Recent Books

Wild Dark Shore

By Charlotte Mc Conaghy

May 13, 2025

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, 18 and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, 17, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; 9-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back towards the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realises Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

Our Evenings

By Alan Hollinghurst

May 13, 2025

Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the Hadlows, the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school where their son Giles is his contemporary. For Dave this weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to Giles’s envy and violence. As Our Evenings unfolds over half a century, the two boys’ careers will diverge dramatically, Dave a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician.

Our Evenings is Dave Win’s own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security; but it is also, very movingly, the story of his hard-working widowed mother, whose own life takes an unexpected new turn after her son leaves home.

The Unquiet Grave

By Dervla McTiernan

May 8, 2025

For years the boglands of Northern Europe have given up bodies of the long-deceased. Bodies that are thousands of years old, uncannily preserved. Bodies with strange injuries that suggest ritual torture and human sacrifice.

When a corpse is found in a bog in Galway, Cormac Reilly assumes the find is historical. But closer examination reveals a more recent story. The dead man is Thaddeus Grey, a local secondary school principal who disappeared two years prior.

There’s nothing in Grey’s past that would explain why he was murdered, or why his body was mutilated in a ritual manner. At first, progress on the case is frustratingly slow and Cormac struggles to keep his mind on the job. His ex-girlfriend, Emma Sweeney, is in trouble, and she’s reached out to him for help – Emma’s new husband has gone missing in Paris, and the French police are refusing to open an investigation into his disappearance.

Cormac is sure that he has found Grey’s killer, and is within hours of an arrest, when another mutilated body is discovered on the other side of the country. Two days later, a third body is found. Press attention is intense. Is there a serial killer at work in Ireland? Has Cormac been on the wrong trail? And if so, can he find the murderer before they strike again?

Three Wee Bookshops at the End of the World

By Ruth Shaw

May 8, 2025

Three Wee Bookshops at the End of the World picks up Ruth’s story with more charming, heartbreaking, brave and funny tales. Having found the love of her life, Lance, she tells of their sailing adventures together, world travels, conservation efforts and their wee bookshops.

Life has never been easy for Ruth but, despite that, her book is chock full of extraordinary people and situations, many of them laugh-out-loud funny. Tales from the bookshops are interwoven with Ruth’s story, along with expert book recommendations.

Written in Ruth’s characteristic style, this absorbing memoir traverses the highs and lows of a life lived to the full, creating another deeply satisfying read.

Delirious

By Damien Wilkins

April 7, 2025

It’s time. Mary, an ex cop, and her husband, retired librarian Pete, have decided to move into a retirement village. They aren’t falling apart, but they’re watching each other – Pete with his tachcychardia and bad hip, Mary with her ankle and knee.

Selling their beloved house should be a clean break, but it’s as if the people they have lost keep returning to ask new things of them. A local detective calls with new information about the case of their son, Will, who was killed in an accident forty years before. Mary finds herself drawn to consider her older sister’s shortened life. Pete is increasingly haunted by memories of his late mother, who developed delirium and never recovered.

An emotionally powerful novel about families and ageing, Delirious dramatises the questions we will all face, if we’re lucky, or unlucky, enough. How to care for others? How to meet the new versions of ourselves who might arrive? How to cope? Delirious is also about the surprising ways second chances come around.

We All Live Here

By Jojo Moyes

April 3, 2025

Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A recently broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart, and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Not to mention a once promising writing career that is now in freefall. So when her real dad – a man she has barely seen since he ran off to Hollywood thirty-five years ago – suddenly appears on her doorstep wanting to make amends, it feels like the final straw.

But it turns out even the family you thought you could never forgive might have something to teach you: about love, friendship, and what it actually means to be family.

Sunrise on the Reaping

By Suzanne Collins

April 3, 2025

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honour of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes. Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves. When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.

Nobody’s Fool

By Harlan Coben

April 3, 2025

A year after the devastating events that took place in Fool Me Once, a secret from former Detective Sami Kierce’s college days comes back to haunt him. Present day is hard enough for Kierce, but his past isn’t through with him yet…

Sami Kierce, a young college grad backpacking in Spain with friends, wakes up one morning, covered in blood. There’s a knife in his hand. Beside him, the body of his girlfriend. Anna. Dead. He begins to scream – and then he runs.

Twenty two years later, Kierce, now a private investigator, is a new father who’s working off his debts by teaching wannabe sleuths at a night school in New York City. One evening, he recognizes a familiar face at the back of the classroom. Anna. It’s unmistakably her. But as soon as he makes eye contact with her, she bolts.

For Kierce there is no choice. He knows he must find this woman and solve the impossible mystery that has haunted his every waking moment since that terrible day.

His investigation will bring him face-to-face with his past. Soon he discovers that some secrets should stay buried

The Safe Keep

By Yael Van Der Wouden

April 3, 2025

It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother’s country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep – as a guest, there to stay for the season…

In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel’s desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known…

Everything is Tuberculosis

By John Green

April 3, 2025

Tuberculosis has been entwined with hu­manity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John be­came fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequi­ties that allow this curable, preventable infec­tious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.

In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.