Joe and Joan Castleman are on an aeroplane, 35,000 feet above the ocean. Joe is thinking about the prestigious literary prize he is about to receive and Joan is plotting how to leave him. For too long Joan has played the role of supportive wife, turning a blind eye to his misdemeanours, subjugating her own talents and quietly being the keystone of...

Smile has all the features for which Roddy Doyle has become famous: the razor-sharp dialogue, the humour, the superb evocation of childhood - but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. When you finish the last page you will have been challenged to re-evaluate everything you think you remember so clearly. Just moved in to a new apartment...

Joan Stanley has a secret. She is a loving mother, a doting grandmother, and leads a quiet, unremarkable life in the suburbs. Then one morning there is a knock on the door, and suddenly the past she has been so keen to hide for the last fifty years threatens to overturn her comfortable world. Cambridge University in 1937 is awash with ideas and ide...

When Vianne Rocher receives a letter from beyond the grave, she has no choice but to follow the wind that blows her back to Lansquenet, the village in south-west France where, eight years ago, she opened up a chocolate shop. But Vianne is completely unprepared for what she finds there. Women veiled in black, the scent of spices and peppermint tea,...

South London, 2008. Two couples find themselves at a moment of reckoning, on the brink of acceptance or revolution. Melissa has a new baby and doesn't want to let it change her but, in the crooked walls of a narrow Victorian terrace, she begins to disappear. Michael, growing daily more accustomed to his commute, still loves Melissa but can't quite...

Seeking refuge and anonymity in the cobbled streets of Montmartre, Yanne and her daughters, Rosette and Annie, live peacefully, if not happily, above their little chocolate shop.Nothing unusual marks them out; no red sachets hang by the door.The wind has stopped - at least for a while.Then into their lives blows Zozie de l'Alba, the lady with the l...

4 of 4 copies available BORROW LISTEN TO A SAMPLE ADD TO WISH LISTADD TO HISTORY Description Creators Details Random House presents the audiobook edition of Kill 'Em All by John Niven, read by Tom Riley. _____________________ The long-awaited sequel to KILL YOUR FRIENDS It is 2017 - the time of Trump, Brexit and fake news. And tim...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Middle England by Jonathan Coe, read by Rory Kinnear. 'It was tempting to think, at times like this, that some bizarre hysteria had gripped the British people' Beginning eight years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by Poundland, and London, where frenzied riots give...

Set in present-day Hong Kong, The Expatriates follows the lives of three women. An unspeakable tragedy leaves twenty-something Mercy with a crippling personal inertia, and Margaret, a mother of three, numb and unable to heal. In the same small expatriate community, Hilary tries to distract herself from a marriage gone stale by providing piano lesso...

In An American Marriage, the author of Silver Sparrow returns with a stunning novel about race, loyalty, and love that endures.

Shirley Jackson's deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family takes readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, macabre humor, and gothic atmosphere. Six years after four family members died suspiciously of arsenic poisoning, the three remaining Blackwoods-elder, agoraphobic sister Constance; wheelchai...

It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? Our narrator has many of the advantages of life: Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of...

The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond: An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Reasons to Be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe. 18 year old Lizzie Vogel finds herself a new job in a dentist's surgery after answering a classified advert in the Leicester Mercury for a 'mature lady with a strong interest in dental issues'. Working for an eccentric dental surgeon who's obsessed with becoming a Free...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Love Story for Bewildered Girls by Emma Morgan, read by Christine Hewitt, Lucy Dixon and Annabel Scholey. Grace loves a woman. Annie loves a man. Violet isn't quite sure. But you'll love them all... Grace has what one might call a 'full and interesting life' which is code for not married and has no kids....

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Forgive Me, a compelling story of a daughter uncovering her mother's secret past from the No. 1 bestselling author, Lesley Pearse. Read by the actress Alison Dowling. Cheltenham, 1991. When Eva Patterson returns home from work one day, a devastating scene awaits her. Her mother, Flora, lies dead in...

James Marlowe puts in long alcohol and cocaine fuelled hours as an advertising director. As his life disintegrates around him he comes to despise his clients, the corporate world, and himself. Now his imagination is fired by a set of characters he calls The Zoo. They lead him into a world crazier than the one that's thrown him out. The way back to...

Tamsin and her best friend Michelle have been inseparable since they were teenagers. Even now they spend all their time together, along with Patrick, Michelle's handsome husband. So when Tamsin hears a rumour that Patrick is having an affair, she is furious and plots a scheme to catch him in the act, using her assistant Bea as live-bait. It should...

Rachel and Becca are stepsisters, living far apart, with little in common. Rachel is the successful one: happily married with three children and a big house. Becca, meanwhile, lurches from one dead-end job to another and has given up on love. The two of them have lost touch, but when Rachel doesn't come home one night, Becca is called in to help. A...

Three sisters and a brother meet up in their grandparents' old house for three long, hot summer weeks. The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past, but now they may have to sell it. And under the idyllic surface, there are tensions. Secrets are uncovered and passions erupt as a way of life - bourgeois, literate, ritualised - win...

After the sudden loss of his wife, Michael Turner moves to London and develops a close friendship with the Nelson family next door. Josh, Samantha and their two young daughters seem to represent everything Michael fears he may now never have. Despite this, the new friendship at first seems to offer the prospect of healing, but then a catastrophic e...