Sceptre

  • Ghosted

    £16.99

    One ordinary morning, Laurie’s husband Mark vanishes, leaving behind his phone and wallet. For weeks, she tells no one, carrying on her job as a cleaner at the local university, visiting her tricky, dementia-suffering father and holing up in her tower-block flat with a bottle to hand. When she finally reports Mark as missing, the police are suspicious. Why did she take so long? Wasn’t she worried? It turns out there are many more mysteries in Laurie’s account of events, though not just because she glosses over the facts. At the time, she couldn’t explain much of her behaviour herself. But as she looks back on the ensuing wreckage – the friendships broken, the wild accusations she made, the one-night stand – she can see more clearly what lay behind it. And if it’s not too late, she can see how she might repair the damage and, most of all, forgive herself.

  • Utopia Avenue

    £9.99

    Utopia Avenue might be the most curious British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, folksinger Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss, guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet and jazz drummer Griff Griffin together created a unique sound, with lyrics that captured their turbulent times. The band produced only two albums in two years, yet their musical legacy lives on. This is the story of Utopia Avenue’s brief, blazing journey from Soho clubs and draughty ballrooms to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was receding into something much darker – a multi-faceted tale of dreams, drugs, love, sexuality, madness and grief; of stardom’s wobbly ladder and fame’s Faustian pact; and of the collision between youthful idealism and jaded reality as the Sixties drew to a close.

  • Honourable Schoolboy

    £8.99

    It is a beleaguered and betrayed Secret Service that has been put in the care of George Smiley. A mole has been uncovered at the organisation’s highest levels – and its agents across the world put in grave danger. But untangling the traitor’s web gives Smiley a chance to attack his Russian counterpart, Karla.

  • Walkers Guide To Outdoor Clues & Signs

    £12.99

    Readers may be familiar with such things as natural weather forecasting, basic tracking and natural navigation, but this guide will reveal intriguing new lessons, including telling the time and date using the stars and detecting which animals are around by listening to birdsong.

  • A Man Called Ove

    £9.99

    There is something about Ove. At first sight, he is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots – neighbours who can’t reverse a trailer properly, joggers, shop assistants who talk in code, and the perpetrators of the vicious coup d’etat that ousted him as Chairman of the Residents’ Association. He will persist in making his daily inspection rounds of the local streets. But isn’t it rare, these days, to find such old-fashioned clarity of belief and deed? Such unswerving conviction about what the world should be, and a lifelong dedication to making it just so?

  • Reason I Jump

    £9.99

    Written by Naoki Higishida when he was only 13, this remarkable book explains the often baffling behaviour of autistic children and shows the way they think and feel – such as about the people around them, time and beauty, noise, and themselves. Naoki abundantly proves that autistic people do possess imagination, humour and empathy, but also makes clear, with great poignancy, how badly they need our compassion, patience and understanding.

  • Living Thinking Looking

    £18.99

    Siri Hustvedt’s novels are known for being as thought-provoking as they are emotionally involving. In these essays, Hustvedt shows what lies behind her fiction – an abiding curiosity about who we are and how we got that way, which has led her into the realms of psychology and neuroscience, as well as philosophy, art and literature.

  • Rules Of Civility

    £10.99

    In a jazz bar on the last night of 1937, watching a quartet because she couldn’t afford to see the whole ensemble, there were certain things Katey Kontent knew. By the end of the year she’d learned – how to launch a paper airplane high over Park Avenue, how to live like a redhead, and how to insist upon the very best.

  • Summer Without Men

    £9.99

    When Mia Fredricksen learns that her husband is having an affair, she suffers a brief breakdown then retreats to her childhood town and her mother’s embrace. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her.

  • Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

    £8.99

    Mr George Smiley is small, podgy, middle-aged and disillusioned. He is also compassionate, ruthless, and a senior British intelligence officer. Smiley comes up against Karla, his old Moscow adversary, and so begins a long battle of wits.

  • Honourable Schoolboy

    £8.99

    It is a beleaguered and betrayed Secret Service that has been put in the care of George Smiley. A mole has been uncovered at the organisation’s highest levels – and its agents across the world put in grave danger. But untangling the traitor’s web gives Smiley a chance to attack his Russian counterpart, Karla.

  • Perfect Spy

    £8.99

    Magnus Pym, ranking diplomat, has vanished, believed defected. The chase is on – for a missing husband, a devoted father, and a secret agent. Pym’s life, it is revealed, is entirely made up of secrets.