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I can hardly believe that June is only a couple of weeks away. I am quietly confident that this month will bring weather which is nice enough to sit in the garden with a book. Fingers crossed everyone!
Here are ten new releases that look exciting.
Winner of the Brage Prize, the most prestigious award in Norwegian Literature, The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman's Life is a quiet, beautiful exploration of solitude and how we relate to other beings. It has been lauded by European critics for doing something very rare: offering deep pleasure and joy in reading with little theatrics.
Having grown up as an only child in Northern Sweden, Lydia is used to isolation and being on her own. She fills her days with her love of animals, nature, and hard work. She eventually settles into a career as a vet in rural Norway and embraces the rhythms of rural life. In a series of poetic sketches, Lydia tends to the animals in her community, spends time with her aging parents, and falls in love. Despite an increasing need for closer human contact that begins to encroach on her contented solitude, ultimately it is Lydia's satisfaction with her inner life that speaks of an elegance and hope often lost in these clamoring times.
Written in concise prose, the gravity and tranquility of this novel make it a gift― a soothing, contemplative offering about the depths of our inner worlds.
Dax and Daryl, two small-time crooks, concocted an ambitious plan to retire—frame themselves for kidnapping and murdering a rap superstar's trophy wife in an unsolved missing person case! To guarantee their capture, they broke into the crime scene and left behind some incriminating evidence—their blood, saliva and... *wink, wink* more intimate organic material—in the hope that the notoriety it gained would attract Hollywood producers and land themselves a movie deal! Their plan worked—and then it immediately backfired! Their dream becomes a nightmare, and they now have to prove their innocence or face the consequences of the death penalty.
In a small pocket of London, between the houses of No.77 and No.79 Eastbourne Road, lies a neglected community garden.
Once a sanctuary for people when they needed it most, the garden’s gate is now firmly closed. And that’s exactly how Winston at No.79 likes it – anything to avoid his irritating new next-door neighbour.
But when a mystery parcel drops on Winston’s doormat – a curious bundle of photographs of a community garden, his garden, bursting with life years ago – a seed of an idea is planted . . .
Somewhere out there, a secret gardener made a decades-old promise to keep the community’s spirit alive. And now it’s time for The Twilight Garden to come out of hibernation . . .
Sweeping through the 1970s to a modern corner of London, this is a life-affirming story of small spaces, small pleasures – and a community lost and found.
For Alice and her partner Joe, moving to the sleepy Cotswold village of Penton is a chance to embrace country life and prepare for the birth of their unexpected first child. He can take up woodwork; maybe she'll learn to make jam. But the rural idyll they'd hoped for doesn't quite pan out when a dead body is discovered at their local antenatal class and they find themselves suspects in a murder investigation.
With a cloud of suspicion hanging over the heads of the whole group, Alice sets out to solve the mystery and clear her name, with the help of her troublesome dog, Helen. However, there are more secrets and tensions in the heart of Penton than first meet the eye. Between the discovery of a shady commune up in the woods, the unearthing of a mysterious death years earlier and the near-tragic poisoning of Helen, Alice is soon in way over her head.
CAN YOU SOLVE THE MOTHER OF ALL MURDERS?
Penina has grown up believing the Orthodox Jewish teaching that there is one soulmate out there for everyone. But now she's twenty-nine and single, she's staring to wonder if she's the exception.
She has tried everything to find 'the one' and after yet another disastrous date, she can feel even her faith starting to dwindle.
Add to that spending her days surrounded by diamond engagement rings in the jewellery store where she works and her new boss, Sam Kleinfeld, making her life a living hell, and Penina feels more hopeless than ever.
Until she meets Zevi, a handsome, successful, Orthodox singleton just like her. Who has a rather unusual proposal. Could Penina be about to get everything she's ever wanted?
But then there's Sam, her pain of a boss, who she just can't stop thinking about...
As a woman in the early 1980s, Clarissa Phipps is unable to pursue her vocation to the priesthood. Instead, she joins the BBC's religious affairs department, where she is sent to interview celebrated artist, Seward Wemlock, about the panels he is painting for an ancient Cheshire church.
Thirty years on, Clarissa, now rector of that same church, chances upon Brian, the chief bell-ringer and husband of her closest friend, fondling fifteen-year-old David. Dismissing David's claim that they are in love, Clarissa is obliged to act. Will she choose friendship or conscience, sympathy or her official duty of care?
The fallout from that choice forces her to reflect on the original controversy over Wemlock's panels and her concerns about his relationship with the teenagers who modelled for Adam and Eve. Had she acted on the whispers that reached her at the time, how many lives - her own included - would have turned out differently?
Before Jeffrey Boakye was a black teacher, he was a black student. Which means he has spent a lifetime navigating places of learning that are white by default. Since training to teach, he has often been the only black teacher at school. At times seen as a role model, at others a source of curiosity, Boakye’s is a journey of exploration – from the outside looking in.
In the groundbreaking I Heard What You Said, he recounts how it feels to be on the margins of the British education system. As a black, male teacher – an English teacher who has had to teach problematic texts – his very existence is a provocation to the status quo, giving him a unique perspective on the UK’s classrooms.
Through a series of eye-opening encounters based on the often challenging and sometimes outrageous things people have said to him or about him, Boakye reflects on what he has found out about the habits, presumptions, silences and distortions that black students and teachers experience, and which underpin British education.
Thought-provoking, witty and completely unafraid, I Heard What You Said is a timely exploration of how we can dismantle racism in the classroom and do better by all our students.
An atmospheric, feminist retelling of the early life of famed villainess Morgan le Fay, set against the colourful chivalric backdrop of Arthurian legend.
When King Uther Pendragon murders her father and tricks her mother into marriage, Morgan refuses to be crushed. Trapped amid the machinations of men in a world of isolated castles and gossiping courts, she discovers secret powers. Vengeful and brilliant, it's not long before Morgan becomes a worthy adversary to Merlin, influential sorcerer to the king. But fighting for her freedom, she risks losing everything – her reputation, her loved ones and her life.
Discover the beauty and wonder of trees in this stunningly illustrated collection of poetry and stories celebrating trees and what they mean to the world around us . . .
Inspired by the woods around his home, the mighty forests that support our life on Earth, and the Ted Hughes poem which gives this book its title, My Heart Was a Tree is a celebration, and Sir Michael Morpurgo's love letter to trees.
There are stories from an ancient olive remembering Odysseus and Penelope, and from a eucalyptus that gave shelter to a koala; from a piece of driftwood that was made into a chair, and from a tiny sapling carried by a refugee as a reminder of home – these are poems and stories that will amuse, move and energise families and readers of all ages to appreciate the beauty and wonder of trees.
Yuval Zommer's beautiful, detailed illustrations bring the natural world to life, and make My Heart Was a Tree a book to pore over for hours and hours, discovering something new each time.
‘My father had spelt it out to me. Choice was a luxury I couldn’t afford. This is your story, Red. You must tell it well . . .’
A girl known only as Red, the daughter of a Cornish fortune-teller, travels with her father making a living predicting fortunes using the ancient method: the Square of Sevens. When her father suddenly dies, Red becomes the ward of a gentleman scholar.
Now raised as a lady amidst the Georgian splendour of Bath, her fortune-telling is a delight to high society. But she cannot ignore the questions that gnaw at her soul: who was her mother? How did she die? And who are the mysterious enemies her father was always terrified would find him?
The pursuit of these mysteries takes her from Cornwall and Bath to London and Devon, from the rough ribaldry of the Bartholomew Fair to the grand houses of two of the most powerful families in England. And while Red's quest brings her the possibility of great reward, it also leads into her grave danger . . .
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