Barcelona, Mary Costello (paperback April 2025)

£9.99

In Barcelona, we meet a cast of characters who live turbulent inner lives. In a Spanish hotel room a marriage unravels as a young wife is haunted by a past love. A father travels to Paris to meet his scientist son and is exposed to his son's true nature.

A woman attends a reading by a famous author and comes to some painful realisations about her own marriage. The stories in Barcelona reveal the underlying disquiet of modern life and the sometimes brutal nature of humanity. Whether on city streets, long car journeys or in suburban rooms, we glimpse characters as they approach those moments of desperation - or revelation - that change or reshape fate.

Evenings and Weekends, Oisin McKenna (paperback from April 2025)

£16.99

Summer in London stops for no-one. Not the half-naked boozers, stoners, and cruisers, the hen parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried fags.

It’s June 2019, and everyone has converged on the city’s parks, beer gardens and street corners to revel in the collective joys of being alive. Everyone but Maggie. She’s 30, pregnant and broke.

Faced with moving back to the town she fought to escape, she’s wondering if having a baby with boyfriend Ed will be the last spontaneous act of her life. Ed, meanwhile, is trying to run from his past with Maggie’s best friend Phil and harbouring secret dreams of his own. Phil hates his office job and is living for the weekend, while falling for his housemate, Keith.

But there’s a problem: Keith has a boyfriend and there might not be room for three people in the relationship. Then there’s Rosaleen, Phil’s mother, who’s tired of feeling like a side character in her own life. She’s just been diagnosed with cancer and is travelling to London to tell Phil, if she can ever get hold of him.

As Saturday night approaches, all their lives are set to change forever. It’s the hottest summer on record and the weekend is about to begin.

I found this a surprisingly touching and raw look at contemporary love and friendship - Linda

Mouthing, Orla Mackey ( new paperback April 2025 )

£9.99

Sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued, a multigenerational portrait of small-town life in Ireland from a refreshing new talent in literary fiction'A bittersweet love letter to small-town Irish life over several generations, in the vein of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge' Irish Times‘Full of disgrace, inherited trauma and family secrets. It will make you laugh - because if you didn't, you'd surely cry’ Aingeala Flannery‘A caustically witty novel for anyone who ever wondered what the neighbours are really up to behind closed doors’ Jan CarsonWelcome to Ballyrowan. This sleepy corner of rural Ireland may seem tranquil, but scratch the surface and you'll find a hotbed of gossip and intrigue - endless material for mouthing - and a town full of people only too happy to oblige in spreading the bad news.

Narrated by several generations of villagers, Mouthing traces the fortunes of one small community from the mid-20th century to the early 21st, in a series of highly confessional and darkly hilarious monologues. The good people of Ballyrowan delight in twisting the knife, in tormenting one another, in perfecting the art of schadenfreude. And, it becomes clear, none of them are entirely reliable witnesses.

As each character offers their version of 'the truth', upending our assumptions at every turn, we see how feuds are passed down through the generations, how families are estranged or reunited and fortunes made or lost, how strict social expectations loosen over decades (and how some things remain stubbornly unchanged). And how secret hopes and private sorrows, triumph and humiliation, pleasure and grief are all absorbed into the merciless chorus of mouthing. Mouthing is an acerbic, unsentimental love letter to rural Irish life, where everyone knows everyone else's business and everyone has an opinion on it - where 'community' is both a lifeboat and a life sentence.

May All your skies Be Blue, Fiona Scarlet ( hardback Feb 25)

£16.99

From the author of the beloved debut Boys Don't Cry - an unforgettable story of love and loss and how the ones we love never really leave us. He's leaning in. I'm leaning in.

'The future is ours to make, Shauns,' he says, lips almost touching. Summer, 1991. Dean: sun-stung and sticky with cool ice-pop juice, walks to the middle of The Green to get a good gawk at the new salon.

And at the owner's kid. Hands deep in his pockets, his jet-black mop of hair hides the tension in his face at the thought of going back home. Shauna: stands well hid behind her ma - her eyes dark and haunted like the rest of her.

The salon is theirs, a fresh start. The smell of her ma's Body Shop perfume clings to her jumper - Shauna can't be anywhere else other than here. Instantly inseparable, their friendship blooms.

But as time passes and tell-tale blushes and school fights develop into something deeper, conflicting responsibilities threaten to pull Shauna and Dean apart. When all seems lost, will they find each other under the same blue sky?

A beautiful, deeply affecting story.' DONAL RYAN'Hugely compelling and utterly persuasive.' JOSEPH O'CONNOR

Twist, Colum McCann ( hardback Feb 2025)

£18.99

Fennell, a journalist, is in pursuit of a story buried at the bottom of the sea: the network of tiny fibre-optic tubes that carry the world’s information across the ocean floor - and what happens when they break. So he has travelled to Cape Town to board the George Lecointe, a cable repair vessel captained by Chief of Mission John Conway. Conway is a talented engineer and fearless freediver - and Fennell is quickly captivated by this mysterious, unnerving man and his beautiful partner, Zanele.

As the boat embarks along the west coast of Africa, Fennell learns the rhythms of life at sea, and finds his place among the band of drifters who make up the crew. But as the mission falters, tensions simmer - and Conway is thrown into crisis. A terrible, violent tragedy is unfolding in the life he has left behind on land; and, trapped out at sea, it seems as if the vast expanse of the ocean is closing in.

Then Conway disappears; and Fennell must set out to find him. As taut and propulsive as a thriller, and a timeless exploration of narrative and truth, Twist is the work of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.

Named a 2025 book to look out for by the Observer, Financial Times, Irish Times and New European**‘Urgent and utterly compelling’ KEVIN BARRY

Giant, Judith McQuoid ( paperback, March 2025)

£7.99

Thrilling historical fiction on the childhoodof beloved author CS Lewis. Davy, a working-class boy living in East Belfast in 1908, is sent to work at the wealthy Lewis household. When he meets Jacks – the name by which CS Lewis was known to friends and family – Davy is captivated by his friend’s world of books and stories.

Together the boys plunge into imagining and adventuring, and Davy discovers his own artistic talent. But when Davy is offered a job at the shipyard, and Jacks’s mother falls gravely ill, their wondrous days of make-believe seem numbered. Will they lose their extraordinary shared world forever?

The Paris Express, Emma Donoghue ( hardback March 2025)

£18.99

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Room and The Pull of The Stars, Emma Donoghue takes readers on a thrilling ride through a simmering turn-of-the-century Paris on the edge of a dazzling future.

Autumn, 1895. Paris is as chaotic as it is glamorous, with industry and invention creating huge wealth and terrible poverty. One morning, an anarchist boards the ill-fated Granville to Paris express train, determined to make her mark on history.

Aboard the train are others from across the globe: the railway crew who have built a life together away from their wives, a little boy travelling alone for the first time, an artist far from home, a wealthy statesman and his invalid wife, and a young woman with a secret. Truths are revealed and relationships forged as the train speeds towards the City of Light and a future that will change everything . .

. 'An edge-of-your-seat historical thriller that I couldn't put down' – Shelby Van Pelt, author of Remarkably Bright Creatures

Whale Fall, Elizabeth O’Connor ( paperback april 2025)

£9.99

A BBC ‘BETWEEN THE COVERS’ BOOK CLUB PICK An Observer Best Debut of the Year

It is 1938 and on an island off the coast of Wales, Manod is trying to imagine her future. Her choices are stark: she must either stay and look after her father's house, in the wild landscape that drove her mother to madness, or marry and leave. And so, when two English anthropologists arrive on the island, Manod senses the possibility of a thrilling new life.

But, as she becomes entangled in their work, and their strange relationship, the outside world she had yearned for appears a much darker place than she could ever have imagined.Elizabeth O’Connor’s beautiful, devastating debut Whale Fall tells a story of longing and betrayal set against the backdrop of a world on the edge of great tumult. 'The quiet cadences of Whale Fall contain a deep melody of loss held and let go.

 It is a gentle, tough story about profound change' - Anne Enright

'I didn't want it to end' - Maggie O'Farrell 

Weathering : Earth wisdom for hopeful living, by Ruth Allen (paperback March 2025)

£10.99

Rocks and mountains have withstood aeons of life on our planet - gradually eroding, shifting, solidifying, and weathering. We might spend a little less time on earth, but humans are also weathering: evolving and changing as we're transformed by the shifting climates of our lives and experiences. So, what might these ancient natural forms have to teach us about resilience and change?In a stunning exploration of our own connection to these enduring forms, outdoor psychotherapist and geologist Ruth Allen takes us on a journey through deep time and ancient landscapes, showing how geology - which has formed the bedrock of her own adult life and approach to therapy - can offer us a new way of thinking about our own grief, change and boundaries.

In a world shaken by physical, political, and medical disasters, Weathering argues for a deeper understanding of the ground beneath our feet to better serve ourselves and the world we live in.

Madame Matisse, Sophie Haydock ( hardback April 2025)

£18.99

This is the story of three women - one an orphan and refugee who finds a place in the studio of a famous French artist, the other a wife and mother who has stood by her husband for nearly forty years.

The third is his daughter, caught in the crossfire between her mother and a father she adores. Amelie is first drawn to Henri Matisse as a way of escaping the conventional life expected of her. A free spirit, she sees in this budding young artist a glorious future for them both.

Ambitious and driven, she gives everything for her husband's art, ploughing her own desires, her time, her money into sustaining them both, even through years of struggle and disappointment. Lydia Delectorskaya is a young Russian emigree, who fled her homeland following the death of her mother. After a fractured childhood, she is trying to make a place for herself on France's golden Riviera, amid the artists, film stars and dazzling elite.

Eventually she finds employment with the Matisse family. From this point on, their lives are set on a collision course.... Marguerite is Matisse's eldest daughter.

When the life of her family implodes, she must find her own way to make her mark and to navigate divided loyalties. Based on a true story, Madame Matisse is a stunning novel about drama and betrayal; emotion and sex; glamour and tragedy, all set in the hotbed of the 1930s art movement in France. In art, as in life, this a time when the rules were made to be broken...

The Bureau, Eoin McNamee ( hardback April 2025)

£18.99

Lorraine would say afterwards that she was smitten straight off with Paddy Farrell. You could tell that he was occupying the room in a different way, he found the spaces that fitted him. She was the kind of girl the papers called vivacious, always a bit of dazzle to her.

Could she not see there was death about him? Could he not see there was death about her? Paddy worked the border, a place of road closures, hijackings, sudden death. Everything bootleg and tawdry, nobody is saying that the law is paid off but it is. This is strange terrain, unsolid, ghosted through.

There's illicit cash coming across the border and Brendan's backstreet Bureau de Change is the place to launder it. Brendan knows the rogue lawyers, the nerve shot policemen, the alcoholic judges and he doesn't care about getting caught. For the Bureau crew getting caught is only the start of the game.

Paddy and his associates were a ragged band and honourless and their worth to themselves was measured in thievery and fraud. But Lorraine was not a girl to be treated lightly. She's cast as a minx, a criminal's moll but she's bought a shotgun. And she's bought a grave.

Some of the most beautiful prose being written in Ireland today' Irish Time

All That Glitters, Orlando Whitfield ( paperback April 2025)

£10.99

A 2024 Book of the Year pick in the Economist, Independent, Prospect, Apollo, New Yorker and at Waterstones

A 2024 Summer Read in the Economist, Telegraph, Guardian, New Yorker, i, and the Evening Standard'

An art world Great Gatsby, deliciously withering and dishy.' Patrick Radden Keefe

DECEPTION IS A FINE ART. When Orlando Whitfield first meets Inigo Philbrick, they are students dreaming of dealing art for a living. Their friendship lasts for fifteen years until one day, Inigo - by then the most successful dealer of his generation - suddenly disappears, accused of a fraud so gigantic and audacious it rocks the art world to its core. A sparklingly sharp memoir of greed, ambition and madness, All That Glitters will take you to the heart of the contemporary art world, a place wilder and wealthier than you could ever imagine.

Just One More Story by Perry Emerson ( paperback April 2025)

£7.99

A lyrical story that's perfect for inspiring reluctant readers to find their own style of reading - illustrated by the internationally bestselling Sean Julian. Pip and Bun are two very different bunnies. Pip LOVES reading.

Bun does not. Until, one day, Bun opens a book . .

. and discovers pages filled with action and adventure!This celebration of creativity and imaginative play is the ideal book to empower kids to write their own story. Just One More Story explores the idea that there are many different ways to read and is ideal for children who have struggled to connect to reading.

Just like Open Very Carefully by Nick Bromley and Nicola O'Byrne, Do Not Open This Book by Andy Lee and Heath McKenzie and I Say Ooh, You Say Aah by John Kane, Just One More Story will be loved by budding book lovers and reluctant readers alike.

The Book of Days, Francesa Kay ( paperback April 2025)

£9.99

ANNO DOMINI 1546. In a manor house in England a young woman feels the walls are closing around her, while her dying husband is obsessed by his vision of a chapel where prayers will be said for his immortal soul. As the days go by and the chapel takes shape, the outside world starts to intrude.

But as the old ways are replaced by the new, the people of the village sense a dangerous freedom …Reader Reviews‘A must read … Characters that one cares about, beautifully structured, a real page turner’‘A jewel of a book’‘Beautifully written’‘Atmospheric and compelling'

Twenty Twenty Vision, Mary Morrissy ( paperback March 2025)

£13.99

Twenty-Twenty Vision is a collection of interlinked short stories about hindsight and late middle-age regret subtly framed within the first year of the pandemic. It’s also a portrait, an emotional map of the 1950s generation moving into the third age with a mixture of apprehension and regret. 

Christine Beckett is faced with some home truths when her best friend, suffering from dementia, decides after a lifetime to be honest with her; Olivia Fletcher has an epiphany at a vaccination centre about a man who has loved her for decades; Bernard Travers revisits an unlikely romantic interlude with the mother of his teenage pen pal that has sustained him for 40 years

The characters make chastening discoveries – one finds after a lifetime that she’s a bullying victim, another draws up a curriculum vitae of her emotional life when there are no jobs left to apply for. The work focuses on a handful of characters – Christine, Olivia, Bernard, Freddie, Triona and Eva – as they revisit their past and grapple with late-life perspectives.

The overarching narrative is connected by character and situation, and united in theme, to form a tapestry of late middle-age reckoning.

When the Cranes Fly South, Lisa Rizden ( paperback May 2025)

£14.99

The most moving book of the year about the power of human connection. A book to love, and share.  Fredrik Backman.

Bo lives a quiet existence in his small rural village in the north of Sweden.

He is elderly and his days are punctuated by visits from his care team and his son. Fortunately, he still has his rich memories, phone calls with his best friend Ture, and his beloved dog Sixten for company. Only now his son is insisting the dog must be taken away.

The very same son that Bo is wanting to mend his relationship with before his time is up. The threat of losing Sixten stirs up a whirlwind of emotions and makes Bo determined to resist and find his voice. An instant number one bestseller in Sweden and winner of the Swedish Book of the Year, When the Cranes Fly South is a profoundly moving and life-affirming novel about one man?s desire to preserve his autonomy, the multitude of stories contained within a life, and the big things for which we have no words.

The Thinking Machine , Stephen Witt ( Hardback April 2025)

£25.00

The Thinking Machine : Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip.

AI tech giant Nvidia is as valuable as Apple and Microsoft. It has shaped the world as we know it. This is the inside story of the company that is inventing the future and its charismatic CEO Jensen Huang.

 The Thinking Machine is the astonishing story of how a designer of videogame equipment conquered the market for AI hardware, and in the process reinvented the computer. It is the story of a determined entrepreneur who defied Wall Street to push his radical vision for computing, becoming one of the wealthiest men alive.

And it’s the story of our awesome and terrifying AI future, as a new kind of microchip unlocks hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, self-driving cars and new movies, art and books, generated on command. ‘A page-turning biography of perhaps the most consequential CEO and company in the world’ David Epstein, author of Range.

A History of the World in 47 Borders, John Elledge ( paperback March 2025)

£10.99

People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does - and about the scale of human folly.

From the Roman attempts to define the boundaries of civilisation, to the secret British-French agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, to the reason why landlocked Bolivia still maintains a navy, this is a fascinating, witty and surprising look at the history of the world told through its borders. 

Elledge writes with wry humour and infectious enthusiasm' OBSERVER

The Silence Factory - Bridget Collins ( Paperback April 2025)

£9.99

In the Factory, the looms clatter all day. Cobwebs found in ancient Mediterranean glades are spun into a precious fabric that silences the world. But what happens to those who fall under its spell? And who is harnessing its power? After all, a world of silence can bring peace, but it can also conceal the deeds of the wicked… The Silence Factory is an enthralling story about complicity, desire and corruption – a novel to lose yourself in.

Fun and Games, John Patrick McHugh ( hardback April 2025)

£16.99

One of the most exciting writers working in Ireland today’ SALLY ROONEY 'An utter joy to read' COLIN BARRETT '

 A stunning debut novel following a teenage boy as he comes of age on the west coast of Ireland, from the author of the acclaimed story collection Pure Gold. Seventeen-year-old John Masterson has no idea what he wants. It’s his last summer on the small island where he has grown up and he should be enjoying the weeks until his exam results come through.

Instead, he’s working mind-numbing shifts at the local hotel and trying to keep his head down after his mother’s nude sext to another man was leaked to the whole island. As John joins the local senior football team, gets caught up in fights and parties, and embarks on a tentative relationship with his slightly older co-worker Amber that he feels both proud and ashamed of, he can almost pretend that this summer will last forever. But soon John must face up to the choices before him: to stay or leave, to stand out or fit in, and whether to love and let himself be loved, despite or perhaps because of, the flaws that make us all human.

Fun and Games is a darkly comic, beautifully crafted debut novel that is full of feeling both harsh and tender. It takes in social class and its firm borders, manhood and its frailties, family and, of course, love.