Almost English
£9.99Longlisted for both the Man Booker and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Charlotte Mendelson’s Almost English is an extraordinary, warm and funny novel about family, food and identity.
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Daughters of Jerusalem
£9.99Behind a crumbling facade of normality, secrets begin to stir within the Lux family home in Charlotte Mendelson’s prize-winning novel Daughters of Jerusalem
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Nemesis
£9.99Paris, 1794. Revolutionary fervour has erupted into the Reign of Terror. A young man, Paul Courtney, hides in a crowd watching as the condemned are brought to the guillotine. Among them is Constance Courtney, Paul’s mother. As he watches her brutal execution, he knows he must avoid the same fate and fulfil his promise to her – to survive, no matter what. He joins Napoleon’s army and is taken to Egypt, but with the world at war and traitors in every corner, just how far will Paul go to ensure his own survival?
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Ripe
£9.99Between the long hours, toxic bosses and unethical projects, Cassie struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty. Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, the black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, its size changing in relation to her distress. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever closer as the world around her unravels. When her CEO’s demands cross an illegal line and her personal life spirals towards a dismal precipice, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are worth the pain, or succumb to the black hole.
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Family lore
£16.99Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides to host her own living wake – bringing together her family and community to celebrate her long life – her sisters Matilde, Pastora and Camila are concerned. What has she foreseen? But Flor isn’t the only one with a secret. Matilde has tried to hide the extent of her husband’s infidelity for years, and now must confront the true state of her marriage. Pastora – always on a mission to solve her sisters’ problems – needs to come to terms with her past. And Camila, the youngest sibling, has decided she no longer wants to be taken for granted. Alongside their struggles, the next generation of Marte women face their own tumult of family obligations, infertility, and heartache.
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What you are looking for is in the library
£12.99‘What are you looking for?’ asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. She is no ordinary librarian. Naturally, she has read every book on her shelf, but she also has the unique ability to read the souls of anyone who walks through her door. Sensing exactly what they’re looking for in life, she provides just the book recommendation they never knew they needed to help them find it. Every borrower in her library is at a different crossroads, from the restless retail assistant – can she ever get out of a dead-end job? – to the juggling new mother who dreams of becoming a magazine editor, and the meticulous accountant who yearns to own an antique store. The surprise book Komachi lends to each will have transformative consequences.
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How to be a French girl
£11.99She’s from Southend. She wanted to be an artist and ended up at the best art school in the country. But that didn’t work out. Now she works as a receptionist in an IT firm, where her only creative outlet is arranging the sandwiches she’s ordered in for other people s meetings. And she still lives in Southend. Outside work, soulless sex has become a symptom of her boredom. Then Gustav appears: older, perceptive, attentive. And French. He’s her way out, she thinks. But more than that, a chance to be creative again: to become someone new.
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Somebody’s fool
£17.99Ten years after the death of the magnetic Donald ‘Sully’ Sullivan, the town of North Bath is going through a major transition as it is taken over by its much wealthier neighbour, Schuyler Springs. Peter, Sully’s son, is still grappling with his father’s tremendous legacy as well as his relationship to his own son, Thomas, wondering if he has been all that different a father than Sully was to him. Meanwhile, the towns’ newly consolidated police department falls into the hands of Charice Bond following the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charice’s ex-boyfriend. When a decomposing body turns up in the abandoned hotel situated between the two towns, Charice and Raymer are drawn together again and forced to address their complicated attraction to one another.
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Burning angel and other stories
£18.99A naïve young linguist sent to the forests of Irian Jaya is manipulated into betraying her mission by a ruthless and disturbed pastor. A deaf girl hired as a maid by a wealthy New York couple turns the tables on her obliviously abusive employers and answers blackmail with blackmail. A psychiatrist treating a girl in rural England becomes ensnared in a love affair that threatens to destroy her career, while a young couple on holiday in Oman accidentally witness a killing that leads to their being hunted as well. An entomologist at a remote hotel in the Andamans survives a tsunami and uses a dead body to further her study of ants. Collected here, Lawrence Osborne’s stories, like his novels, feel like nightmares set against calmly and meticulously observed backgrounds.
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Diary of a void
£9.99When 34-year-old Ms Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her workplace, she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day, she announces that she can’t clear away her colleagues’ dirty cups – because she’s pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is – Ms Shibata isn’t! Pregnant Ms Shibata doesn’t have to serve coffee to anyone. Pregnant Ms Shibata isn’t forced to work overtime. Pregnant Ms Shibata rests, watches TV, takes long baths, and even joins an aerobics class for expectant mothers. But pregnant Ms Shibata also has a nine-month ruse to keep up. Helped along by towel-stuffed shirts and a diary app on which she can log every stage of her ‘pregnancy’, she feels prepared to play the game for the long haul. Before long, though, the hoax becomes all-absorbing, and the boundary between her lie and her life begins to dissolve.
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Last comes the raven
£9.99A complete English-language edition of Calvino’s early short story collection. Calvino was a fabulist and master of the surreal but this collection of early stories shows the enigmatic writer in a more realist mode. Taking place in Italy, both during and after the Second World War, rich with the beauty of the Italian countryside and seaside, these are sumptuous and at times unnerving stories. Circling the ludicrousness of war and the human condition, Calvino’s war-torn Italy is vivid, intense, almost hyper-real.