category: Fiction

The British far right is working to dismantle our democracy. This shocking, eye-opening undercover journey reveals who they are, how they operate and how they are normalising extreme ideologies including eugenics.

In summer 2024, riots swept England in the biggest wave of far-right violence in the post-war period. But far-right activity takes many other forms as well, all of them dangerous.

Journalist Harry Shukman knows the dangers all too well: he’d gone undercover to infiltrate these groups. For over a year, he carefully attached his hidden lapel camera and pretended to be an extremist named Chris.

We follow Shukman as he hangs out in the pub with a secretive community network, canvasses with political party Britain First and attends a neo-Nazi conference. We meet a circle of Holocaust deniers, a race science organisation with a major Silicon Valley investor and right-wing think tanks supported by Conservative policymakers. What we witness is hard to believe, or stomach.

Year of the Rat is a gripping and urgent exposé – nail-bitingly tense, darkly absurd and utterly chilling. Risking his safety and sanity, Shukman has removed the far right’s terrifyingly everyday mask. Now, we must ensure it stays off.

They knew they were changing history.
They didn’t know they would change each other.

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight. They have come here from all walks of life, and they are thrown into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship.

Dora was never meant to go to university, but, after losing both her brother and her fiancé on the battlefield, has arrived in their place. Beatrice, politically-minded daughter of a famous suffragette, sees Oxford as a chance to make her own way – and her own friends – for the first time. Socialite Otto fills her room with extravagant luxuries but fears they won’t be enough to distract her from her memories of the war years. And quiet, clever, Marianne, the daughter of a village vicar, arrives bearing a secret she must hide from everyone – even The Eights – if she is to succeed.

But Oxford’s dreaming spires cast a dark shadow: in 1920, misogyny is still rife, influenza is still a threat, and the ghosts of the Great War are still very real indeed. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time, their friendship will become more important than ever.

The Eights is a captivating debut novel about sisterhood, self-determination, courage, and what it means to come of age in a world that is forever changed.

Maggie Flynn isn’t your typical 1960s mum.

She’s a spy, an unsuspecting operative for MI5, stalking London’s streets in myriad disguises.

Widowed and balancing her clandestine career with raising a Beatles-mad teenage daughter, Maggie finds comfort and purpose in her profession – providing a connection to her late husband, whose own covert past only surfaced after his death.

But Maggie’s world spins out of control when a chance encounter with a mysterious Russian agent triggers a chilling revelation: he knew her husband. And what’s worse, the agent suspects someone on home soil betrayed him.

As Maggie searches for answers, she’ll question everyone – and everything – she thought she could trust. In the murky and perilous world of espionage, can she outsmart those determined to keep her silenced?

‘A gripping story and great 60s detail, Mrs Spy is the female answer to Harry Palmer’ – Ian Moore

‘Mrs Spy is a delicious recreation of 1960s London… rich and well-constructed’ – Emma Flint

Four women

Annie has brought her three best friends and their families together for a long weekend away in a gorgeous seaside Airbnb. It should be idyllic – sun, sea, sand, cocktails and laughter.

One shocking secret

But below the surface, none of these friendships are quite what they seem. And Annie has a secret – and an earth-shattering favour to ask of one of her friends.

A life-changing decision

As the idyllic weekend turns sour – arguments, grudges and a boat trip that goes awry – Annie must make her devastating decision – and change everyone’s lives, forever.

About the author

Hannah Begbie studied Art History at Cambridge University. She went on to become a talent agent, representing BAFTA and Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning writers and comedians for fifteen years.

Her debut novel, Mother, won the RNA Joan Hessayon Award for new writing and has been optioned by the BAFTA-winning Clerkenwell Films for adaptation into a television drama.

She lives in north London with her husband and their two sons.

ONCE UPON A TIME LIKE YOU’VE NEVER READ IT BEFORE . . .
 
DI Lyla Rondell is on the case of a lifetime. Tasked with investigating a series of perplexing deaths, the only lead she has is that each appears to be based on a different classic fairy tale. Far from the stuff of bedtime stories, the press is having a field day with what they have named the Grimm Ripper Murders.
 
But as the bodies stack up, Lyla’s whole world is about to flip on its head. Because the killer’s bloody trail stretches deep into her own origin story, and when she discovers the truth, nothing will ever be the same again.
 
Faced with the fact that everything she knows is fiction, Lyla will have to take a little creative license of her own if she’s going to turn the final page on the killings . . . 

A. K. (ALEXANDRA) BENEDICT is a best-selling, award-winning writer of short stories, novels and scripts. Educated at Cambridge, Sussex and Clown School, she has been an indie-rock singer, an actor, RLF Fellow, and a composer for film and TV, as well as teaching and running the prestigious MA in Crime Thrillers at City University. She is now a full-time writer and creative coach.   As A. K. Benedict, she writes acclaimed short stories, high-concept novels and award-winning audio drama for Big Finish, Audible UK, Audible US and BBC Sounds, among others. She won the Scribe Award for her Doctor Who radio drama, The Calendar Man, and was shortlisted for the eDunnit Novel Award for The Beauty of Murder and the BBC Audio Drama Podcast Award for Children of the Stones. As Alexandra Benedict she writes puzzle-filled Christmas mysteries, of which The Christmas Murder Game and Murder on the Christmas Express were both bestsellers and The Christmas Murder Game was longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. Her most recent festive thriller, The Christmas Jigsaw Murders, was published in 2023.   She lives on the south coast of England with writer Guy Adams, their daughter, Verity, and dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

Some people move to the big city hoping to find themselves – Sickan Hermansson isn’t leaving it up to chance.

Twenty-one, friendless, without money but not without hope, Sickan’s arrival at Stockholm University represents a new start. Her lonely childhood in a small southern town has left her utterly unprepared for intimacy: for friends, for sex, for love even. But Sickan is determined to build a new version of herself from the ground up, to make up for lost time. To simply be normal.

Just as Sickan seems to be finding her first ever friends, in whose company she finally feels safe, she meets Abbe: beautiful, charming – and by some miracle he wants her too. Unlike Sickan, Abbe seems completely at ease in his own skin. A solid foundation then, on which to build a relationship? Maybe?

What A Time To Be Alive is a story of class, sex, loneliness, and the trials of young womanhood. But above all, it’s a story of firsts: the first party you’re actually invited to, the first moment you fall in love, the first time you betray a friend. The first time you ask yourself, how much of myself am I willing to sacrifice, to finally fit in?

Jenny Mustard is a writer and social media influencer, born in Sweden but living in London. She has over 600k followers, and more than 50 million views on YouTube. Together with her partner David she co-hosts a culture and literature podcast, with 20,000 downloads per episode.

Jenny and her work have featured in the Observer, the Independent, Vogue, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Okay Days, was published in 2023. Her second novel, What A Time To Be Alive, will be published in 2025.

When a boy in her town starts claiming that a demon is stalking him – Alecto Gray has no choice but to investigate. After all, that’s exactly what her brother Lucas said, right before he died. Soon, Alecto’s investigation leads her to uncover a sinister underbelly to her small seaside town with two warring factions at its heart. Armed only with her razor-sharp wit and a talent for getting into trouble, Alec endures threats and kidnappings, and even the spark of a new romance, in order to get to the truth. But can she handle the truth or will the darkness at the heart of the mystery destroy her as well?

Laure Eve is a French British hybrid who grew up in Cornwall. Her first novel, Fearsome Dreamer, is a wonderfully ambitious but lusciously rich and multi-layered novel, a magnificently crafted alternate universe dripping with sensuous imagination, characters to fall in love with and an unputdownable storyline. Her debut has been longlisted for the Branford Boase Children’s Prize and Waterstone’s Childrens Prize. She has published a second novel called The Illusionists. Laure Eve’s next novel, The Graces, is a seductive, powerful and startlingly original young-adult thriller in the vein of The Virgin Suicides and The Secret History (and films such as The Craft). This is her first novel for older YA (16+) readers. It was shortlisted for the YA Book Prize 2017. The Curses, which continues the magic of The Graces, was published in 2018. Blackheart Knight, was  published in 2021 by Quercus.

Someone Like Pearl explores what happens when 27-year-old Pearl – who lives with OCD – pushes herself outside her comfort zone in search of a real connection. Pearl finds solace in the small routines of her life – lunch with her best friend Una, talking with her therapist Mairead and working with the O’Callaghans in their local shop. Her other routines – from needing to count to ten before she can go up or down the stairs, to obsessively sanitising her hands – pose more of a problem, that is until Jack enters the picture.

Claire Frances has worked as a journalist and freelance feature writer for BBC Countryfile Magazine and Devon Life and was a host blogger for The Huffington Post UK.