Historical fiction

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  • Beyond the Edge of Light

    £16.99

    Munich, 1938. As dark shadows gather at the fringe of the traditional Oktoberfest revelry, Julia Ormesby finds herself falling in love with Conrad von Echlau. Later, on the eve of war, they are forced to recognise that the weight of history leaves them little chance of a life together. Julia moves from rescuing refugees to a pivotal role at Bletchley Park, while Conrad is awarded the Knight’s Cross for the capture of a crucial Allied stronghold on the Belgian border. When he is selected for a top secret mission on the Suffolk coast, their destinies collide once more. Immediately after Dunkirk, the nation is gripped by the fear of enemy invasion – so Churchill’s intelligence chiefs have decreed that every member of von Echlau’s incoming unit must die.

  • The Poet

    £9.99

    The life of a poet becomes a parable of hunger, hope, and the price of beauty. Yi Sang, born into poverty, dreams of becoming a poet. His gift with words leads him down a path of wandering, hunger, and rejection – yet also moments of transcendent vision. Drawing on the real life of nineteenth-century poet Kim Byeong-yeon, Yi Mun-yol creates a work that is at once historical fiction, fable, and a meditation on the burden of art itself.

  • Cain

    £9.99

    Two decades after Portuguese novelist and Nobel Laureate José Saramago shocked the religious world with ‘The Gospel According to Jesus Christ’, he did it again with ‘Cain’, a satire of the Old Testament. Written in the last years of Saramago’s life, it tackles many of the moral and logical non-sequiturs created by a wilful God.

  • Sunday’s Children

    £9.99

    One of Cinema’s great masters revisits his childhood – and the end of his parent’s marriage – in a novella of awakening. Over the course of one summer, eight-year-old Pu Bergman realises that his parents are no longer in love. Surrounded by the quiet idyll of the Swedish countryside, with its ponds, rivers and woods, the daily chaos of the family’s ramshackle summer home threatens to end the bright, brilliant haze of Pu’s childhood world.

  • The Master of Go

    £9.99

    Go is a game of strategy which is simple in its fundamentals yet infinitely complex in its execution. This fictional account of a match played between a revered and invincible master and a younger, more progressive, challenger captures the moment in which the traditions of imperial Japan met the onslaught of the 20th century.

  • A Parish Chronicle

    £9.99

    An intimate, magical novel about one enduring church in a rural Icelandic valley – an ode to a quiet way of life now lost to time forever. The resting place of legendary Viking warrior Egil Skallagrímsson’s skull, Mosfell Church is a lonely, country church, fated to be destroyed. But as the plans to destroy it take shape, stories, myth and folklore abound in one magical last attempt to leave Mosfell standing.

  • The Treasures

    £9.99

    Every family’s story starts somewhere. Alice and Tom’s begins here. On the eve of her 16th birthday, Alice Jansen collects her treasures – the keepsakes, figurines and mementoes that help her make sense of her fragile family. But the next day her heart is broken, and the final treasure, a gift from her father, is lost. Two years later, Alice answers a phone call from a stranger and runs away to New York, and tries to forget her last golden summer at the orchard on the banks of the Hudson. Tom Raven can’t understand why he keeps losing so many of the things and people that really matter to him, but he knows for certain that something important is missing from his life. One day, he remembers a forgotten letter and makes a phone call, then leaves Sevenstones, the only place that feels like home, for a strange city.

  • Distant Star

    £9.99

    Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was once the quiet, unknowable, unpromising member of Chile’s young poetry scene. But the military coup of 1973 sees Alberto reborn as Chile’s leading celebrity poet, Carlos Wieder. Known for his daring sky poems, penned in smoke high above the cities, Weider’s dazzling trajectory is a cause for astonishment and speculation amongst his old poetry friends. Where did this talent suddenly spring from? And, how is it connected to the disappearance of the beautiful Garmendia twins? Told from across the years in exile in Europe, the narrator’s attempts to trace the fate of his old circle will lead him to one last confrontation with the brutality of their generation.

  • The Phoenix Pencil Company

    £9.99

    ‘Absorbing’GUARDIAN

    ‘Magical’GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

    ‘Suspenseful’ MAIL ON SUNDAY

    ‘Wildly inventive’ LIZ MOORE

    A REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK

    In this dazzling debut novel, a young reclusive coder unearths the story of a lost Shanghai pencil company and a legacy of magic, espionage and family secrets that will alter the path of her life forever.

  • No. 1 St James’s Park

    £20.00

    At the height of the First World War, Emily Grey finds herself far away from the action, collating Swiss rubber imports in a hut in the middle of St James’ Park. Summoned to MI6’s Whitehall headquarters, Emily learns that her talent for languages is needed elsewhere and she is despatched to Bern to debrief Fritz the Ritz, an agent reporting on the wartime activities of German industry. However, when she discovers that Fritz the Ritz may not be all he claims to be, she is led to the door of an import-export dealership in Lausanne and the unassuming couple who run it. Could they really be at the heart of a network that threatens the lives of millions of Allied soldiers? And, if they are, can Emily, and her ever-eager partner Nigel Nisbet, stop them before they go too far?

  • Icarus 17

    £20.00

    FROM SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR CHARLES CUMMING, THIS IS THE ENTHRALLING NEW ESPIONAGE THRILLER FOLLOWING CAREER SPY, LACHLAN KITE

    'Nobody writes more enjoyable spy thrillers’ ANTHONY HOROWITZ

    ‘Charles Cumming has breathed new life into the spy novel’ BEN MACINTYRE

    'The rightful inheritor of John le Carré's crown' OBSERVER

  • The Scandalous Ladies Football Club

    £18.99

    Meet Minnie Newton – spinster, troublemaker and founder of the first ever women's football club – in a story inspired by real-life Victorian trailblazers, who showed the world that women can do anything they put their minds to, even if they are ridiculed for it at first…

  • Rooms for Vanishing

    £9.99

    A heart-stopping epic of grief and hope, and one family blown apart – across the globe, across time, across parallel possibilities – by war.

  • A Thread of Light

    £9.99

    The lives of Ruby, a ballsy ARP warden, and Kitty, an industrious lawyer fighting for Indian independence, collide during the Blitz.

  • I’ll Be Right Here

    £9.99

    Emigrating alone from Paris to New York after World War II, a young girl, Gazala, befriends two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. When Gazala’s beloved brother Samir joins her in Manhattan, this inseparable foursome becomes the beating heart of an untraditional, multigenerational family. The decades are marked by erupting passions within everyday life. Gazala and Samir make a home together, Alma loses a baby, Anne leaves her husband for his sister and her restless daughter grows up to raise a child on her own. The four friends stand by one another through it all, steadfastly unapologetic about their authentic desires and the unorthodox family they have created.

  • No Friend to This House

    £9.99

    A defiantly feminist retelling of the myth of Medea from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stone Blind.