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.
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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
