Anne Worthington’s debut novel The Unheard takes us through three key moments in Tom Pullan’s life, the reverse chronology of which making what is an already deeply affecting story all the more impactful. Tom Pullan knows that the people who visit him are trying to tell him something, but he cannot remember what. He knows the faces in his memory,…
JP Delaney’s My Darling Daughter explores what happens after an adopted teenager contacts her birth parent out of the blue and Anna’s mother Susie and husband, Gabe, respond to her cry for help. Out of the blue, Susie Jukes is contacted on social media by Anna, the girl she gave up for adoption fifteen years ago. But when they meet,…
Grace Jensen’s past catches up with her in The Beach House, threatening to dismantle the new life she’s carefully constructed for herself in the Pacific Northwest and bring it crashing down. When Grace Jensen returns to her home one day, she finds a body in a pool of blood and a menacing gift left for her. The community of Lookout…
Deesha Philyaw’s collection of short stories about The Secret Lives of Church Women is as delicious as its striking cover suggests. The nine stories feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church’s double standards and their own needs and passions. With their secret longings, new love,…
Ethan Joella’s novel A Little Hope takes you into the lives of a small town Connecticut community, with all the setbacks and disappointment, success and joy which people experience over the course of one year. Freddie and Greg Tyler seem to have it all: a comfortable home at the edge of the woods, a beautiful young daughter, a bond that…
A hidden stash of telegrams and old letters sets Sam Cooper off on a transatlantic journey to see the crumbling family home and meet the infirm grandmother her mother never even mentioned while she was alive, only for her to discover that much darker family skeletons have also been kept hidden away. Winter 1954, and in a dilapidated apartment in…
Lizzie Damilola Blackburn’s debut novel introduces us to relatable singleton and career girl, Yinka, and the gaggle of modern-day Mrs Bennets that are her Nigerian mother and associated Aunties, intent on matchmaking and publicly praying for her to find a man in Yinka, Where is Your Huzband? The Nigerian Accent DictionaryHuzband (pronounced auz-band) noun1. A male partner in a marriage e.g. Yinka’s younger…
Annie Ward mixes together a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs and alcohol with all the suspicion, gossip and lies circulating among the pushy soccer moms, its charismatic sports coach, and staff at an elite private school in the Colorado mountains to great effect in The Lying Club. At an elite private school nestled in the Colorado mountains, a tangled web…
When six friends book a weekend stay at a remote barn on the Northumberland moors, a violent overnight storm exposes the cracks in their relationships, some of which could prove fatal in Gilly Macmillan’s The Long Weekend. In an isolated retreat, deep in the Northumbria moors, three women arrive for a weekend getaway. Their husbands will be joining them in…
Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s The Newcomer is a crime novel with a difference: for here, as the title suggests, the victim doesn’t cede the story to the perpetrators or those investigating, but instead remains the main focus of our attention throughout. When her 29-year-old daughter Paulina goes missing on a sleepy pacific island, Judy Novak suspects the worst. Her fears are…
