Books Archive

Love Marriage (April 2022)

By Monica Ali

April 5, 2022

Yasmin Ghorami has a lot to be grateful for: a loving family, a fledgling career in medicine and a charming, handsome fiance, fellow doctor Joe Sangster.

But as the wedding day draws closer and Yasmin’s parents get to know Joe’s firebrand feminist mother, both families must confront the unravelling of long-held secrets, lies and betrayals.

While Yasmin dismantles her own assumptions about the people she holds most dear, she’s also forced to ask herself what she really wants in a relationship and what a ‘love marriage’ actually means.

Love Marriage is a story about who we are and how we love today – with all the complications and contradictions of life, desire, marriage and family.  What starts as a captivating social comedy develops into a heartbreaking and gripping story of two cultures, two families and two people trying to understand one another.

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The Darkest Sin (April 2022)

By D. V. Bishop

April 5, 2022

Florence. Spring, 1537.

When Cesare Aldo investigates a report of intruders at a convent in the Renaissance city’s northern quarter, he enters a community divided by bitter rivalries and harbouring dark secrets.

His case becomes far more complicated when a man’s body is found inside the convent, stabbed more than two dozen times.  Unthinkable as it seems, all the evidence suggests one of the nuns must be the killer.

Meanwhile, Constable Carlo Strocchi finds human remains, pulled from the Arno river, that belong to an officer of the law missing since winter.  The dead man had many enemies, but who would dare kill an official of the city’s most feared criminal court?

As Aldo and Strocchi close in on the truth, identifying the killers will prove more treacherous than either of them could ever have imagined…

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The Herd (April 2022)

By Emily Edwards

April 5, 2022

You should never judge how someone chooses to raise their child.

Elizabeth and Bryony are polar opposites, but their unexpected friendship has always worked.  They’re the best of the friends, and godmothers to each other’s daughters – because they trust that the safety of their children is the top priority for both of them.

But what if their choice could harm your child?

Little do they know that they differ radically over one very important issue.  And when Bryony, afraid of being judged, tells what is supposed to be a harmless white lie before a child’s birthday party, the consequences are more catastrophic than either of them could ever have imagined…

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The Paris Apartment (April 2022)

By Lucy Foley

April 5, 2022

Welcome to No. 12 rue des Amants

A beautiful old apartment block, deep in the backstreets of Montmartre.  Where nothing goes unseen, and everyone has a story to unlock.

The watchful concierge
The scorned lover
The prying journalist
The naive student
The unwanted guest

There was a murder here last night.  A mystery lies behind the door of apartment three.

Who holds the key?

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The Couple at the Table (April 2022)

By Sophie Hannah

April 5, 2022

You’re on your honeymoon at an exclusive couples-only resort.

You receive a note warning you to ‘Beware of the couple at the table nearest to yours’.  At dinner that night, five other couples are present, and none of their tables is any nearer or further away than any of the others.  It’s as if someone has set the scene in order to make the warning note meaningless – but why would anyone do that?

You have no idea.

You also don’t know that you’re about to be murdered, or that once you’re dead, all the evidence will suggest that no one there that night could possibly have committed the crime.

So who might be trying to warn you?  And who might be about to commit the perfect impossible murder?

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The Perfect Family (April 2022)

By Robyn Harding

April 5, 2022

Thomas and Viv Adler have a picture perfect family.  Affluent and attractive, with two well-mannered kids almost out of the nest, they live in a beautiful house in a well-to-do neighbourhood.  Their jobs are fulfilling; their children are thriving; the world is their oyster.

Until one morning, when they wake up to find that their house and car have been pelted with eggs.  Thomas dismisses it as the work of a few out-of-control kids, but when a smoke bomb is tossed on their front lawn, and the tires on their BMW are punctured, he begins to worry.  Unable to identify the perpetrators, they are helpless as the assaults escalate.  The police assure them that this is just the work of bored teenagers, but no one in the Adler family believes it.  After all, each of them has a secret – kept not only from the outside world but from each other.

As the Adlers grapple with their guilt, fear and shame, the assaults grow deadly.  Their ‘perfect’ façade is crumbling, and it may be too late for any of them to do anything about it.

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The Fish (April 2022)

By Lloyd Jones

April 5, 2022

When the baby is born – in a shabby caravan at a beach campground – it’s clear he is not like other babies.  But the family will try hard to protect and love and accept him.  Perhaps all the more to make up for letting his troubled mother down.

The young uncle grapples with his connection to the Fish.  And as he tries to understand his family and its confusing secrets and shame, his sense of his own place in the world begins to crumble.

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Give Unto Others (April 2022)

By Donna Leon

April 5, 2022

When Commissario Guido Brunetti is visited by Elisabetta Foscarini at the Questura one morning, he barely recognises her.  It has been many decades since Brunetti’s family lived in the apartment below hers, and yet when she approaches him with a favour that she wants kept out of any official police reports Brunetti agrees to help against his better judgement.

Suspicious of her son-in-law’s recent behaviour, Elisabetta pleads with Brunetti to examine his business dealings for fear that her daughter might be in danger.  At first it seems these are just the vague and anxious  imaginings of an overly protective mother.  But when a violent act of vandalism takes place in the middle of his investigation, Brunetti is forced to reconsider everything he thought he knew about the case and the people involved…

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