The Secrets of Strangers

**Shortlisted for ‘best novel’ in the 2021 Ngaio Marsh Awards!**

A regular weekday morning veers drastically off-course for a group of strangers whose paths cross in a London café – their lives never to be the same again when an apparently crazed gunman holds them hostage. But there is more to the situation than first meets the eye and as the captives grapple with their own inner demons, the line between right and wrong starts to blur. Will the secrets they keep stop them from escaping with their lives?

Another tense, multi-dimensional drama from the writer of the Richard & Judy bestseller AFTER THE FALL.

‘tautly plotted, gripping and emotional’ – Clare Mackintosh

All the Lives We Ever Lived

‘Deeply moving… This is a beautiful book.’ TLS
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Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford University when she first read Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death, she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief.

Braiding memoir, literary criticism and biography, Smyth’s story explores universal questions about family, loss and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, Smyth guides us towards a new vision of Woolf’s most demanding and rewarding novel. All the Lives We Ever Lived is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author.

‘Beautifully written… a gift to readers drawn to big questions about time, memory, mortality, love and grief’ Wall Street Journal

The Neon Bible

The accomplished and evocative first novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Confederacy of Dunces.

John Kennedy Toole wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript was finally published twenty years after Toole’s death.

The Neon Bible opens with the narrator, a young man named David, on a train, leaving the small Southern town he’s grown up in for the first time. What unspools is the tender and tragic coming-of-age story of a lonely child, a story that revolves around David’s unorthodox friendship with his great-aunt Mae – a former stage performer who is fiercely at odds with the conservative townspeople – and the everyday toll of living in an environment of religious fanaticism. From the opening lines of The Neon Bible, David is fully alive, naive yet sharply observant, drawing us into his world through the sure artistry of John Kennedy Toole.

Sourdough

It’s like Fight Club meets The Great British Bake Off – NPR

Lois Clary is a software engineer. She codes all day and collapses at night into her sofa, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the local takeaway from which she orders dinner every evening – that is, until the brothers are forced out of business. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their famous bread. She must keep it alive, feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. Lois is no baker, but soon, not only is she eating her own homemade, but she’s initiated into a fantastical and possibly fantastically sinister underground world: a secret market that aims to fuse home-cooked food with cutting-edge technology…

The Shallows

‘Boldly reactionary… What looks like feast, Carr argues, may be closer to famine’ Sunday Times

‘Chilling’ The Economist

In this ground-breaking and compelling book, Nicholas Carr argues that not since Gutenberg invented printing has humanity been exposed to such a mind-altering technology. The Shallows draws on the latest research to show that the Net is literally re-wiring our brains inducing only superficial understanding. As a consequence there are profound changes in the way we live and communicate, remember and socialise – even in our very conception of ourselves. By moving from the depths of thought to the shallows of distraction, the web, it seems, is actually fostering ignorance.

The Shallows is not a manifesto for luddites, nor does it seek to turn back the clock. Rather it is a revelatory reminder of how far the Internet has become enmeshed in our daily existence and is affecting the way we think. This landmark book compels us all to look anew at our dependence on this all-pervasive technology.

This 10th-anniversary edition includes a new afterword that brings the story up to date, with a deep examination of the cognitive and behavioural effects of smartphones and social media.

Bream Gives Me Hiccups

Bream Gives Me Hiccups: And Other Stories is the whip-smart fiction debut of Academy Award-nominated actor and star of The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg. Known for his iconic film roles but also for his regular pieces in the New Yorker and his two critically acclaimed plays, Eisenberg is an emerging voice in fiction.

Taking its title from a group of stories that begin the book, Bream Gives Me Hiccups moves from contemporary L.A. to the dormrooms of an American college to ancient Pompeii, throwing the reader into a universe of social misfits, reimagined scenes from history, and ridiculous overreactions.

United by Eisenberg’s gift for humour and character, and grouped into chapters that each open with an illustration by award-winning cartoonist Jean Jullien, the witty pieces collected in Bream Gives Me Hiccups explore what it means to navigate the modern world, and mark the arrival of a fantastically funny, self-ironic, witty and original voice.

Dalva

From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam, and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul.

One of Harrison’s most ambitious novels, Dalva explores an extraordinary family through the strong, engaging voice of an unforgettable woman, confirming Harrison as one of America’s most memorable writers.

The Tao of Bowie

What would David Bowie do?

When life gets tough, who can we turn to for help? Who will help us find happiness, meaning and purpose? The Tao of Bowie suggests that we turn to David Bowie for guidance – and use his amazing journey through life as a map to help us navigate our own.

Buddhism was central to David Bowie’s life, but he was a wide-ranging thinker who also drew meaning from other sources including Jungian psychology, Nietzschean philosophy and Gnosticism. The Tao of Bowie condenses these concepts – the ideas that inspired and supported Bowie throughout his life and career – into ten powerful lessons, each with a series of exercises, meditations and techniques to encourage readers to apply these learnings to their own lives.

The Tao of Bowie will help readers understand who they really are, clarify their purpose in life, manage their emotions and cope with setbacks and change. This fresh approach to the search for spirituality and happiness unites the perennial human quest for answers with the extraordinary mind and unique career of one of the most important cultural figures of the past half-century.

The Churchill Complex

‘Rich and rewarding’ Wall Street Journal

It is impossible to understand the last 75 years of British and American history without understanding the Anglo-American relationship, and specifically the bonds between presidents and prime ministers. FDR of course had Churchill; JFK famously had Macmillan, his consigliere during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan found his ideological soul mate in Thatcher, and George W. Bush found his fellow believer, in religion and in war, in Tony Blair.

In a series of shrewd and absorbing character studies, Ian Buruma takes the reader on a journey through the special relationship via the fateful bonds between president and prime minister. It’s never been a relationship of equals: from Churchill’s desperate cajoling and conniving to keep FDR on side, British prime ministers have put much more stock in the relationship than their US counterparts did. For Britain, resigned to the loss of its once-great empire, its close kinship to the world’s greatest superpower would give it continued relevance, and serve as leverage to keep continental Europe in its place. As Buruma shows, this was almost always fool’s gold.

And now, as the links between the Brexit vote and the 2016 US election are coming into sharper focus, it is impossible to understand the populist uprising in either country without reference to Trump and Boris Johnson, though ironically, they are also the key, Buruma argues, to understanding the special relationship’s demise.

A Burning Sea

‘Superb. A Burning Sea is a vivid, enthralling read, yet again proving that Theodore Brun is a force to be reckoned with.’ Giles Kristian

Doomed to wander. Destined for glory.

Convinced he is cursed, Erlan Aurvandil has turned his back on his native Northern lands. In search of freedom, he embarks on a perilous trip to Byzantium, the greatest city in the world. But as his voyage ends, Erlan is brutally betrayed and sold into slavery to a powerful Byzantine general.

Meanwhile, Lilla Sviggarsdottír, Queen of Svealand, has lost her husband – and with him her kingdom. Fleeing for her life, Lilla journeys east on a new quest: to find Erlan and raise an army mighty enough to defeat her usurper.

But, on reaching Byzantium, Lilla discovers a dark tide is rising against the Emperor, both outside the city walls and within his own court. As the whispers of war grow ever louder, both her and Erlan’s fate become entwined with that of the city. Are they doomed to fall, or can freedom be won in the fierce heat of battle?