Modern & contemporary fiction

Zara is planning her wedding. She loves her fiance Dan, but the pressure is huge: a marriage to a British-Asian from a good family has been her mother's dream for Zara since she was six. In desperation, Zara turns to her granny, who is planning her own Big Day: her funeral. Granny's snobbish frie...

When X - an iconoclastic artist, writer and polarizing shape-shifter - dies suddenly, her widow, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognised as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, ...

In England's birdwatching paradise, a new breed has been sighted - murderer. Young Tom French was found dead, lying in a marsh on the Norfolk coast, with his head bashed in and his binoculars still around his neck. One of the best birders in England, Tom had put the village of Rushy on the birdwa...

Emily Blackwood, adventuress and plant hunter, travels north for a curious new commission. A gentleman has written to request she catalogue his vast collection of taxidermied creatures before sale. On arrival, Emily finds a ruined castle, its owner haunted by a woman who vanished years before. An...

Frances Strange - now known as Birdie Johnson - has always felt that something was missing from her life. She also has a secret - a big secret. Will that secret, and the thing she is always missing, come back to ruin her life? Or will the charmingly eccentric Frenchman Noel save her from herself?

Colombia's Pacific coast, where everyday life entails warding off the brutal forces of nature. Damaris lives with her fisherman husband in a shack on a bluff overlooking the sea. Childless and at that age 'when women dry up,' as her uncle puts it, she is eager to adopt an orphaned puppy. But this...

Diana and Matthew receive a formal demand from the Congregation: They must test the magic of their seven-year-old twins, Pip and Rebecca. Concerned with their safety and desperate to avoid the same fate that led her parents to spellbind her, Diana decides to forge a different path for her family'...

Hamou Badi is born in a mountain village with the magical signs of the zouhry on his hands. In Morocco, the zouhry is a figure of legend, a child of both humans and djinns, capable of finding all manner of treasure: lost objects, hidden water. But instead, Hamou finds a body. This unsolved murder...

Pru's husband has walked out, leaving her alone to contemplate her future. She's missing not so much him, but the life they once had - picnicking on the beach with small children, laughing together, nestling up like spoons in the cutlery drawer as they sleep. Now there's just a dip on one side of...

Teetarpur is just a nondescript village outside Delhi - famous for nothing. Until an eight-year-old girl is found swinging from the branch of a Jamun tree, a scarf noosed about her neck. Her father discovers the body, and at the scene of the crime he also finds Mansoor - an itinerant Muslim in th...