A desperate phone-call in the middle of the night shatters so much more than the peace and tranquility of a family holiday in Gillian McAllister’s sixth novel That Night. During a family holiday in Italy, you get an urgent call from your sister. There’s been an accident: she hit a man with her car and he’s dead. She’s overcome with…
Curated by book squirrels
Michael Joseph
In Nicola Moriarty’s You Need to Know we meet the Lewis family, as they approach the first anniversary of a tragic accident in the run-up to Christmas, in itself a stressful enough time for most families. Jill’s three grown-up sons mean everything to her. She would do anything for her boys – protect them, lie for them, even die for…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes is the story of two families, neighbours in upstate New York, and how life can change in an instant but may take a generation before things begin to heal. Gillam, upstate New York: a town of ordinary, big-lawned suburban houses. The Gleesons have recently moved there and soon welcome the Stanhopes as their new…
Then She Vanishes opens with an uncharacteristic and shocking act, no clear motive behind it, but as Claire Douglas soon shows us, things are rarely that straightforward, especially when it comes to family. Heather and Jess were best friends – until the night Heather’s sister vanished. Jess has never forgiven herself for the lie she told that night. Nor has Heather. But…
As a local archaeological dig unearths harsh burial rites and customs, secrets in the Vermuydens’ own more recent past threaten their fragile equilibrium in Fiona Neill’s latest novel. After a chaotic childhood, Grace Vermuyden is determined her own daughters will fulfil the dreams denied to her. Lilly is everyone’s golden girl, the popular, clever daughter she never had to worry…
I am cheating ever so slightly with the book for X in the A to Z Challenge by choosing Exhibit Alexandra which came out in paperback last month retitled His Perfect Wife. Alexandra Southwood has vanished. Her husband, Marc, is beside himself. It isn’t long before the police are searching for a body. But Alexandra is alive – trapped, far…