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£16.99
The crumbling Gothic mansion of Thornwalk, long-term home of the Gilbert family, is being handed over to a chain of luxury ‘historic’ hotels. Millions will be spent in its restoration. But for every ‘improvement’, what will be lost? What value can there possibly be in a threadbare carpet, a tarnished spoon and a thousand empty jam jars? Before the hotel people arrive, with their clipboards and their skips and their bottles of bleach, Maximus, loyal guardian of the Gilberts’ legacy, invites us on a final tour of the once-stately home, where each room holds a secret. From the bolt on the blue room door to the tiny dents in the bars at the nursery window. These are the keys that will unlock the lives of the five fatherless Gilbert children.
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£18.99
Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region – from New England to Florida to California – these nine stories reflect and expand upon a single shared theme: the ceaseless battle between the dark and light in all of us. Among those caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling; a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult; a mother blinded by the loss of her family; and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by human fallibility, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.
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£18.99
It’s the mid-1960s and Lillian Wells is a clever teenager with a daring pixie cut, tangerine mini-dress and new boyfriend, Jim, who works at the brewery. Even better, he lives across the road, so she’s never far from her bee-hived, high-heeled single mother Winnie, who is prone to attacks of the nerves. But Lillian harbours secret dreams of going to art school in London. When she gets in, how will she tell her mother – and Jim – that she’s leaving Abingdon – and them? Forty years later, Lillian’s own daughter Rachel is heading off to university, but Lillian is not sure either of them are ready. She sees herself and Winnie in Rachel, who is ambitious and intelligent, but also prone to nervous habits. As Lillian tries to bite her tongue about Rachel’s symptoms, she is reminded of what everyone in Abingdon used to say: It’s a short road to Longbrook – the local institution for the mentally ill.
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£9.99
It is late September in 2001 and the walls of New York are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady’s father is there, the poster she made taped to columns and bridges. Her mother died long ago and now, orphaned on the cusp of adulthood, Cora is adrift and alone. Soon, a letter will arrive with the offer of a new life: far out on the ragged edge of Ireland, in the town where her parents were young, an estranged aunt can provide a home and fulfil a long-forgotten promise. There the story of her family is hidden, and in her presence will begin to unspool.
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£10.99
Thought-provoking and powerfully ambivalent, this book offers an extraordinary meditation on the many complex afterlives of the Holocaust. It is a novel about individual and collective inheritance, individual and collective violence; about memory, trauma, connection and estrangement. It asks what it means to be a Jew in the long wake of the 20th century, and how the past lives on in the present.
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£16.99
Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her bathroom-less studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual, spiking stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Unemployed and subsisting on selling plant propagations, Dell starts her own livestream in order to fundraise $14,000 for a week of private life support for Daisy. Finally, Dell has found something she’s good at. But when a troll-turned-incel threatens to expose her past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores and what real redemption means.
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£20.00
In Catherine, Essie Fox breathes new life into Wuthering Heights, transforming a gothic masterpiece into a haunting confession of obsession, madness and love that even death cannot end.
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£12.99
A summer’s evening in Manhattan. Nothing – not cold drinks, not showers not a stroll through the chilly aisles of an all-night drugstore – can undo the heat’s hold on the city. Julian is half watching the evening news, his husband filling the dishwasher. That’s when it arrives. An email with the subject line: ‘From Paul Axel’. An email about a dead man from Chloe – a woman Julian has never met. Paul has left a message he’d like her to relay. Emails are exchanged. Morning coffee at the Bryant Park Grill is agreed. Chloe, fulfilling Paul’s final request, wonders how she will tell Julian of a life – and a love – he has no idea existed. A life, encased in a flash drive, containing multitudes.
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£18.99
Graham Greene, the great 20th-century novelist, also wrote exceptional short stories. Selected and introduced by Yiyun Li, 22 of his very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise Greene’s great novels: betrayal and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence.
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£14.99
Aysegül Savas’s acute and tender collection explores the distances we keep, and those we try to close, in the age of connectivity. A researcher abroad in Rome eagerly awaits a visit from her long distance lover, only to find he is not the same man she remembers. An expat meets a childhood friend on a layover and is dismayed by her unexpected contentment. A newly pregnant woman considers the taboo of sharing the news too soon, but can’t resist when an opportunity comes to patch up a damaged friendship. ‘Long Distance’ showcases Savas’s devastating talent for the short story. Her shrewd encapsulations of contemporary life often centre on characters displaced more by choice than circumstance, characters both determined to install themselves in new lives and preoccupied with the people they’ve left behind.
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£9.99
A propulsive novel about music, coming of age and the cost of fame, for fans of Megan Abbott and Daisy Jones and the Six.
‘The secrets simmer in this atmospheric, powerful novel’ KATIE BISHOP
‘You won’t be able to put it down’ RUFI THORPE
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£14.99
Oghi wakes in a hospital bed unable to speak or move. The car accident that killed his wife has left him trapped in his own body and under the control of his mother-in-law, as she grieves the loss of her only child. Isolated from his friends and neglected by his nurse, Oghi’s world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his wife, a sensitive woman who found solace in cultivating her garden. But as Oghi remains alone and paralysed, his mother-in-law is hard at work in the now-abandoned garden, uprooting what her daughter had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes.