In A Ghost in the Throat Doireann Ní Ghríofa chronicles her personal response to a famous eighteenth-century poem in captivating prose and lays bare her own life while discovering that of the poet who wrote it. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem that…
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Someone might be getting away with murder in Romy Hausmann’s novel, Sleepless, an ambitious cat-and-mouse thriller, about guilt, coercive control, social inequality, retribution and justice. It’s over, my angel. Today I’m going to die. Just like her. He’s won.It’s been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she’s wanted nothing more than…
The locked-room murder mystery that she’s neatly stitched it into is entirely her own creation but the inspiration behind Hope Adams’ novel Dangerous Women is the Rajah quilt, an actual quilt made by convicts on their 1841 voyage of transportation from London to Van Diemen’s Land. (What we now know as Tasmania, Australia’s island state, following a name change in…
Emma Stonex takes as her inspiration for The Lamplighters a real event from 1900, where three lighthouse keepers vanished from the Flannan Isles Lighthouse on Eilean Mòr in the Outer Hebrides. Moving the action to Cornwall in 1972 and making hers a rock lighthouse, fifteen miles off the coast from Lands End, she creates a compelling locked room mystery together…
In Jennie Fields’ Cold War novel Atomic Love, a once brilliant scientist, who was fired from the Manhattan Project, finds herself wrestling with intense and conflicting emotions when an ex-colleague and former lover suddenly comes back into her life and the FBI pressures her to get close to him again. Chicago, 1950. Rosalind Porter has always defied expectations – in…
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,…
It’s publication day for Abigail Mann’s debut novel, which was runner-up in the Comedy Women in Print Prize 2019: The Lonely Fajita is a story about how finding yourself with nowhere else to go just might lead you to the very place you need to be. It’s Elissa’s birthday, but her boyfriend hasn’t really noticed – and she’s accidentally scheduled…
Born Survivors tells the story of three remarkable young women whose lives were first diminished, and then devastated, when the Nazis swept through Eastern Europe intent upon their annihilation, but which they somehow found the resilience to outlast and survive. Among millions of Holocaust victims sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944, Priska, Rachel, and Anka each passed through its…
Dominic Brownlow’s evocative yet unsettling debut novel The Naseby Horses opens with a teenager returning home only to discover that his sister has been missing since the very same day he was admitted to hospital. Seventeen-year-old Simon’s sister Charlotte is missing. The lonely Fenland village the family recently moved to from London is odd, silent, and mysterious. Simon is epileptic…