The House in Little Chelsea

by Clare Hastings
£12.99

The fictional fabric of a London abode

The author Clare Hastings turned to her own Victorian property in Little Chelsea when writing her new novel, which chronicles the imagined lives of the people who lived there.  It follows the fortunes of the changing tenants – from a pair of ambitious newlyweds to a bookseller who sacrifices his bookshelves to accommodate lodgers – the varying accounts depicting the joy and sadness of the passing of time.

Paris Echo

by Sebastian Faulks
£20.00

Here is Paris as you have never seen it before, harsh and relentless, a place to be lonely or lost – a city in which every building seems to hold the echo of an unacknowledged past, the shadows of Vichy and Algeria.

Described as ‘the most impressive novelist of his generation’ by the Sunday Telegraph, Sebastian Faulks has crafted a novel that brings together a city’s urgent present with its inescapable past. In this urgent and deeply moving novel, Faulks deals with questions of empire, grievance and identity, considering how, as individuals and societies – we learn to make peace with our history. With great originality and a dark humour, Paris Echo asks how much we really need to know if we are to live a valuable life.

MOB Kitchen: Feed 4 or more for under £10

by Ben Lebus
£14.99

Having taken the social media world by storm with his one minute, how-to-make recipe videos, MOB Kitchen founder Ben Lebus is revitalising home-cooking with delicious, easy and accessible dishes that absolutely anyone can cook, all on a budget. This, the first MOB kitchen cookbook, contains all the inspiration you need to make budget meals to impress your friends and family, any time.

The core element of every MOB Kitchen recipe is that it is affordable, healthy, delicious, beautiful and easily to make. Unlike most budget cooking sites, MOB Kitchen doesn’t make any absurd store-cupboard assumptions. All that is expected is that you have salt, pepper, olive oil and a small budget, nothing more. Teaming up with musicians, as online, each recipe has a song that’s perfect to play as you cook and can be accessed directly through Spotify.

The Life To Come

by Michelle de Kretser
£8.99

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award, 2018

Michelle de Kretser’s fifth novel is both a delicious satire on the way we live now and a deeply moving examination of the true nature of friendship.

Pippa is a writer who longs for success. Celeste tries to convince herself that her feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka but blots out the memory of a tragedy from that time. Driven by riveting stories and unforgettable characters, here is a dazzling meditation on intimacy, loneliness and our flawed perception of other people.

Profoundly moving as well as bitingly funny, The Life to Come reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can transform, distort and undo the present. Travelling from Sydney to Paris and Sri Lanka, this mesmerising novel feels at once firmly classic and exhilaratingly contemporary.

The Sacco Gang

by Andrea Camilleri
£9.99

Based on a true story, a “wild west” tale of two brothers who battle both the State and a Mafia empire in 1920s Italy.

Raffadali, province of Agrigento, 1920s. The Sacco brothers are free men with strong ideas about socialism and the State. Their lives change radically one morning when their father, Luigi Sacco, receives an anonymous letter from the local Mafia demanding protection money. Luigi tells the police of the extortion letters, but the police don’t know what to do: no one in the village has ever dared denounce the Mafia before. From that moment on, the Sacco brothers must defend themselves: from the Mafia and the forces of order, from their collaborators, from traitors, and from the village’s leaders, as they are assailed by murder attempts, false accusations, and false testimony.

The Sacco Gang is not only a gripping Italian “western,” but an indictment of the Mafia’s influence and the devastation it wreaks in people’s lives.

Old Baggage

by Lissa Evans
£14.99

It is 1928. Matilda Simpkin, rooting through a cupboard, comes across a small wooden club – an old possession of hers, unseen for more than a decade. Mattie is a woman with a thrilling past and a chafingly uneventful present. During the Women’s Suffrage Campaign she was a militant. Jailed five times, she marched, sang, gave speeches, smashed windows and heckled Winston Churchill, and nothing – nothing – since then has had the same depth, the same excitement. Now in middle age, she is still looking for a fresh mould into which to pour her energies. Giving the wooden club a thoughtful twirl, she is struck by an idea – but what starts as a brilliantly idealistic plan is derailed by a connection with Mattie’s militant past, one which begins to threaten every principle that she stands for. Old Baggage is a funny and bittersweet portrait of a woman who has never, never given up the fight.

Happy Little Bluebirds

by Louise Levene
£14.99

For fans of Muriel Spark, a dazzling novel about a young woman thrust into in the opulent world of 1940s Hollywood, where dirty dealings, undercover agents and off-camera romances abound It is September 1940 and Evelyn Murdoch, a translator from the Postal Censorship department, is uprooted from her home in wartime Woking and transferred to Hollywood. She is to assist a mysterious British agent in his attempts to outwit the Los Angeles German delegation and boost the British propaganda war effort. The unhappy young widow is supplied with a new Californian wardrobe, a Bel Air bungalow and her own desk in the writers’ block of Miracle Studios. At first bewildered by the glamorous excesses of this strange new world, she is gradually seduced by the sunlight, orange groves and clever, fast-talking men. But, just as she begins to blossom, her new technicolor ending threatens to slip from her grasp.

Putney

by Sofka Zinovieff
£14.99

It is the 1970s and Ralph, an up-and-coming composer, is visiting Edmund Greenslay at his riverside home in Putney to discuss a collaboration. Through the house’s colourful rooms and unruly garden flits nine-year-old Daphne – dark, teasing, slippery as mercury, more sprite than boy or girl. From the moment their worlds collide, Ralph is consumed by an obsession to make Daphne his. But Ralph is twenty-five and Daphne is only a child, and even in the bohemian abandon of 1970s London their fast-burgeoning relationship must be kept a secret. It is not until years later that Daphne is forced to confront the truth of her own childhood – and an act of violence that has lain hidden for decades. Putney is a bold, thought-provoking novel about the moral lines we tread, the stories we tell ourselves and the memories that play themselves out again and again, like snatches of song.

Epic: A 30-year Search for the Soul of Sport

by Simon Barne
£18.99

This is an autobiography from which the author, award-winning writer Simon Barnes, has been surgically removed. He has reported on six World Cups, seven Olympic Games, cricket on five continents and more than 20 Wimbledons, watching Diego Maradona, Usain Bolt, Sachin Tendulkar and Roger Federer at their peak. Along the way he had soul-revealing conversations with Ayrton Senna and sat on Desert Orchid. His journalist’s experience gives him perspective, until the addictive madness of sport takes over.

Epic is a stunning mosaic of some of the greatest sporting moments in recent years, which build up to provide the reader with a better idea of what sport is for, what differentiates winners from losers, and reveals how sport teaches us how better to enjoy life.This is sport unplugged. Speaking for itself. Allowing the reader to understand sport with more clarity and depth than ever before.

Clock Dance

by Anne Tyler
£18.99

Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life: when she was eleven and her mother disappeared, being proposed to at twenty-one, the accident that would make her a widow at forty-one.

At each of these moments, Willa ended up on a path laid out for her by others. So when she receives a phone call telling her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help, she drops everything and flies across the country. The spur-of-the moment decision to look after this woman – and her nine-year-old daughter, and her dog – will lead Willa into uncharted territory.

Surrounded by new and surprising neighbours, she is plunged into the rituals that make a community, and takes pleasure in the most unexpected things.

A bittersweet novel of hope and regret, fulfilment and renewal, Clock Dancebrings us the everyday life of a woman who decides it’s never too late to change direction, and choose your own path.

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

by Michael Burleigh
£9.99

Incisive, robust and always insightful, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times by Michael Burleigh is both a dazzling tour d’horizon of the world as it is today and a surprisingly optimistic vision of the world as it might become.

In the decades since the end of the Second World War, it has been widely assumed that the western model of liberal democracy and free trade is the way the world should be governed. However, events in the early years of the twenty-first century – first, the 2003 war with Iraq and its chaotic aftermath and, second, the financial crash of 2008 – have threatened the general acceptance that continued progress under the benign (or sometimes not so benign) gaze of the western powers is the only way forwards. And as America turns inwards and Europe is beset by austerity politics and populist nationalism, the post-war consensus looks less and less secure. But is this really the worst of times?

Get Me The Urgent Biscuits

by Sweetpea Slight
£8.99

In 1980s London, Sweetpea Slight is en route to drama school when she is snapped up to work as an assistant to the maverick theatre producer Thelma Holt. Full of wit, charm and backstage intrigue, her irresistible memoir of the resulting twenty years is at once the poignant story of a young woman coming of age, and an exhilarating journey down the rabbit hole into the enchanting world of theatre.

Watling Street

by John Higgs
£7.99

Winding its way from the White Cliffs of Dover to the Druid groves of Anglesey, the ancient road of Watling Street has gone by many different names. It is a road of witches and ghosts, of queens and highwaymen, of history and myth, of Bletchley Park codebreakers, Chaucer, Boudicca, Dickens and James Bond.

But Watling Street is not just the story of a route across our island. It is an acutely observed exploration of Britain and who we are today, told with wit and an unerring eye for the curious and surprising.

Why Mummy Swears

by Gill Sims
£12.99

Why Mummy Swears is the much anticipated new novel from Gill Sims, author of the hilarious Why Mummy Drinksand online sensation Peter and Jane.

It’s every parents’ nightmare – the start of the school holidays – and instead of sitting in the sun, reading a book over a cold, crisp glass of Pinot Grigio, Mummy has two bored moppets to attend to. After frantically booking sports camps, child minder slots, not to mention time off work, Mummy is exhausted. But this is only the beginning…

After being dragged to join the school’s PTA in the new term by an annoyingly kind-spirited neighbour, Mummy is stuck with organising the Christmas Fayre and pleasing all the overly disapproving parents.

In combination with getting to know her father’s surprise new glamorous (and much younger) wife, and being forced to spend more time with her narcissistic mother, life isn’t cutting her much of a break. What more could possibly happen?

Shelfie

by Martha Roberts
£12.99

Clutter-clearing ideas for stylish shelf art

De-cluttering, and then curating our favourite possessions stylishly, is a great way to bring personality into the home and workspace. In the first book on the shelfie, Martha Roberts shows you how to source, sort and arrange your belongings for every room in the house. Photography by Nick Pope, who took the photographs for At Home with Plants, also published by Mitchell Beazley.

Killing It

by Asia Mackay
£7.99

Every working mum has had to face it. The guilt-fuelled, anxiety-filled first day back in the office after maternity leave. But this working mum is one of a kind. Meet Alexis Tyler. An elite covert agent within Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Her first project back is a high-stakes hit of global significance and the old boys network of government espionage is far from ready for the return of an operational mother. But woe betide anyone who ever tells Alexis Tyler ‘you can’t’. She will have it all. Or she’ll die trying . . . And yes, she damn well will be home for bath time.

The White Devil

by Dominic Stansberry
£8.99

Vittoria, as she’s known in Italy, is a small-time actress who left behind a dark past in her native Texas and followed her fading writer husband to the Eternal City.

Guided by her controlling, obsessive brother Johnny, Vittoria soon enters the upper circles of Roman society, becoming a paparazzi darling and mingling with shady cardinals and corrupt senators. Among them is Paolo Orsini, who quickly falls prey to Vittoria’s charms. Too bad he’s married; too bad his wife, an aging film icon, is murdered.

From the ravishing beauty of Rome – a city of dark secrets held within the frescoed walls of glamorous palazzos – to the pristine beaches of Malibu and the dangerous alleys of a mysterious South American city, Vittoria finds herself at the heart of a lethal chase, spiralling dangerously out of control…

Winner of the Hammett Prize for Best Crime Fiction

The Bank That Lived a Little

by Philip Augar
£25.00

Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market

This is an extraordinary corporate thriller, which among much else describes how Barclays came to buy Lehman Brothers for a bargain price in 2008, why it was so keen to avoid taking government funding during the financial crisis, and the price shareholders have paid for a decade of barely controlled ambition. But Augar also shows how Barclays’ experiences are a paradigm for Britain’s social and economic life over thirty years, which saw the City move from the edge of the economy to its very centre.

A Long Way Home

by Peter Carey
£8.99

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in rural south eastern Australia. Together they embark upon the Redex Trial, a brutal car race around the continent, over roads no car can ever quite survive. Set during the 1950s in the dying embers of the British Empire, A Long Way from Home is a thrilling high-speed story, illuminating a country’s relationship with its own ancient culture, and the love made and hurt caused along the way.

Notes on a Nervous Planet

by Matt Haig
£12.99

How can we stay sane on a planet that makes us mad? How do we stay human in a technological world? How do we feel happy when we are encouraged to be anxious?

After experiencing years of anxiety and panic attacks, these questions became urgent matters of life and death for Matt Haig. And he began to look for the link between what he felt and the world around him.