After years of tension between a king and his people, in 1641 England reaches a semblance of peace. Armies have disbanded, legislation has passed to ensure Parliament will continue to sit, and the people are tentatively optimistic. Radical politicians congratulate themselves on a stunning political victory. Royal servants are coming to accept an altered future.
Then comes winter. With it, chaos, protests, political deadlock, and eventually a remarkable attempt by King Charles I to destroy his opponents. On 4 January 1642 Charles marches on the small riverside city of Westminster at the head of an army, seeking to arrest five Members of Parliament. In doing so, he sets in motion a series of events that will lead to bloodshed and war, changing a nation forever.
Two women. An extraordinary power. An explosive bond.
In a time of revolution, their fates will lie in the turn of a card . . .
It is the early days of the French Revolution and, on the streets of Paris, terror reigns.
Marie Anne Adelaide Lenormand is a young woman with an extraordinary power – through her tarot cards, she can commune with the dead, revolutionaries and the aristocracy alike seeking her out to divine their fortunes. Lenormand is loyal to Marie Antoinette and the dauphin of France, but she has seen the queen’s fate in the cards and must take care that it doesn’t become her own.
Then, one fateful day, she comes across Cait, a scullery maid from Ireland who has travelled to Paris for love. Cait has powers too – she can read people’s pasts as Lenormand reads their futures. The two young women share an electrifying connection, drawn to each other’s abilities. But Cait is hiding something. What will she do – and who will she betray – to bring revolution to the shores of her beloved Ireland too?
The king has been appointed by god to marry six queens. Those six queens are all that stand between the kingdom of Elben and ruin. Or so we have been told.
Each queen vies for attention. Clever, ambitious Boleyn is determined to be Henry’s favourite. And if she must incite a war to win Henry over? So be it.
Seymour acts as spy and assassin in a court teeming with dragons, backstabbing courtiers and strange magic. But when she and Boleyn become the unlikeliest of things – allies – the balance of power begins to shift. Together they will discover an ancient, rotting magic at Elben’s heart. A magic that their king will do anything to protect.
People at Synagogue say she is weird. A psychiatrist says she has Asperger’s. But Evie knows she is a witch. Leeds, England 1982. After the sudden death of her eccentric aunt Mim, Evie Edelman is left with a sizeable fortune, a yellow Alpine Sunbeam and a chihuahua named Peggy. Seizing her chance at independence, she escapes the claustrophobia of her parents’ house and the disapproval of her tight-knit Jewish community and moves to the country to practice her true calling: witchcraft. But trouble follows Evie in the form of her first-love Alex, and property developer Malcolm who just might be Satan himself. As Evie finds herself increasingly torn between magick and reality, and the past and present, rumours begin flying about what exactly a single young woman is doing in a remote village on her own. Soon, Evie starts to wonder whether she is always destined to be misunderstood – and if she will ever figure out who she truly is.
Isaac is Hannah’s entire world. If she lets her guard down, he will be taken from her.
When the Soundfield arrived twenty years ago, the world changed with it. Now, people are forced to live at night due to the deadly heat, food and water are scarce, and everyday life is punctuated by a constant and disconcerting hum.
Hannah spent her early career working on the enigma of the Soundfield, looking for answers; now, she focuses all her energy on keeping Isaac living, not just alive.
To do so, she will have to lie to the people she knows and hope she can trust the ones she doesn’t.
The only thing more dangerous than her lies, is the truth of what she has done.
Sylvie is only happy when she is at therapy. This is because Sylvie is in love with her therapist.
She wants to kiss her and roll around on the floor with her. She thinks about her every second they’re not together (roughly 167 hours and 10 minutes per week). Outside therapy, Sylvie has a quiet life: a job as a veterinary nurse, a tattoo artist friend and seaside walks with her brain-damaged dog, Curtains.
When her therapist delivers some devastating news, Sylvie finds she must imagine new and lasting ways of coping (that don’t include being adopted by the therapist). As her world begins to open up, Sylvie wonders, is she finally ready for a bravery of feeling?
Twenty years ago, during a family holiday on the savage and remote island of Little Auger, eleven-year-old Hazel left her bed and was never seen again. The unanswered questions surrounding Hazel’s disappearance tore three families apart and the girls left behind all experience their own terrible guilt. Roz, because she broke a promise; Catrin, because it was her idea; and Nina, who slept through it all. Their friendship never recovers and all three women go on to lead vastly different lives.
Twenty years later, they each receive a phone call from Stella Cox, a true-crime podcaster, who has unearthed new evidence about Hazel’s disappearance. There is no doubt Stella has found something important but the question is, how can the women—once best friends, now strangers—trust her, or each other?
Will their return to the island finally reveal the truth, and if it does, is it something any of them are prepared to learn?
Love cynic Erron Grover and hopeless romantic Casey Hart led very different lives, but their roles as Apollo agents have brought them together in their afterlife. By day they match up pre-destined couples to fulfil their daily quota of assignments; by night they can be found sipping cocktails in their favourite jazz bar.
But when several of their missions result in a bizarre series of deaths, they find themselves under suspicion of involvement – and the fabric of reality starts to unravel. Faced with the collapse of civilisation, far too many geese and a few questionable soul reapers, the two men are forced to go on the run to solve the murders and save the world . . .
Mother Clap’s Holborn coffee house is open to all comers, a place of companionship and community, until a tip-off leads to a midnight raid.
Two women, exiled from their families, set up a utopian homestead in a remote Welsh cottage, inspiring a generation of Romantic poets.
The celebrated Chevalier d’Éon, soldier, diplomat and spy, challenges a rival to a fencing match. The sweepstake is not over who will win, but whether the Chevalier is a man or a woman.
A dark theatrical comedy about the vexed and violent relationship between Britain and Ireland, from twice Booker-shortlisted author Patrick McCabe.
It’s the summer of Brexit, and in a seedy hotel room on the South Coast of England, Chenevix Meredith finds his old comrade Henry Plumm murdered in the bathtub. Piecing together their shared history, Meredith looks back at the years they spent in Dublin half a century ago, running a theatrical agency and rubbing shoulders with actors and assassins alike in the swirling smoke of public houses. What their clients didn’t know, is that the flamboyant pair were undercover agents of the British state, posted to identify terrorist networks.
Goldengrove is a deeply immersive, satirical novel in which nothing is as it seems and no one is who they say there are. Steeped in film noir, classic crime and popular culture, McCabe blurs the lines between what’s real and what’s staged in this absurd game of cat and mouse.
