Romy Hausmann’s Dear Child begins where other thrillers often end and takes the breaking news event we might hear about—a young woman escaping from captivity with children in tow—as her starting point, before showing us what life was like for them and how they fare once free. A windowless shack in the woods. Lena’s life and that of her two…
Vanessa Savage’s second book, The Woods, tells the unsettling story of three families, whose lives are intertwined, and two sisters, who need to unearth what happened ten years ago, before they can move on. For Tess, her older sister Bella is her whole world. She’s smart and beautiful and popular – everything Tess isn’t – and since the death of…
In his second novel, We Germans, Alexander Starritt poses an intriguing question to one generation from another and asks what it was like to be on the German side during the Second World War. When a young British man asks his German grandfather what it was like to fight on the wrong side of the war, the question is initially…
When Pete and Maddie discover that the child they brought home from hospital two years ago is not the same one as Maddie gave birth to, an already fraught situation rapidly blows up into something altogether more dangerous and frightening in JP Delaney’s latest novel Playing Nice. Pete Riley answers the door one morning to a parent’s worst nightmare. On…
Claire Douglas sets her latest novel Just Like the Other Girls in one of Bristol’s more affluent suburbs, showing us how the enviable and charming, outwardly respectable facade of a Georgian townhouse on Clifton’s leafy streets and crescents offers no protection against dark secrets, family dysfunction and danger finding their way in. Una Richardson is devastated after the death of…
Beth Cartwright’s debut novel Feathertide is an enchanting tale of one young girl’s quest to find the father she’s never known. Born covered in the feathers of a bird, and kept hidden in a crumbling house full of secrets, Marea has always known she was different, but never known why. And so to find answers, she goes in search of…
Witnessing a fatal accident involving an acquaintance of hers, on the same day that her granddaughter arrives for a prolonged stay, proves to be a watershed moment not only for Astrid Strick but also her family in All Adults Here, the latest novel from Emma Straub. Astrid Strick has always tried to do her best for her three children. Now,…
In Lost Souls Deputy Coroner and new father Clay Edison’s latest case triggers two parallel investigations into long-buried family ties and secrets, against a backdrop of halted construction work, activists and protestors, court hearings, missing records and more personal threats, in this new novel by father-son duo, Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman. Deputy Coroner Clay Edison is juggling a new baby…
I’m wearing my Comedy Women In Print (CWIP) hat and sharing Q&A duties with Helen Lederer today. While she puts much funnier questions to Kirsty Eyre over on the CWIP blog, I’m posing some of my own to the inaugural (CWIP) Unpublished Novel Prize Winner. Congratulations on your win, Kirsty, and Happiest of Publication weeks to you with the audiobook…
Gilly Macmillan’s latest novel To Tell You The Truth features the ultimate in unreliable narrators, as past and present events in Lucy Harper’s life seem to align with disturbing similarity, when an unsettling house move forces her back to the scene of a traumatic childhood event. Lucy Harper has a talent for invention… She was nine years old when her…