Fiction & related items

For a year, the three of them live in the flat below Earl's on the Blossom View Estate. Livia, who has been running for long enough to think her past might never catch up with her. But now she's been forced to catch her breath and face the daughter she left behind. Mickey, who is angry: about hav...

It's 1981 in the suburbs of Blackburn and, as Rafi's mother reminds him daily, the family moved here from Pakistan to give him the best opportunities. But Rafi longs to follow his own path. Flamboyant, dramatic and musically gifted, he wants to be a Bollywood star. Twenty years later, Rafi is fly...

A powerful polyphonic novel about family secrets, judgemental aunties, and Brazilian butt lifts. In 'Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow', Damilare Kuku brings her signature humour, boldness, and compassion to each member of this loveable but exasperating family, whose lives reveal the ways in which...

'Ponyboy' is a quest for self-identity set among the art world of Paris and Berlin. In the first act, Ponyboy's eponymous narrator - a pill-popping, speed-snorting trans-masculine lightning bolt - unravels in his Paris apartment. Ponyboy is caught in a messy love triangle with Baby, a lesbian pai...

Autumn, AD 672. While out walking, Abbot Brocc was shocked to encounter the sinister apparition of a young woman, cloaked entirely in grey, who foretold his impending death. Dismissing the soothsayer's words, Brocc nevertheless felt concerned enough to ask for Sister Fidelma's advice on the matte...

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a ...

Shakespeare fed us the myth of the Macbeths as murderous conspirators. But now Val McDermid drags the truth out of the shadows, exposing the patriarchal prejudices of history. Expect the unexpected. A thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three compan...

Best friends Matilda, Penny, Sofia and Jo are approaching their sixties with flair until, one by one, their bubbles are burst. Matilda, a bestselling novelist, is dropped by her publisher; Penny is cut from her prime-time TV show in favour of her male co-host; Sofia's acting agent can only offer ...

This novel is about a young man, Tunde, whose brother is involved in an accident and stranded just as the Biafran war begins. Tunde spends the novel travelling through a war zone to be reunited with his brother - to bring him home and to ask for forgiveness for the part he played in the accident,...

A young student sits on a bench in a park in San Miguel, Mexico. Bonita is away from her home in India to learn Spanish. She is alone, somewhere she has no connection to. It is bliss. And then a woman approaches her. The woman claims to recognize Bonita because she is the spitting image of her mo...