FICTION

The Artist, Lucy Steeds ( hardback Jan 2025)

£16.99

PROVENCE, 1920 ; Ettie moves through the remote farmhouse, silently creating the conditions that make her uncle's artistic genius possible. Joseph, an aspiring journalist, has been invited to the house.

He believes he'll make his name by interviewing the reclusive painter, the great Edouard Tartuffe. But everyone has their secrets. And, under the cover of darkness, Ettie has spent years cultivating hers.  Over this sweltering summer, everyone's true colours will be revealed. Because Ettie is ready to be seen. Even if it means setting her world on fire.

Steeped in the heat and atmosphere of 1920s Provence, this novel brims with intrigue, hope and yearning' Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory

Dextrous and powerful . . .a hugely accomplished portrait of ambition and self-fulfilment' Guardian

The Paris Dancer, Nicola Rayner ( Paperback Feb 2025)

£9.99

Paris, 1938.

Annie Mayer arrives in France with dreams of becoming a ballerina. But when the war reaches Paris, she's forced to keep her Jewish heritage a secret. Then a fellow dancer offers her a lifeline: a ballroom partnership that gives her a new identity.

Together, Annie and her partner captivate audiences across occupied Europe, using her newfound fame and alias to aid the Resistance. New York, 2012. Miriam, haunted by her past, travels from London to New York to settle her great-aunt Esther’s estate.

Among Esther’s belongings, she discovers notebooks detailing a secret family history and the story of a brave dancer who risked everything to help Jewish families during the war. As Miriam uncovers Esther’s life in Europe, she realises the story has been left for her to finish. Grappling with loss and the possibility of new love, Miriam must find the strength to reconcile her past and embrace her future.

Immaculately researched and exquisitely written... historical fiction at its best' - Louise Fein

The Painter’s Daughter, Emily Howes ( paperback Feb 2025)

£9.99

1759, Ipswich. Sisters Peggy and Molly Gainsborough are the best of friends and do everything together. They spy on their father as he paints, they rankle their mother as she manages the books, they tear barefoot through the muddy fields that surround their home.

But there is another reason they are inseparable: from a young age, Molly has had a tendency to forget who she is, to fall into confusion, and Peggy knows instinctively that no one must find out. When the family move to Bath, Thomas Gainsborough finds fame as a portrait artist, while his daughters are thrown into the whirl of polite society. Here, the merits of marriage and codes of behaviour are crystal clear, and secrets much harder to keep.

As Peggy goes to greater lengths to protect her sister, she finds herself falling in love, and their precarious situation is soon thrown catastrophically off-course. The discovery of a betrayal forces her to question all she has done for Molly - and whether any one person can truly change the fate of another . .

Convincing, engaging, transporting' GUARDIAN 'A wonderfully powerful and haunting novel with a hugely gripping plot' DEBORAH MOGGACH

Shark Heart, Emily Habeck ( paperback June 2024)

£10.99

For Lewis and Wren, their first year of marriage is also their last. A few weeks after their wedding, Lewis receives a rare diagnosis. He's turning into a great white shark, and has less than a year left to live as a human.

At first, Wren resists her husband's fate. Is there a way for them to be together after Lewis fully transforms?But as Lewis changes, day by day, Wren begins to make peace with the inevitable. After all, this isn't the first time she's lost a loved one.

An extraordinary novel of love, loss, hope and happiness, Shark Heart explores the shapes that love takes, in all its many forms, and asks us to ask ourselves: what makes us human?

'Every page bursts with heart' Anthony Doerr, author of All The Light We Cannot See'Compelling, moving, lyrical' - Claire North, author of Ithaca

The Paris Dancer, Nicola Rayner ( paperback Feb 2025)

£9.99

Paris, 1938. Annie Mayer arrives in France with dreams of becoming a ballerina. But when the war reaches Paris, she's forced to keep her Jewish heritage a secret. Then a fellow dancer offers her a lifeline: a ballroom partnership that gives her a new identity.

Together, Annie and her partner captivate audiences across occupied Europe, using her newfound fame and alias to aid the Resistance. New York, 2012. Miriam, haunted by her past, travels from London to New York to settle her great-aunt Esther’s estate.

Among Esther’s belongings, she discovers notebooks detailing a secret family history and the story of a brave dancer who risked everything to help Jewish families during the war. As Miriam uncovers Esther’s life in Europe, she realises the story has been left for her to finish. Grappling with loss and the possibility of new love, Miriam must find the strength to reconcile her past and embrace her future.

 'Immaculately researched and exquisitely written... historical fiction at its best' - Louise Fein

Shark Heart, Emily Habeck ( paperback June 2024)

£10.99

For Lewis and Wren, their first year of marriage is also their last. A few weeks after their wedding, Lewis receives a rare diagnosis. He's turning into a great white shark, and has less than a year left to live as a human.

At first, Wren resists her husband's fate. Is there a way for them to be together after Lewis fully transforms?But as Lewis changes, day by day, Wren begins to make peace with the inevitable. After all, this isn't the first time she's lost a loved one.

An extraordinary novel of love, loss, hope and happiness, Shark Heart explores the shapes that love takes, in all its many forms, and asks us to ask ourselves: what makes us human?

Every page bursts with heart' Anthony Doerr, author of All The Light We Cannot See'Compelling, moving, lyrical' - Claire North, author of Ithaca and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Dengue Boy, Michel Nieva ( paperback Feb 2025)

£12.99

The year is 2272. New York and Buenos Aires were submerged years ago and the Patagonian archipelagos are the only habitable lands on Earth. Here, Dengue Boy is a humanoid mosquito whose monstrous appearance repulses everyone, including his own mother.

As the world spirals to its end, Dengue Boy searches for the meaning of his life and his true origins. Elsewhere, adults exploit the value of pandemics on the Stock Exchange and waste the last of Earth's resources, while their privileged children plug into virtual realities and stream violent video games. For readers of China Miéville, Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez, with joyful, savage flair, Dengue Boy blends body horror and cyberpunk to deliver an extraordinary portrait of a demented future.

Translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery

'A rip-roaring satire of late capitalism and humanity's unerring instinct for self-sabotage' IRISH TIMES'

Another Marvelous Thing, Laurie Colwin ( paperback Nov 24)

£9.99

 At a perfectly ordinary cocktail party, Francis is introduced to Billy and - although it slips right by him at the time - he falls in love with her at once. Billy is a serious, often glum person. An economic historian, she is indifferent to a great many things (clothes, food, home décor), frowns easily and is frequently irritated.

Francis is older. He likes routine and a well-run household; he likes to pay for dinner, open car doors and call Billy at night to make sure she is safe. Both are happily married - but not to each other.

So begins a whirlwind love affair, perfectly captured in this frank, funny irresistible novel, from its fabulous inception to its inevitable end

Hope Street, Mike Gayle ( hardback Feb 2025)

£20.00

Lila Metcalfe is a trainee journalist in Derby and she's very used to being given the stories that no one else wants. So, when her editor tells her that the city's Cossington Park development is being held up by a solitary resident on Hope Street who is refusing to leave, she knows she is going to be the one sent to find out more.

And that's how she meets Connor. Twenty-something Connor is the sole resident of Hope Street and he is not at all what Lila is expecting. And he has a very clear reason not to move: he is waiting for his mum to come home.

The uplifting and heartfelt new novel from the author of A Song of Me and You. 'Moving, uplifting, unforgettable. Mike always writes from the heart and creates stories we fall in love with' Lisa Jewell'Full of relatable characters and as Mike takes us on a journey through all their high and lows and we're with them every step of the way .

. . A wonderful story' Ruth Hogan

The Puzzle Wood, Rosie Andrews ( paperback Feb 2025)

£9.99

In the outstanding new novel from the author of the Sunday Times bestseller The Leviathan, an isolated forest becomes the unsettling, beguiling backdrop to a tale of myths, memory and murder…

Deep in the woods, something is stirring…When Miss Catherine Symonds arrives to take up a position as governess at remote Locksley Abbey in the foothills of the Black Mountains, where England bleeds into Wales, she is apprehensive. It is not the echoing, near empty house with its skeleton staff that frightens her, nor the ancient woods that surround the Abbey or even the dogs that the owner, Sir Rowland, encourages to stalk the grounds, baying for blood. It is Catherine herself who fears scrutiny: her reference and very identity are fraudulent.

She is travelling in disguise to investigate the fate of the last governess at the house, who took her own life out in the woods. For that governess was Catherine’s own sister, but until now she had believed Emily had died many years before, when they were just children.

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

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 

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...

There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak ( paperback April 2025)

£9.99

The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted, internationally bestselling author of The Island of Missing Trees and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

There Are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel set between the 19th century and modern times, about love and loss, memory and erasure, hurt and healing, centred around three enchanting characters living on the banks of the River Thames and the River Tigris – their lives all curiously touched by the epic of Gilgamesh.

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'

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.

The Eights, Joanna Miller ( hardback April 2025)

£16.99

Entertaining and moving…I came to love these four women as though they were my sisters’ TRACY CHEVALIER

They knew they were changing history.They didn’t know they would change each other. Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students.

Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight. They have come here from all walks of life, and they are thrown into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship. Dora was never meant to go to university, but, after losing both her brother and her fiancé on the battlefield, has arrived in their place.

Beatrice, politically-minded daughter of a famous suffragette, sees Oxford as a chance to make her own way – and her own friends – for the first time. Socialite Otto fills her room with extravagant luxuries but fears they won’t be enough to distract her from her memories of the war years. And quiet, clever, Marianne, the daughter of a village vicar, arrives bearing a secret she must hide from everyone – even The Eights – if she is to succeed.

But Oxford’s dreaming spires cast a dark shadow: in 1920, misogyny is still rife, influenza is still a threat, and the ghosts of the Great War are still very real indeed. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time, their friendship will become more important than ever. The Eights is a captivating debut novel about sisterhood, self-determination, courage, and what it means to come of age in a world that is forever changed.

-'Beautifully captures the power of friendship ... A pleasure to read' PIP WILLIAMS

The Names, Florence Knapp ( hardback

£16.99

The Names is the story of three names, three versions of a life, and the infinite possibilities that a single decision can spark. 'I've just been blown away by the best debut novel in years . .  a genius idea for a book'Sunday Times.

It is 1987, and in the aftermath of a great storm, Cora sets out with her nine-year-old daughter to register the birth of her son. Her husband intends for her to follow a long-standing family tradition and call the baby after him.

But when faced with the decision, Cora hesitates. Going against his wishes is a risk that will have consequences, but is it right for her child to inherit his name from generations of domineering men? The choice she makes in this moment will shape the course of their lives. Seven years later, her son is Bear, a name chosen by his sister, and one that will prove as cataclysmic as the storm from which it emerged.

Or he is Julian, the name his mother set her heart on, believing it will enable him to become his own person. Or he is Gordon, named after his father and raised in his cruel image - but is there still a chance to break the mould? Powerfully moving and full of hope, this is the story of three names, three versions of a life, and the infinite possibilities that a single decision can spark. It is the story of one family, and love's endless capacity to endure, no matter what fate has in store.

Liars, Sarah Manguso ( May 2025, paperback)

£9.99

'A white-hot dissection of the power imbalances in a marriage, and as gripping as you want fiction to be. Any spouse that has ever argued about money, time, work and childcare should read it' – Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway. When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy.

When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including – a few years later – all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife. As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter.

Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her. Sarah Manguso's Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.

A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us all. 'An unflinchingly true and honest depiction of a marriage turning from gold to dust' – Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace

Darkness In the City of Light, Heidi Edmundson ( paperback May 2025)

£10.99

Vulpe Tempest is in charge of her uncle’s detective agency for the summer. Against the backdrop of a series of murders in which the victims are all mermaids, she takes on what appears to be the simple case of a missing person. To solve the mystery, she must descend into the dark underworld of the city, its rivalries and its fantastical stories. It's engagingly descriptive of a city which is 'almost' real but with magical elements. For fans of Jan Carson or Daphne Du Maurier. 

Heidi grew up in Northern Ireland and is also a doctor! This is her first fiction novel. 

Ripeness, Sarah Moss ( hardback May 2025)

£20.00

Moving from 60s Italy to contemporary Ireland, Ripeness is a breathtaking story of love and the search for belonging from Sarah Moss, bestselling author of Summerwater. On the brink of adulthood and just out of school, Edith finds herself travelling to rural Italy. She has been sent by her mother with strict instructions: to see her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, through the final weeks of her pregnancy, help at the birth and then make a phone call which will change all of their lives.

Decades later, happily divorced and newly energized, Edith is living in contentment and comfort in Ireland. When her best friend Méabh receives a call from an American man claiming to be her brother, Méabh must decide if she will meet him, and Edith finds herself plunged back into her own past and the story of the baby she once knew and loved. 'Tender and rueful .

. . Sarah Moss is a marvel of insight and eloquence' - Emma Donoghue'

The Director, Daniel Kehlmann ( hardback May 2025)

£22.00

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody.

Not even Greta Garbo, who he made famous, can help him. And thus, almost through no fault of his own, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. The returning family is confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime.

But Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin, wants the film genius, he won't take no for an answer and makes big promises. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement. Daniel Kehlmann's novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph.

Summer Heat, Defne Suman ( paperback April 2025)

£9.99

1974. Melike should be happy: school is shut and her parents have stopped hosting parties for their rowdy political friends. But she’s scared.

She can tell from her parents’ urgent whispers about prison, invasion and military coups that Istanbul is changing. So when the family relocate to a quaint village in the south, Melike is hopeful life might get better. And for a while, it does.

But then her beloved father disappears...

 2003. Nearly three decades have passed, and Melike has done her best to move on.

But despite her successful career as an art historian and a husband who adores her, she has always felt a lingering discontent. When she meets mysterious – and extremely handsome – stranger Petro, Melike feels her fortunes changing. But Petro isn’t who he says he is.

And when Melike uncovers his true identity, she also lays bare a lifetime of hidden pasts... With a backdrop of the Turkish army’s occupation of Cyprus in 1974, Summer Heat explores family secrets, tangled identities and one woman’s place in her country’s devastating history.

Albion, Anna Hope ( hardback June 2025)

£16.99

The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home – twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone – to bury Philip: husband, father and the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember. Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn.

Each believes their father has given them his blessing, setting them on a collision course with each other. Isa has long suspected that her father thought only of himself, and hopes to seek out her childhood love, who still lives on the estate, to discover whether it is her feelings for him that are creating the fault lines in her marriage. And then there is Clara, who arrives in their midst from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.

Superb … Anna Hope engages, head-on, with some of the most urgent and challenging issues facing the world today, and transforms them into spellbinding family drama' Jonathan Coe

Speak to Me Of Home, Jeanne Cummins ( hardback May 2025)

£20.00

Rafaela remembers everything that matters: her beautiful childhood in San Juan, her marriage to Peter, uprooting their children, Ruth and Benny, to the American Midwest, and losing all sense of her place in the world. So she tells no one when her memory begins to slip. Her daughter, in New York with a family of her own, wishes she could forget her muddy feelings about where she comes from - the same feelings which motivated her 22-year-old daughter Daisy to reconnect with their past.

Daisy, who has momentarily forgotten everything, hears the word critical in a hospital room in San Juan and remembers, all at once, the car that hurtled towards her, the terrible storm, and something else. What was it?Now Ruth and Rafaela must return to the city where it all began, to gather by Daisy's bedside and confront the twists of fate that have caused a growing rift in their family and led them to this moment.

'A riveting tale of three generations, this is storytelling at its finest'JOHN BOYNE, author of The Heart's Invisible Furies'

Shy Creatures, Clare Chambers ( paperback June 2025)

£9.99

 It all started the weekend the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park . .

Croydon, 1964. Art therapist Helen Hansford is working in a psychiatric hospital, where she has been having passionate but precarious affair with her married colleague, the charismatic Dr Gil Rudden.

Helen's structured life is upended when William Tapping - a silent, thirty-seven-year-old man with a beard down to his waist - arrives at the hospital. As Helen helps William express himself through art, she becomes increasingly entangled in his mysterious past. Inspired by a true story, Shy Creatures is a life-affirming exploration of loneliness, love and the quiet forces that shape our lives, reminding us that freedom can come in unexpected forms.

'Reading a Clare Chambers novel can feel like entering a modest bungalow and finding yourself in a cathedral' SUNDAY TIMES

The Echoes, Evie Wyld ( paperback June 2025)

£9.99

Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. This summer, discover the beautiful novel that ‘will stay with you forever’ (Observer).

‘Like all the best ghost stories, The Echoes is also a love story’ PAULA HAWKINS

As a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, Max watches his girlfriend Hannah in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him. In the months before Max’s death, Hannah is haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seems to offer the potential of a different story. Yet the past refuses to stay hidden.

Happiness Forever, Adelaide Faith ( hardcover May 2025)

£16.99

A hilarious and utterly original debut novel following a woman trying to make sense of her life and herself as she falls in love with her therapist. Sylvie is only happy when she is at therapy. This is because Sylvie is in love with her therapist.

She wants to kiss her and roll around on the floor with her. She thinks about her every second they’re not together (roughly 167 hours and 10 minutes per week). She’s aware she has an obsession, but whether it is – as her therapist suggests – a case of extreme ‘erotic transference’, or a lost person’s need to connect, Sylvie isn’t sure.

Beyond therapy, Sylvie has what she considers to be a small life: a job as a veterinary nurse, her little brain-damaged dog, Curtains, and a new friend Chloe who she met on the beach. When the therapist delivers some devastating news, Sylvie has to imagine new and lasting ways of coping (that don’t include being adopted by the therapist). Her world has begun to open up, inching beyond the fear that has confined her until now, and she must decide whether she’s ready for a bravery of feeling.

In this stunning debut novel, Adelaide Faith encapsulates the great vulnerability, difficulty and joy of being alive. 'There is so much rare humour and insight and sweetness and humanity … and a true and ringing voice' Sheila Heti

Good Girl, Aria Aber ( hardback Jan 2025)

£16.99

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025**A portrait of the artist as a young woman in a Berlin that can’t escape its history: an electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery‘Kaleidoscopic, full of style and soul’ Raven Leilani‘A must-read … Dark, breathtaking, profound, so fresh’ Guardian‘A no-bullshit must-read debut’ Kaveh Akbar‘Delicious, propulsive reading’ VogueIn Berlin’s underground, where techno rattles buildings still scarred with the violence of the last century, nineteen-year-old Nila finds her tribe. In their company she can escape the parallel city that made her, the public housing block packed with refugees and immigrants, where the bathrooms are infested with silverfish and the walls outside are graffitied with swastikas. Escaping into the clubs, Nila tries to outrun the shadow of her dead mother, once a feminist revolutionary; her catatonic, defeated father; and the cab-driver uncles who seem to idle on every corner.

To anyone who asks, her family is Greek, not Afghani. And then Nila meets American writer Marlowe Woods, whose literary celebrity, though fading, opens her eyes to a world of patrons and festivals, one that imbues her dreams of life as an artist with new possibility. But as she finds herself drawn further into his orbit and ugly, barely submerged tensions begin to roil and claw beneath the city’s cosmopolitan veneer, everything she hopes for, hates, and believes about herself will be challenged.

Bitter Sweet, Hattie Williams ( Hardback July 2025)

£16.99

In my life, there are things that have happened to me, and things that I have done, that have proven to be moments that have a clear before and an after. One of those moments, perhaps in some ways the biggest, was the day that I met Richard Aveling for the first time.'Charlie is twenty-three, single and the new publicity assistant at the independent London publishing house Winden & Shane.

Richard Aveling is fifty-six, married and the author that has defined his generation. Charlie has long idolised the charming, illustrious writer, who also represents a link to her late mother, who loved his work. But as they embark on an illicit and all-consuming affair, Charlie is forced to hide the relationship from everyone she cares about.

And when the success of Richard's latest book launches him to a new level of fame where all anonymity is lost, she realises she might just be in too deep... A thought-provoking exploration of a relationship founded in power, control and silence, Bitter Sweet is perfect for book clubs and will appeal to fans of Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason and Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors. **

**'Brutal but tender, entertaining, compelling and completely believable' LAUREN BRAVO'

Notes on Infinity, Austin Taylor ( hardback July 2025)

£16.99

The moment Zoe notices Jack in their Harvard chemistry class, with his scruffy clothes and casual self-assurance, she knows he’s the one to beat. When Zoe starts trying to outsmart Jack in chemistry, he knows she’s the person he’s been looking for. Because Jack has dreams that go far beyond the classroom.

And while he and Zoe might be from different worlds, they share the same thirst for knowledge and fierce ambition. When he invites her to partner with him on some research, she puts aside her pride, and joins him. Apart they are brilliant, but together they are unstoppable, and within two years, they are at the helm of a thriving start-up company, and deep in a relationship that seems a perfect match in every sense.

Until a shocking accusation is levelled against Jack which threatens everything they’ve built – their company, their reputation, and most importantly, their love. Are some dreams too big to come true? And how far would you go to achieve them anyway?A captivating, deeply poignant novel about ambition, deceit, the recklessness that comes with early success and the way that love can make us feel invincible

Love Forms ,Claire Adam ( hardback June 2025)

£16.99

In the heart-aching new novel from the author of the award-winning Golden Child, a mother searches for the daughter she left behind a lifetime ago. Trinidad, 1980: Dawn Bishop, aged 16, leaves her home and journeys across the sea to Venezuela.

There, she gives birth to a baby girl, and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption. Dawn tries to carry on with her life - a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce - but through it all, she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela, and of what might have been. Then, forty years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch.

She says that she might be Dawn's long-lost daughter, stirring up a complicated mix of feelings: could this be the person to give form to all the love and care a mother has left to offer?

'Reads like a Claire Keegan short story expanded by Elizabeth Strout.'JOHANNA THOMAS-CORR.