Fiction

Twelve hours after a woman's broken body is washed up on a deserted shore on the south coast of England, her traumatised three-year-old daughter is discovered twenty miles away walking the streets of Poole, alone and apparently abandoned. Why was Kate Sumner killed and her daughter, a witness, allowed to live? More curiously, why had Kate willingly boarded a boat when she had a terror of drowning at sea? Police suspicion centres on a young actor, a loner with an obsession for pornography who lies about his relationship with Kate, and whose sailing boat is moored just yards away from where the toddler is found. As the investigation proceeds, attention shifts inexorably towards the murdered woman's husband. Was he really in Liverpool the night she died? And is Kate the 'respectable woman' he claims her to be? And why does their daughter scream every time he tries to pick her up?

This New York Times Notable Book begins on a rainy winter night. It takes hours for a black woman known as Mad Annie to die in the gutter. It will take 20 years for the woman who found her to shape her neighbors' racism, the indifference of the police, and her own rage into the truth.

As the year 1349 approaches, the Black Death continues its devastating course across England. In Dorseteshire, the quarantined people of Develish question whether they are the only survivors.Guided by their beloved young mistress, Lady Anne, they wait, knowing that when their dwindling stores are finally gone they will have no choice but to leave. But where will they find safety in the desolate wasteland outside?One man has the courage to find out.Thaddeus Thurkell, a free-thinking, educated serf, strikes out in search of supplies and news. A compelling leader, he and his companions quickly throw off the shackles of serfdom and set their minds to ensuring Develish's future - and freedom for its people.But what use is freedom that cannot be gained lawfully? When Lady Anne and Thaddeus conceive an audacious plan to secure her people's independence, neither foresees the life-threatening struggle over power, money and religion that follows...

When Lieutenant Charles Acland is flown home from Iraq with serious head injuries, he faces not only permanent disfigurement but also an apparent change to his previously outgoing personality.Crippled by migraines, and suspicious of his psychiatrist, he begins to display sporadic bouts of aggression, particularly against women, especially his ex-fiancee who seems unable to accept that the relationship is over.After his injuries prevent his return to the army, he cuts all ties with his former life and moves to London. Alone and unmonitored, he sinks into a private world of guilt and paranoid distrust... until a customer annoys him in a Bermondsey pub...Out of control and only prevented from killing the man by the intervention of a 250-pound female weightlifter called Jackson, he attracts the attention of police who are investigating three ‘gay’ murders in the Bermondsey area which appear to have been motivated by extreme rage...Under suspicion, Acland is forced to confront the real issues behind his isolation. How much control does he have over the dark side of his personality? Do his migraines contribute to his rages? Has he always been the duplicitous chameleon that his ex-fiancee claims?And why – if he hates women – does he look to a woman for help?

The story revolves around an explosive narrative of personal justice and revenge. When a devastating terrorist bomb kills a loved one, the official police investigation stalls and political promises fall short, forcing the protagonist to take matters into their own hands.

Joss le Guern, one-time sea captain and now town crier in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, announces the items of news that are left (with a fee) for him to "cry" three times a day. A number of enigmatic and disturbing messages are being slipped into his box, and he is becoming alarmed. Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg is visited by an extremely troubled woman. She keeps finding reversed 4s in black paint on the doors of her building. Between these strange marks and the town crier's frightening bulletins, Adamsberg begins to sense a connection, even a grotesque menace. Then charred and flea-bitten corpses are found. The press seizes on their plague-like symptoms, and the panic sets in. Adamsberg, a detective of formidable intelligence and intuition but with a fragile memory, enlists a mediaeval scholar to help him unravel the messages delivered to the town crier and relayed to the neighbourhood

Seattle chef Kate Linden feels life's opportunities are slipping away at the ripe old age of twenty-six, after she is suddenly fired from the city's hottest restaurant and her ex-boyfriend, Gaston, announces his forthcoming wedding to a woman he just met, and comes up with a grand--if misguided--scheme to transform her life.

The story follows LAPD officers Dana Vaughn, Nate Weiss, and the eccentric duo nicknamed Flotsam and Jetsam as they navigate the chaotic streets of Hollywood to investigate a series of bizarre attacks and complex local crimes.

The story revolves around the Plumb family, four middle-aged siblings—Leo, Beatrice, Jack, and Melody—who share a joint trust fund they have affectionately called "The Nest". They have all spent years prematurely counting on this inheritance to bail them out of various self-inflicted financial crises. However, the family dynamic fractures when the oldest brother, Leo, gets into a catastrophic, drug-fueled car accident. To pay for his rehab and cover up the scandal, their mother drains the trust fund, forcing the dysfunctional siblings to confront their choices, relationships, and financial dependencies.

Set in a hardscrabble, back country town in 1969, this begins with two half-brothers who get lost in the wild wooded countryside around the small town of Angel Rock. Only the eldest, 13-year-old Tom, finds his way home. A story of psychological suspense. Notable for its description of the Australian countryside in all its harshness and beauty.

The First Lord Nanther clearly hoped to be the subject of an admiring posthumous biography. Having built a name for himself as Queen Victoria's favored physician expert on blood diseases and particularly the royal disease of hemophilia he fastidiously set about recording the details of his eminent life, carefully cataloguing every significant letter, diary and medical essay that he'd written. But when the present Lord Nanther begins to research the life of his great-grandfather, he soon realizes there is little of interest in his ancestor's dry-as-dust account. Indeed, he begins to suspect that these old records conceal more than they reveal....

I fell in love with Emma Eckstein the moment I saw her from the fourth gallery of the Carl Theater, and this was also the night I met Sigmund Freud.” So goes the life, times, and loves of Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn, a fairly incurable romantic venturing optimistically through modern history.

In 1970, Sybilia, a young woman living on Corsica at the end of World War II, who had fallen in love with an American soldier, discovers a terrible secret about the death of her lover, a discovery that sets the stage for conflict and tragedy.

Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He’s a normal Italian teenager―obsessed with music, food, and girls―but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior.In an attempt to protect him, Pino’s parents force him to enlist as a German soldier―a move they think will keep him out of combat. But after Pino is injured, he is recruited at the tender age of eighteen to become the personal driver for Adolf Hitler’s left hand in Italy, General Hans Leyers, one of the Third Reich’s most mysterious and powerful commanders.Now, with the opportunity to spy for the Allies inside the German High Command, Pino endures the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation by fighting in secret, his courage bolstered by his love for Anna and for the life he dreams they will one day share.

The body, at least what was left of it, was drifting in Havana Bay the morning Arkady arrived from Moscow. Only the day before, he had received an urgent message from the Russian embassy in Havana that his friend Pribluda was missing and asking that he come. The Cubans insisted that this corpse floating in an inner tube was Pribluda, but Arkady wasn't so sure. "You don't investigate assault, you don't investigate murder. Just what do you investigate?" Arkady asks Ofelia Osorio, a detective in the Policia Nacional de la Revolucion. "Or is it simply open season on Russians in Havana?" The comrades of the Cold War have parted bitterly, and the Russians who used to swarm through Havana's streets are now as rare as they are despised, much more so than Americans. Havana is overrun with color, music, and suspicion. The Revolution's heroes have outlived idealism. The Com-munist world has shrunk to Cuba. Paradise has become a stop on sex tours. It is a city of empty stores and talking drums, Karl Marx and sharp machetes, where an American radical rides around in Hemingway's car to tout island investments and a Wall Street developer on the run from the FBI flies a pirate flag.

While a tough New York cop investigates a young woman's drug overdose, an Irish judge is blackmailed into helping the IRA, and the British Secret Intelligence Service attempts to plant an informer inside Colombia's most ruthless drug cartel.

The first book in the classic Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s -- the novels that shaped the future of Scandinavian crime writing. Hugely acclaimed, the Martin Beck series were the original Scandinavian crime novels and have inspired the writings of Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo. Written in the 1960s, 10 books completed in 10 years, they are the work of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo -- a husband and wife team from Sweden. They follow the fortunes of the detective Martin Beck, whose enigmatic, taciturn character has inspired countless other policemen in crime fiction; without his creation Ian Rankin's John Rebus or Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander may never have been conceived. The novels can be read separately, but are best read in chronological order, so the reader can follow the characters' development and get drawn into the series as a whole. 'Roseanna' begins on a July afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from Sweden's beautiful Lake Vattern. Three months later, all that Police Inspector Martin Beck knows is that her name is Roseanna, that she came from Lincoln, Nebraska, and that she could have been strangled by any one of eighty-five people.

When Philo knocks on the door of the Good Shephard convent seeking sanctuary from her husband Tommo, it's not just her own life she's about to overhaul. Swearing and smoking like a trooper, she sticks out like a sore thumb amidst all that convent holiness, but to both the nuns and the OAPs at the day-care centre, whose bitternesses and loves have been simmering away for years, Philo's earthiness and honesty bring just the kind of lifeforce they've been missing. While fighting a battle with her weight and a war with social services, who've temporarily placed her children in a local orphange, Philo artlessly manages to heal social rifts that have split the community and her family for years. Sheridan's charming debut novel is beautifully characterised and alive with the sights and sounds of Dublin's North Wall. In turns moving, hilarious, raw and heart-warming, this gem of a story is hard to resist.

Margaret and Patrick, married just a few months, set off on a great adventure - a year living in Kenya. While Patrick practices medicine, Margaret works as a photojournalist, capturing a dizzying and sometimes dangerous city on film. When a British couple invites the newlyweds on a climbing expedition to the summit of Mount Kenya, they eagerly agree. But during their arduous ascent a horrific accident occurs. In its aftermath, Margaret struggles to understand what happened on the mountain and how it has transformed her and her marriage, perhaps for ever.

Hannah is a confused fourteen-year-old. In the magazines she reads, celebrities plan elaborate weddings; in Hannah's own life, her parents' marriage is crumbling. Over the next decade and a half, love throws her some complicated questions. At what point can you no longer blame your adult failures on your messed up childhood? Is settling for someone who's not your soulmate an act of maturity or an admission of defeat? And if you move to another state for a guy who might not love you back, are you being plucky - or just pathetic?

On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton, former Devon farmer and now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park, receives the news that his soldier brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in Iraq. For Jack and his wife Ellie this will have a potentially catastrophic impact. For Jack in particular it means a crucial journey--to receive his brother's remains, but also into his own most secret, troubling memories and into the land of his and Ellie's past.

Richard Beaumont hoped to see the elusive chough on the Dover cliffs. Instead he sees a young woman falling to her death. No-one recognises her, no-one has reported her missing, and Richard returns, shaken, to his new young wife, but instead of finding solace in Lilian's company, he locks himself away and obsessively paints the scene of the woman's broken body on the rocks. His cool behaviour towards her takes Lilian to the flat below and the wordly-wise company of Sarah Fortune. But Sarah, once Richard's lover, is awkward with her and is also preoccupied with her brother's unbreakable habit of cat-burglary, and the suspicious traffic to the penthouse at the top of the mansion block. Unable to forget what he witnessed, Richard returns to the coast and is befriended by the local police surgeon. Recently widowed, John is depressed, not so much by his wife's death but by the realisation that his marriage had been a loveless void. Recognising the symptoms, Richard introduces him to Sarah, so that she can no longer ignore the Beaumonts' troubles and is drawn into helping to trace where the dead girl came from and in so doing reveals a trade which is both breath-takingly lucrative and chillingly cruel.

Jack Tobin is a trial lawyer with a searing-hot reputation in Miami, far removed from his scrappy youth on the streets of New York. But when a young Florida man is railroaded into a murder conviction in the tiny Florida backwater of Bass Creek, Tobin is driven to pay back a debt to his best friend, the boy who once dubbed him 'the Mayor of Lexington Avenue'.In his efforts to get the death penalty overturned, Tobin moves back to South Florida, where he finds himself up against the small-town legal establishment, where favours are routinely traded at the expense of truth, and where police corruption has become an art form.

MGB officer Leo is a man who never questions the Party Line. He arrests whomever he is told to arrest. He dismisses the horrific death of a young boy because he is told to, because he believes the Party stance that there can be no murder in Communist Russia. Leo is the perfect soldier of the regime. But suddenly his confidence that everything he does serves a great good is shaken. He is forced to watch a man he knows to be innocent be brutally tortured. And then he is told to arrest his own wife. Leo understands how the State works: Trust and check, but check particularly on those we trust. He faces a stark choice: his wife or his life. And still the killings of children continue...

The bestselling author of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" describes how we experience the visual world. In "Musicophilia", Oliver Sacks explored music and the brain; now, in "The Mind's Eye", he writes about the myriad ways in which we experience the visual world: how we see in three dimensions; how we recognize individual faces or places; how we use language to communicate verbally; how we translate marks on paper into words and paragraphs, even how we represent the world internally when our eyes are closed. Alongside remarkable stories of people who have lost these abilities but adapted with courage, resilience and ingenuity, there is an added, personal element: one day in late 2005, Sacks became aware of a dazzling, flashing light in one part of his visual field; it was not the familiar migraine aura he had experienced since childhood, and just two days later a malignant tumor in one eye was diagnosed. In subsequent journal entries - some of which are included in "The Mind's Eye" - he chronicled the experience of living with cancer, recording both the effects of the tumor itself, and radiation therapy. In turning himself into a case history, Sacks has given us perhaps his most intimate, impressive and insightful book yet.

There's a caste system even in murder.Seven years ago, Vivek 'Vicky' Rai, the playboy son of the Home Minister of Uttar Pradesh, murdered Ruby Gill at a trendy restaurant in New Delhi simply because she refused to serve him a drink. Now Vicky Rai is dead, killed at his farmhouse at a party he had thrown to celebrate his acquittal. The police search each and every guest. Six of them are discovered with guns in their possession. In this elaborate murder mystery we join Arun Advani, India's best-known investigative journalist, as the lives of these six suspects unravel before our eyes: a corrupt bureaucrat; an American tourist; a stone-age tribesman; a Bollywood sex symbol; a mobile phone thief; and an ambitious politician. Each is equally likely to have pulled the trigger. Inspired by actual events, Vikas Swarup's eagerly awaited second novel is both a riveting page turner and an insightful peek into the heart and soul of contemporary India.

The book is a psychological fiction thriller based on a true-life murder. The story follows Portia McTeague, a forensic psychologist, who is called in to evaluate Jimmy Wier. Jimmy is a seemingly naive delivery worker charged with the brutal murder of two elderly women. Portia must examine him to understand the dark impulses that drove him across the line and determine if he is mentally stable.