Classic Summer Stories
£10.99A collection of short stories inspired by the most vibrant season of the year.
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A collection of short stories inspired by the most vibrant season of the year.

A wildly original debut set in Belfast: full of the pain, joy and bad decisions arising from young friendship, grief and bad house shares.

Munich, 1936. All eyes are on the Bavarian capital for the upcoming Olympic games. As athletes fight for gold and the Nazis fight for power, Detective Sebastian Wolff faces a battle of his own. A famous actress has disappeared and Wolff has been ordered to find her, fast. But Elena Lang is no ordinary film-star: she is the mistress of Joseph Goebbels – Hitler’s right-hand-man in the party that Wolff despises. But corruption runs deep in Munich and Elena is just the first to go missing. In a search that will take him from high society to the city’s darkest corners, Wolff is about to learn just how easily the hunter becomes the hunted: this is a city on the brink of war, and some enemies are better left alone.

International bestseller Jane Harper returns with an immersive and deeply atmospheric standalone crime novel. A mother must uncover the explosive truth about what happened to the son who vanished from a small Australian town on his twenty-first birthday five years ago.

This is a 24-hour urban love story. It follows Stephen Connolly through one of the worst days of his life. On a stiflingly hot December day, he has decided it’s time to break up with his girlfriend Fiona. He’s 39, aimless and unfulfilled; he’s without a clue working out how to make his life better. As an ordinary day develops into an existential crisis, Stephen begins to understand, perhaps too late, that love is not a trap, and only he can free himself.

Such a small but powerful and intense novel.
Fictionalised biography? Auto fiction? Essay on Art and artists in 20th Century Paris? This book takes many forms and they are all fascinating. Every sentence matters, you will not want to miss a single word, a single thought.
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Who was Gertrude Stein? Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius – a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. And why does she matter? The narrator of Deborah Levy’s novel has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first.

For Niamh Ryan, the Foleys are family. Her childhood flew by on their farm, playing with her best friend Peter and his sister Kate – all the while being doted on by their mother Helen and coached by their father Liam, a legendary former hurling player. Now, following a distressing series of events, the family ties are strained. Niamh receives drunken phone calls and messages from Peter who can’t understand what derailed their burgeoning relationship three years ago. Meanwhile, Helen Foley is trying her best to escape her life by checking into guesthouses under the names of women she went to school with. In her life in Belfast, Kate is attempting to hold down a job and a relationship while carrying the weight of the family’s secrets, and feeling like she is the one to blame. As a family wedding looms, and the women find themselves face to face, the knotty love that still binds Niamh, Helen and Kate might just bring them back together aga

A profound and devastating collection of short stories by Colm Tóibìn, author of Long Island and Brooklyn

‘I love Ben Brooks.’ Matt Haig ‘Brooks is a frightening young talent.’ Tim Key
HOW MUCH SHOULD ONE PERSON GIVE TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE? AND HOW MUCH CAN ONE FAMILY TAKE?
When Arthur Candlewick falls down a disused mineshaft with only his son’s drug stash, a book on the concept of ‘effective altruism’ and a bottle of medium-priced Bordeaux for company, his life takes an unexpected turn. Determined to sell up the family timber business and devote his remaining time on earth to giving away his wealth in a way which does most good to humanity, his decision will leave a lasting legacy to the world but have unintended and unforeseen consequences for those he loves the most.

For readers of David Nicholls, Ann Patchett, and Colm Tóibìn, Almost Life is a love story that begins when Erica and Laure meet on the steps of the Sacré-C?ur in 1978. Theirs is a story that will last a lifetime – even if their lives take them in very different directions.

This internationally acclaimed masterpiece traces the interwoven destinies of five women – including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher – as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, this unforgettable novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men.T.

A stunning and deeply moving literary debut of grief, loss and female friendship, set against the backdrop of two cataclysmic natural events.

Western Australia, 1958. A truck rumbles along a lonely outback road. A moment’s inattention, and in a few muddled seconds the lives of the MacBride family are shattered. Instead of leaving them to heal, fate comes back for them in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child.

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.

Cromarty, The Black Isle, 1831. As seagulls shriek & rise on the coastal winds, a circulating library in the port town of Cromarty is meeting for the first time. Ostensibly united by a love of books, the demands of social convention have brought together a disparate group of people. Charlotte Mackenzie, the remote & fragile wife of the local laird, seeks an escape from a loveless marriage; her best friend, Rachel Mackay, a former governess who is ardently in love with her own older husband, the town’s minister; the young schoolmaster, John Learmonth, newly arrived from Edinburgh with secrets in tow; & the gentle bank clerk, Ludovic Cameron who dreams of a new life across the ocean, far from his erstwhile schoolmate, Farquhar Hossack. Whenthe laird befriends a wounded officer, a chain of events is set in motion that threatens to upset the delicate equilibrium of the community.

Everyone’s talking about Janey Devine. Glasgow, 1979. While walking her dog, twelve-year-old Janey finds a murdered woman on an abandoned railway – and her innocent childhood ends in a shocking moment of trauma. When the victim is named as daughter of a local hardman, Janey’s nana, Maggie, is distraught and deeply afraid. Janey claims she can’t remember what she saw that day, but the police think she’s hiding something, and they’re not the only ones interested. Maggie tries desperately to keep Janey safe but is battling long-buried secrets of her own. As fear and rumour stalk the streets of Possilpark, Maggie becomes convinced she will lose her beloved granddaughter forever – especially when Janey starts to remember exactly what happened in that bad, bad place.