The eagle eyed amongst you will notice that my top ten new releases is actually eleven. How could I possibly decide which of these beauties to leave out?
This is the story of The Greatest Funambulist Who Ever Lived...
Born into a post-war circus family, our nameless star was unwanted and forgotten, abandoned in the shadows of the big top. Until the bright light of Serendipity Wilson threw her into focus.
Now an adult, haunted by an incident in which a child was lost from the circus, our narrator, a tightrope artiste, weaves together her spellbinding tales of circus legends, earthy magic and folklore, all in the hope of finding the child... But will her story be enough to bring the pair together again?
Beautiful and intoxicating, A Girl Made of Air brings the circus to life in all of its grime and glory; Marina, Manu, Serendipity Wilson, Fausto, Big Gen and Mouse will live long in the hearts of readers. As will this story of loss and reconciliation, of storytelling and truth.
Already available in hardback, the paperback version of this book will be available on the 2nd September.
A heart-wrenching and ultimately life-affirming Holocaust survivor story that demonstrates the power of love to see us through the darkest of times.
When Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert was liberated in 1945, a Jewish American soldier gave her a banknote on which he’d written ‘Good luck and happiness’. And when her great-grandson, Dov, decided to use social media to track down the family of the GI, 96-year-old Lily found herself making headlines round the world. Lily had promised herself that if she survived Auschwitz, she would tell everyone the truth about the camp. Now was her chance.
In Lily’s Promise, she writes movingly about her happy childhood in Hungary, the death of her mother and two youngest siblings on their arrival at Auschwitz in 1944 and her determination to keep her two other sisters safe. She describes the inhumanity of the camp and the small acts of defiance that gave her strength. From there, she and her sisters became slave labour in a munitions factory, and then faced a death march that they barely survived.
Lily lost so much, but she built a new life for herself and her family, first in Israel and then in London. It wasn’t easy; the pain of her past was always with her, but this extraordinary woman found the strength to speak out in the hope that such evil would never happen again.
1895. Hampstead, London.
Olive Westallen lives a privileged life in her family’s West Hampstead home, but a lonely one. At twenty-eight she is now considered far too old to marry, but Olive is determined to count her blessings, not weep over those that have passed her by. She has radical plans for the future of the Westallen family – plans that will shock the high-society world she inhabits.
London is an exciting new playground to explore for twelve-year-old Ottilie Finch. Her family have recently arrived from Durham, under the cloud of a scandal that Otty is blissfully unaware of. She is in love with London Zoo, the stately homes, the heath . . . and the canals, with their horse-drawn barges and busy bustle at all hours. The only shadow over her days is the mysterious illness of her mother, which keeps Mrs Finch to her room, away from all company.
For eighteen-year-old Mabs, life on the canal is far from exotic: it is a daily grind, where she risks life and limb to take home a meagre pay packet to her widowed father, and her little brothers and sisters. So when she is offered the role of housemaid to the Finches in their grand Hampstead house, it seems like the ticket to a better life. Little does she know that not all is all as picture-perfect as it seems. Mabs is about to become tangled in the secrets that chased the Finches from their last home, and stuck in an impossible dilemma . . .
The Rose Garden is an absorbing and moving novel, perfect for fans of Dinah Jefferies, Lucinda Riley and Rachel Hore.
1943
Evelyn dreams of escaping Vaughan Court and the loveless marriage that led her there. Then, at the height of the Second World War, a single moment changes her life and tethers her to the house for ever.
2016
Decades later, life has given as much as it has taken from Evelyn. Although a bestselling author, Evelyn still cannot escape the painful hold of the past.
Aspiring journalist Bethan hasn't been back to Vaughan Court since she was a little girl. But the opportunity to interview her grandmother's oldest friend - the Evelyn Vaughan - leads her back to North Wales. As Bethan learns about Evelyn's life, she realises the ghosts of the grand house are yet to be laid to rest. And soon she's determined to uncover the secrets hidden within . . .
A provocative must-read of feminist fury about the inhuman lengths some take for success...or justice.
Three campfire secrets. Two witnesses. One dead in the trees. And the woman, thirty years later, bent on making the guilty finally pay.
1988. A group of outcasts gather at a small, prestigious arts camp nestled in the Maine woods. They're the painters: bright, hopeful, teeming with potential. But secrets and dark ambitions rise like smoke from a campfire, and the truths they tell will come back to haunt them in ways more deadly than they dreamed.
2018. Esteemed art professor Max Durant arrives at his protégé's remote home to view her graduate thesis collection. He knows Audra is beautiful and brilliant. He knows being invited into her private world is a rare gift. But he doesn't know that Audra has engineered every aspect of their weekend together. Every detail, every conversation. Audra has woven the perfect web.
Only Audra knows what happened that summer in 1988. Max's secret, and the dark things that followed. And even though it won't be easy, Audra knows someone must pay.
From one of our greatest living writers comes a sweeping novel of unrequited love and exile, war and family.
The Magician tells the story of Thomas Mann, whose life was filled with great acclaim and contradiction. He would find himself on the wrong side of history in the First World War, cheerleading the German army, but have a clear vision of the future in the second, anticipating the horrors of Nazism.
He would have six children and keep his homosexuality hidden; he was a man forever connected to his family and yet bore witness to the ravages of suicide. He would write some of the greatest works of European literature, and win the Nobel Prize, but would never return to the country that inspired his creativity.
Through one life, Colm Tóibín tells the breathtaking story of the twentieth century.
The temples and teahouses of Kyoto are the scene of a Frenchwoman’s emotional awakening in the stunning new novel by international bestseller Muriel Barbery.
Rose has turned 40, but has barely begun to live. When the Japanese father she never knew dies and she finds herself an orphan, she leaves France for Kyoto to hear the reading of his will.
In the days before Haru’s last wishes are revealed, his former assistant, Paul, takes Rose on a tour of the temples, gardens and eating places of this unfamiliar city. Initially a reluctant tourist and awkward guest in her late father’s home, Rose gradually comes to discover Haru’s legacy through the itinerary he set for her, finding gifts greater than she had ever imagined.
This stunning novel from international bestseller Muriel Barbery is a mesmerizing story of second chances, of beauty born out of grief and roses grown from ashes.
Upon the cliffs of a remote Scottish island, Lòn Haven, stands a lighthouse.
A lighthouse that weathered more than storms.
Mysterious and terrible events have happened on this island. It started with a witch hunt. Now, centuries later, islanders are vanishing without explanation.
Coincidence? Or curse?
Liv Stay flees to the island with her three daughters, in search of a home. She doesn’t believe in witches, or dark omens, or hauntings. But within months, her daughter Luna will be the only one of them left.
Twenty years later, Luna is drawn back to the place her family vanished. As the last sister left, it’s up to her to find out the truth . . .
But what really happened at the lighthouse all those years ago?
A twisty new murder story from the bestselling author of the Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries. An old man lies dead and it looks like poison, but his wife isn't the only one who had reason to kill him.
Brighton, 1965
When theatrical impresario Bert Billington is found dead in his retirement home, no one suspects foul play. But when the postmortem reveals that he was poisoned, suspicion falls on his wife, eccentric ex-Music Hall star Verity Malone.
Frustrated by the police response to Bert's death and determined to prove her innocence, Verity calls in private detective duo Emma Holmes and Sam Collins. This is their first real case, but as luck would have it they have a friend on the inside: Max Mephisto is filming a remake of Dracula, starring Seth Billington, Bert's son. But when they question Max, they feel he isn't telling them the whole story.
Emma and Sam must vie with the police to untangle the case and bring the killer to justice. They're sure the answers must lie in Bert's dark past and in the glamorous, occasionally deadly, days of Music Hall. But the closer they get to the truth, the more danger they find themselves in...
They say you die three times.
In the Shadow of the Queens by Alison Weir
The first time for me was when my heart stopped beating beneath his hands by the lake.
The second was when what was left of me was lowered into the ground in front of Ivan and Raksha at Bromma Church.
The third will be the last time my name is spoken on earth.
After a childhood of neglect, Inni is a rebellious teenager, a volatile young woman, a drug addict, a sex worker, an unreliable mother . . . She lives her life on the margins, but it is a life that is full, complex, full of different shades of dark and light, until it is brutally ended one summer's day on a lake shore at the heart of a distant, rain-washed forest.
On the surface, this is the story of Inni's death - but really it is about her life before, and the lives that carry on afterwards. It's about her children, her parents, her childhood, adolescence and the chain of choices, tragedies and accidents that lead her to life on the streets and take her into the wrong crowd, the wrong places, and finally the wrong car with the wrong person.
Sara Stridsberg's new novel is about absolute vulnerability, brutality and isolation. The Antarctica of Love is a heartrending existential drama in which the characteristic blend of Stridsberg's great literary weight and her readability creates an original mix of terror and beauty, longing and black despair. A devastating story of unexpected love, tenderness and light in the total darkness.
Translated from Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner.
Behind every great king stands a queen. And behind every queen, the whole court watches on...
Over the years of his reign, six different women took their place beside King Henry VIII of England as his wife and queen.
But the real stories of the six Tudor queens belong to those who lived among them. Played out in glittering palaces and whispering courts, these are tales of the people who loved and served these women, and those who lied and betrayed them.
Collected together for the first time, In the Shadow of Queens reveals thirteen startling stories from the Tudor court, told by those at the very heart of that world.
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