitting up, Melody is intrigued enough to investigate for her podcast.
Die-hard romantic Al is heartbroken. His fiancé has left him for his best friend and has sworn off love, so when the work opportunity comes to remove love locks from the bridge, he takes it.
When Melody and Al – quite literally – collide, sparks fly. Can the two of them get to the bottom of the mystery? And, in the middle of solving everyone else’s heartbreak, can they unlock their own love?
It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of her flesh, giving it life. She fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open, and yet – it watches and listens.
It looks on as Christenze is haunted by rumour, it hears what the people whisper. It sees how, in the candlelight, she gazes with love at her friends, and hears the things they say in the shadows. It knows pine forest, misty fjord and the crackle of the burning pyre. It observes the violence in men’s eyes and the cruelty of their laws. In time, it begins to understand that once a suspicion of witchcraft has taken hold, it can prove impossible to shake…
A shocking murder.
A ship full of suspects.
On a luxury cruise from Southampton to New York, the annual gathering of the mysterious Midnight Chorus Society is in full swing. Unbeknownst to the rest of the innocent passengers, the deadly convention is made up entirely of serial killers, wannabes and their fans.
Travelling on board is Hollywood royalty Jacqui Dulac, star of the television show Lady Detective, and her latest ghost-writer, Martha Hammond. Yet when Martha witnesses a shocking murder on deck, with a single red button found at the crime scene, the quarrelling duo must put aside their differences to become real-life detectives…
But with a cruise liner full of the world’s most notorious serial killers, they both know that when there’s been one murder, another is sure to follow. And as a storm rocks the ship, can Martha and Jacqui identify the killer before it’s too late?
Two children lost. The wrong one found.
The town of Aurora is waiting to die. A few miles away a deep seam of coal burns underground, the fire creeping closer ever year. Businesses close. Families leave. Hope dwindles.
And then one day, nine-year-old Danny Yates comes back from the dead. He walks into town half-starved and silent, ten months after he and his best friend Will Keefe were presumed drowned. But when Danny does finally speak, he swears that he’s not Danny anymore. He’s Will.
Danny’s mother is convinced that her boy has come back wrong, and that the town itself is now at risk from whatever dark force returned her son. Chief of Police John Deacon is more interested in how the sinister disappearance of two boys could have been written off as a tragic accident, and who was responsible. What happened to Danny to make him take on his friend’s name, his personality? And does Danny’s return mean there’s a chance that Will is still alive?
Big Man follows the life of Big, a middle-aged Black British gay man who lives a gentle life with his boyfriend, Little, in their home in East London. Big and Little enjoy evenings out and group holidays with friends, as much as practising yoga together at home, and running side by side along the Hackney canals.
Big came of age in the club scene under the watchful eye of Mother, an African American trans woman who made a home and name for herself in London, her house a refuge for wayward queer youths like Big. When he finds out Mother is releasing a memoir, the two reconnect after decades of distance, and Big finds himself having to confront a long-repressed assault that opens old – and new – wounds.
A tender, daring novel full of gentle humour, Big Man explores themes of identity, aging, sex, family and trauma, turning a lens on what it means to age as a queer person, while being a double-edged love letter to the people and places that make us.
A story of complicated families and a wartime secret that ripples down through the generations from a writer of exceptional talent
Tommaso is just about making it work: travelling abroad for his job, helping his girlfriend with her two unruly sons, and keeping up with the eccentricities of his Italian grandmother, Alma. But as Alma grows increasingly troubled by strange and unsettling memories, Tommaso realises that there is much in her past that he doesn’t know. And the more he discovers, the more it seems that the secrets she has guarded for so long might not only overwhelm her, but upend his own precariously balanced life too.
Reaching back to the tumultuous days of the Italian resistance during the Second World War and into the domestic chaos of modern life, this is a story of the past’s long shadow, and the families we have and those we make.
Within the walls of Winterbourne dwells a secret room, with an unspeakable collection of books.
Librarian Anne Adams has found the perfect escape: a job cataloguing the library of Winterbourne, an architectural masterpiece on a remote island off the west coast of Scotland. Surrounded by an awe-inspiring landscape, the library is magnificent, with priceless first editions, a librarian’s dream.
However, Anne’s early weeks in her new job are beset by obstacles – no internet, a house plunged into darkness every night and unexplained mysteries on the island. After weeks of isolation, upon meeting the mysterious owner Lucien Broussard, Anne is puzzled. Eloquent and well-travelled, his reclusive nature seems uncharacteristic. But after finding a cryptic clue within the pages of a book, Anne discovers that Broussard’s collection includes everything from the mundane to the books no one should ever open . . .
A new PI. A dead rockstar. A tangled web of secrets.
When Ethan Adler set up his new PI agency in central Manchester, he wasn’t expecting his first case to be so high profile – investigating the mysterious death of rock star Dylan Vy.
Ethan has been avoiding the spotlight ever since his beloved wife Maggie’s untimely passing. His grief has been complicated by rumours that Maggie was pregnant with another man’s child at the time of her fatal accident. And because said accident took place just hours after Ethan won the lottery, a cloud of suspicion has followed Ethan ever since.
With the help of his assistant Amelia, Ethan throws himself into uncovering the truth about Dylan Vy. In a fast-escalating investigation, they uncover a labyrinth of secrets, lies and deadly connections between bandmates, girlfriends and a volatile manager. And when Dylan’s unreleased music is leaked on the dark web, speculation swirls that the lyrics contain hidden clues that might lead to the killer. But who leaked these songs, and what is their secret motive? In the midst of a media frenzy and a storm of fan conspiracy theories, who can Ethan trust?
As Ethan digs deeper, he must also confront his own demons — the lingering questions about Maggie’s death and the growing realisation that those closest to him may have played a role…
A bookseller must escape the infamously haunted library that holds her darkest secrets, but with a murderer in her tour group, escaping alive is not as simple as it seems, in this twisty locked-room thriller.
Aria Stokes is finally feeling settled—she lives in a tiny New York apartment, works as a bookseller at a local shop, and has even taken a leap of faith in love by indulging her attraction to bookstore regular Jasper. And he seems to already know her so well.
As a Valentine’s Day surprise, Jasper gets the two of them tickets to an exclusive, after-dark tour of the Daedalus Library—the grandiose establishment famed for its immersive genre-based reading rooms and, more notoriously, its rumored hauntings. While Aria normally loves all things ghastly, this place holds more dark secrets than she’d prefer Jasper to know. Like that the last time she was here, she left a body behind.
But when the automatic-door entry malfunctions and Aria, Jasper, and the five other people in their tour group become trapped in the library, they are forced to venture through the storied rooms and hidden passageways of the Daedalus in search of escape . . . and Aria quite literally has nowhere to hide from the shadows of her past. Then the group learns there’s a murderer in their midst.
Now, as she tries to break out of the library’s intricate reading rooms, Aria has to decide who she can trust—and what secrets are best kept buried—if she wants to make it out alive.
