Female Life on Planet Earth
£16.99A daughter uncovers the secrets of her mother's past in this profound and darkly funny novel
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How to Find a Romance in a Bookshop
£10.99Petra doesn’t like books anymore – not since her career as a literary agent imploded after a social media typo went viral. Now she is stuck for six months, babysitting a little bookshop by the sea, surrounded by books that just remind her of her failure. Ross McCloud’s award-winning debut novel blew the minds of the world’s literati, but that was five years ago. Now Ross and his keenly awaited second work have vanished. Something has gone wrong – horribly wrong – and Ross doesn’t want to talk about it. Marooned in Capelthorne’s Bookshop miles from London, Petra can’t stop thinking about all the ways she has let people down. Then she discovers Ross lurking, incognito, in the second-hand books section. Misery loves company it seems, and a kinship tentatively forms.
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Hollywood, Ending
£22.00For rising young actors Kai Laramie and Juniper Castillo, being cast in the buzzy biopic Andy Warhol Never Gets Old is the opportunity they’ve both been waiting for. They’re on the verge of breaking out, and maybe even falling in love. Soon, the movie is blowing up, and so are their lives – in exciting, but also terrifying, ways. John Green artfully blends a behind-the-scenes Hollywood love story with an unflinching examination of the insatiable attention economy. Told through dual points of view, the novel follows Kai and Juniper from the first days on location to the movie’s premiere, brilliantly juxtaposing their story with the on-screen study of Warhol’s life at the dawn of celebrity culture.
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The Housekeeper
£20.00Mrs Danowski – known as Danni – is the housekeeper of a grand house on the wild coast of Cornwall. When a glamorous young writer, Daphne du Maurier, visits Manderville Hall to research her new novel, she and Danni are drawn into a clandestine and intoxicating affair. For Danni, it is an all-consuming love; for Daphne a submission to long-suppressed desires. But their fragile secret is vulnerable to prying eyes and destined for heartbreak. When Daphne’s novel launches to triumphant success, Danni is distraught to find herself transformed into a malign and jealous character on the page. She seeks respite from the hurt by telling her own story: The Housekeeper. What unforeseen encounters, what forbidden feelings can inspire a writer?
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Farewell to Eden
£22.00Philip Deval, a soldier recently returned from the beaches of Normandy, arrives in Palestine on a peace-keeping mission in the final days of the British Mandate. The Sea of Galilee glitters in the distance as war-weary troops marvel at the novelty of oranges and sun – a paradise that belies a fierce new conflict about to erupt. Some years later, Philip begins work teaching at a school in the English countryside and meets the enigmatic music mistress, Frances Darwood. Over long evenings spent listening to records in her music room, they grow close. But Philip is a changed man, and must confront the secrets and scars of all he has lived through – which threaten, even now, to upend his future.
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The Strangers
£20.00Over the year following the death of her mother, a woman grapples with the rawness of her new pain and with the older – but no less powerful – grief for the babies she lost in the preceding decades. At the same time, a new kind of animal begins to appear, first in the UK and then gradually across the world. A little like a badger, a little like a cat, but with a long snout that leads to the nickname ‘mimmoth’, it’s a creature both baffling and unsettling, provoking speculation, fear, rage and even devotion in the humans in which it appears to show little interest. For the narrator, the connection she feels to the mimmoths is a solace, but maybe also a kind of madness. As the impact of the creatures begins to be felt in many different (possibly dangerous) ways she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles.
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Exit Party
£18.99From the global bestselling author of Station Eleven comes a story of the broken boundaries between parallel worlds and a single party that links two very different versions of reality.
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The Rouse
£35.00The master of uncanny fiction returns with an epic saga of the blood-soaked twentieth century, filled with secrets, conspiracies, grief and infinite mystery . . .
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Clearly Charmed
£9.99Dandelion ‘Dani’ McGuire loves her quiet mountain life in Harvest Moon, Colorado even if she and her sisters are part of the town’s magical lore. As the only veterinarian for miles, Dani spends her time caring for the animals she loves with an instinct and touch many consider supernatural. While hiking in the woods, Dani finds a wayward dog that belongs to Bryce O’Dell, an out-of-town journalist. He is there to explore the story of the McGuire girls and their witchy heritage and Dani wants nothing to do with him. But she can’t deny the chemistry and it is hard to avoid someone in this tiny town. Could she trust him? Or will he expose her and her sisters’ secrets to the world?
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The Newer World
£20.00Against the rapidly shifting landscape of post Civil War America, Tennyson Bouguereau – freed man, devoted brother, nascent singer, conflicted soldier and wanted man – journeys to find meaning and belonging. From the relative safety of home in Tennessee with his sister Rosalee, he is offered the possibility of a whole new life in Nashville, until a surprising trip to Victorian England changes everything.
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What Other Years Have Done
£12.00After more than two decades abroad, Lillie Carrigan – now in her mid-forties – returns to New York for a year to teach at Barnard College, determined to believe the past is finally behind her. In England, she has built a life of poise and apparent stability with a British artist. Now, back in the land of her childhood, old loyalties, old wounds and old desires begin to stir. As Lillie is drawn once more into the orbit of her childhood friend Lara, her glamorous, brittle friend Mallory, and the husband she thought she had left far behind, the carefully ordered story she tells herself starts to come apart.
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Our Noble Selves
£22.00It’s the summer of 1951 and everyone is looking to put the dark days of the war behind them. The government’s solution: The Festival of Britain, a celebration of the country’s creativity, grit and ingenuity. For foreign correspondent turned war reporter Harry Flynn, it might offer the chance of redemption after a bad war in the Far East and a peace that is proving no easier to negotiate. Having failed to resume his journalistic career, he reluctantly joins an oddball team of misfits, ne’er-do-wells and downright chancers helping to ready the Festival of Britain for launch. Flynn’s attempts to resume some semblance of a romantic life also founder when one of his dates goes missing and he is deemed to be the last person to have seen her alive. Could he have been in some way responsible for her disappearance?
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Switzy
£18.99A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting. A mystery, among many mysteries. The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable. This is what David knows: Cody, his assistant, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades. His final destination is Zurich. David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life.
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Primeval and Other Times
£14.99The Nobel Prize in Literature laureate at her earthiest and most ethereal, in a fictional journey through three generations in the life of a mythical Polish village.
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Practical Magic
£10.99Gillian and Sally were brought up by their two elderly guardian aunts in a world of spells and exotica. As the magical charm of their childhood wears away, they escape from this mystical mayhem – one by running away, the other by marrying.
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Taipei Story
£22.00‘Rebecca F. Kuang is about as accomplished as it’s possible to get’ VOGUE
First love. Second language. Final goodbyes.
The electrifying new novel from the literary phenomenon.