An incredible historical novel inspired by the true story behind the Boots empire. Jersey 1885 On the beautiful island of Jersey, Florence Rowe lives a quiet life working in her father's bookshop. Life for the Rowe family is good, but Florence can't help yearning for more... When Jesse Boot, the successful owner of Boots the chemist, arrives on the island, Florence is immediately captivated by his tales of life in a busy, bustling city on the mainland. For the first time ever, Florence imagines a life away from the constraints of Jersey society, of being someone more than just a shopgirl. Until her parents reveal the shocking news they will refuse any marriage proposal from Mr Boot. Can Florence find a way to be with the man she loves and make a new life for herself? Readers are loving Mrs Boots: 'A book that drew me in...I cuddle up on my reading chair and entered the world of Boots' Abby 'Vibrant, believable, characters and an absorbing plot' Tabby 'This will definitely pull at your heartstrings...Loved it' Beverley 'I'm so glad this is the beginning of a series and I can't wait to read the rest! Wonderfully written' Grace 'If you like historical novels this is a book for you' Bookoholic Cafe 'A gorgeous start to a new historical series that captivated, charmed and inspired me' Adele 'A great and powerful read about love, relationships, and the trials and tribulations in between...a true thrill' Donna 'Watch this author-this is a series you'll want to stick with' Micah

The International No.1 Bestseller 'The perfect summer escape' - Sarah Morgan 'You will love this' Philippa Ashley 'This will sweep you away to Italian citrus groves' Fabulous Her summer escape will awaken the past In the Golden Age of Hollywood, Kelly Sinclair is on the cusp of becoming the next big movie star. Until then, she's spending the summer of 1953 on the magical island of Capri... Sixty years later, on a visit to her elderly grandmother's cottage, photographer Maddie Williams unearths a box of old film memorabilia featuring a glamorous and beautiful young woman with platinum blonde hair. She also finds a postcard from the island of Capri, detailing the heart-breaking end of a passionate love affair. Her grandmother now has trouble remembering anything from all those years ago. So when Maddie is commissioned for a photoshoot in Italy, she visits Capri to see if she can find out the truth. Can she unravel the mystery and discover what really happened in the summer of 1953, and will her magical island escape hold some surprises for Maddie, too? Everyone LOVES Alex Brown: 'An intriguing story you will love' Jill Mansell 'Evocative and engaging ... a story to fall in love with' Cathy Bramley 'The perfect, feel-good summer read' My Weekly 'The cleverly entwined stories kept me turning the pages' Trisha Ashley 'I adored it' Lesley Pearse 'A warm, emotional tale of love, friendship and following your heart.' Milly Johnson

Shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize - Shortlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award - "Even by his high standards, his magnificent new novel The Unseen is Jacobsen's finest to date, as blunt as it is subtle and is easily among the best books I have ever read." Eileen Battersby, Irish Times Born on the Norwegian island that bears her name, Ingrid Barroy's world is circumscribed by storm-scoured rocks and the moods of the sea by which her family lives and dies. But her father dreams of building a quay that will end their isolation, and her mother longs for the island of her youth, and the country faces its own sea change: the advent of a modern world, and all its unpredictability and violence. Brilliantly translated into English by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, The Unseen is the first book in the Barroy Chronicles and a moving exploration of family, resilience, and fate.

Tempestuous and beautiful Wanda Miles, daughter of Ruth and Stephen Miles (or so she thinks), aspires to more than the life of a debutante, but the trouble is she doesn't know precisely what she wants. Then her aunt Marie, the family's renowned glassblower, arrives from Lauscha, Germany, and Wanda decides that learning about her ancestry may hold the key to her future. When Marie accidentally reveals a long-held secret about Wanda's parents, Wanda goes to Lauscha to unravel the truth. While Marie finds herself increasingly swept up in New York City's bohemian social scene-catching the eye of a handsome young Italian in the process-Wanda explores a past she never knew in the village of her mother's youth-and begins to build a life that she never expected. A sweeping tale that takes readers from the small town of Lauscha to the skyscrapers of New York and the sun-kissed coast of Italy, The American Lady is a tribute to the enduring power of family and what we'll do in the name of love.

In his latest novel, Mo Yan--arguably China's most important contemporary literary voice--recreates the historical sweep and earthy exuberance of his much acclaimed novel "Red Sorghum." In a country where patriarchal favoritism and the primacy of sons survived multiple revolutions and an ideological earthquake, this epic novel is first and foremost about women, with the female body serving as the book's central metaphor. The protagonist, Mother, is born in 1900 and married at seventeen into the Shangguan family. She has nine children, only one of whom is a boy--the narrator of the book. A spoiled and ineffectual child, he stands in stark contrast to his eight strong and forceful female siblings.
Mother, a survivor, is the quintessential strong woman who risks her life to save several of her children and grandchildren. The writing is picturesque, bawdy, shocking, and imaginative. The structure draws on the essentials of classical Chinese formalism and injects them with extraordinarily raw and surprising prose. Each of the seven chapters represents a different time period, from the end of the Qing dynasty up through the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, the civil war, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao years. Now in a beautifully bound collectors edition, this stunning novel is Mo Yan's searing vision of twentieth-century China.

'BEAUTIFUL AND BRUTAL...A BREATHTAKING DEBUT' JOANNA CANNON 'AN ATMOSPHERIC SLOW BURN...WITH A SENSE OF FOREBODING THAT GROWS WITH EACH PAGE' GOOD HOUSEKEEPING 'ATMOSPHERIC AND COMPELLING' KATE SAWYER, author of the Costa-shortlisted The Stranding A beautifully written atmospheric story of trauma, grief and redemption, Still Water is a debut from a bright new voice in literary fiction. When Jane Douglas returns to the Shetland Islands, she thinks she has escaped the dark shadows of her childhood. She carves out a simple life on the bleak, windswept island, working at the salmon fishery and spending quiet evenings at home. And for the first time in her life, she's happy. Then the body of Jane's long-missing mother is found in a flooded quarry. Her mother disappeared when Jane was a teenager, following the death of Jane's baby brother. Jane has spent her life running from her past, living in fear that she has inherited her mother's demons. Now, Jane must face what actually happened on that fateful, tragic day twenty years ago... 'A HAUNTING STORY...TOLD WITH COMPASSION AND EVEN TENDERNESS' KATIE MUNNIK 'INTENSE, UNFLINCHING, HONEST... BEAUTIFULLY TOLD' LUCIE MCKNIGHT HARDY, author of Dead Relatives

'As heart-warming as it is heartbreaking, this novel is unputdownable' Sunday Express. Tarabeg is a small village on the West Coast of Ireland. In the aftermath of the Second World War, two women are waiting there for ambitious Michael Malone to return home. Rosie is the local schoolteacher and most people think she is promised to him. Just a few have guessed that he has secretly begun to woo Sarah, whose brutal fisherman father would kill her if he knew. Both Rosie and Sarah love Michael, both hope to become his wife and their lives will interweave in a tale of tangled secrets, old promises and new feuds. Michael Malone's choice will have fateful consequences for everyone - especially, in due course, for his young daughter. This is the first in a new sequence of novels with a brilliant cast of characters and a story that will lead to Liverpool in Mary Kate and back to Ireland in The Velvet Ribbon.

The course of true love never did run smooth...Val Walker is looking forward to starting a family, her best friend Cissie is expecting her second child, and newly engaged Janice is looking forward to wedded bliss. But the road to happiness isn't easy. Val struggles to fall pregnant with her longed for first baby, Cissie's husband starts taking an interest in a new female colleague, and Janice is torn between leaving her widowed father and younger brother behind in Blackpool and her new life in Yorkshire. Are the three friends' marriages strong enough to survive, or are they all headed for heartbreak? An enthralling tale of marriage, love and friendship, perfect for fans of Margaret Dickinson and Rosie Harris.

Grief is like an inside joke: you have to have been there to really get it.

The only things Cassandra knows about her family are the stories she’s heard in snatches over the years: about the aunt and cousin she never got to meet, about the man from the folded-up photograph in one of her aunt’s drawers, and of course about her cousin Chevy, and why he never speaks – but no one utters a word about them any more.

When a call from one of her sisters brings Cassandra news of Chevy’s death, she has to return home for the funeral. To Toronto and the big house on Florence Street, where her sisters are hiding more than themselves in their rooms, where the tension brewing between her mother and aunts has been decades in the making, and where sooner or later every secret, unspoken word and painful memory will find its way out into the open.

Moving between Toronto and Trinidad, Wild Fires is a vivid and compelling story exploring the ways we mourn and why we avoid the very things that can save us.

A joyful family saga about free will, forgiveness, and how we are all interconnected. In October 1989, triplet babies are born into chaos in a Swedish hospital. Over two decades later, the siblings are scattered around the world, barely speaking. Sebastian is in London working for a mysterious scientific organisation and falling in love. Clara has travelled to Easter Island to join a doomsday cult. And the third triplet, Matilda, is in Sweden, practising being a stepmother. Then something happens that forces them to reunite. Their mother calls with worrying news: their father has gone missing and she has something to tell them, a twenty-five-year secret that will change all their lives ...

Now in her seventies and widowed for the past three years, Mary Wilson never expected to find love again. But when a kindly stranger helps her home with her shopping and she invites him in for a cup of tea, it marks the start of a slow-burning friendship. Mary's affection for Bill grows steadily, despite his failing health and repeated attempts to interfere by her scheming daughter-in-law. But despite her growing feelings for Bill, Mary finds it hard to adjust to sharing her life with someone again and is reluctant to take the relationship further. It's only when tragedy strikes Mary's family, that she realizes how much Bill has come to mean to her and how she needs him now as never before. But has she left it all too late . . .?

A Boundless Tale of Love. Replenishing the Sea of Galilee is a sweeping story of love, loss and the power of loyalty in the face of conflicting ideologies and religious beliefs. The story begins in 1940s Palestine where twins Rasheed and Rasheeda Dinar work in their family inns. Educated by a Jesuit priest about the essence of his own Muslim religion, relative to love and sex, Rasheed follows closely the teachings of his mentor and includes Rasheeda, so that she learns those teachings as well. When Rasheed falls in love with Natalia, a Jewish woman, he is able to apply what he learned from the priest to his budding relationship. However, it is the 1940s, and relations between Arabs and Jews are tense. Before long, those tensions come to a breaking point. Natalia mysteriously disappears, and Rasheed and Rasheeda are chased out of Palestine to Beirut, Lebanon. Years pass, and though Rasheed continues to miss his beloved Natalia, he gets word of a surprising visitor-someone he didn't even know existed. Rasheed's life is upended, but in the most wonderful way. As the Dinar family expands and enters the 1970s, their convictions are tested. In a dramatic final scene, the family reunites and proves once again that the thin line separating people because of their differences is powerless against the strength of family, love, and loyalty.

The second in the classic trilogy about the Eliots of Damerosehay. War has left David Eliot a changed man. Returning to the family home, he slowly begins to put the pieces of his life together. Tormented by the failure of her love affair with David five years earlier, Nadine has misgivings about bringing her family to live in the enchanting old inn close to the Damerosehay estate. But as the tranquil Hampshire countryside casts its spell, both families come to discover a measure of peace and contentment.

Where there's community, there's courage...Jess Delaney has always longed for independence. But when the Blitz reaches Manchester, she is locked in the cellar by her feckless mother, Lizzie. As bombs rain down from a sky turned blood red with flame, Jess waits for Lizzie to return. But fortunes are fickle, and soon Jess finds herself packed off to live with her tyrant Uncle Bernie, a bullying black marketeer. Though he treats her like a servant, she seeks refuge in the Sally Army and her natural musical talent offers both an escape route and the chance for love. But Uncle Bernie never forgives his niece for refusing to join his illegal schemes and threatens to deprive Jess of her hard-won freedom once and for all. This is a sweeping saga of hope and resilience perfect for fans of Kitty Neale and Rosie Goodwin. Praise for Dancing on Deansgate 'A heart-wrenching story' 5* Reader review 'It drew me in straight away' 5* Reader review 'Another gem from a great writer' 5* Reader review 'A compelling story of separation and hardship, and heartache overcome at last' 5* Reader review

A Sunday Independent Book of the Year Against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution and Europe's sexual revolution, the fates of two families in London and Beijing become unexpectedly intertwined, in this dazzling new novel from the author of Mrs Engels. Revolution is a Family Affair. In London, sisters Iris and Eva, members of a radical performance collective, plan an attack on the West End theatre where their mother is playing the title role in Miss Julie. Meanwhile in Beijing, Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao's wife, rehearses a gala performance of her model ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, which she will use to attack her enemies in the Party. As the preparations for these two astonishing performances unfold, Iris, Eva, and Jiang Qing are transformed into unforgettable protagonists in a single epic drama. The three 'sisters', although fighting very different personal battles, find themselves bound together by the passions of love, by the obsessions of power, and by the forces of history. Exquisitely observed, relevant, and wise, The Sisters Mao shows us that the political is always personal.

Home is where the heart is... Beryl was the first Farley clan bride, finding a home in the arms of loving, attentive, elder son Tony. Yet even now, wrapped in Tony's embrace, Beryl has never quite been able to forget the past she ran away from, nor the shocking family secret she tried to bury. With Tony away fighting the Jerries alongside his brothers, it's up to Beryl and her sisters-in-law to keep the family afloat. Hard, gruelling work doesn't faze her, but the sudden arrival of a devastating letter does... Will Beryl be able to hold her family together and face up to her past? Or will the war take away the one thing she holds most dear - the one person she never thought she deserved? The perfect family saga, set on the Newcastle streets that inspired Catherine Cookson's bestselling classic The Fifteen Streets - This is the second in brand new series for fans of Nancy Revell, Elaine Everest and Daisy Styles. * * * * * * * Readers are LOVING the first Biscuit Factory Girls saga... "Could not put it down" 5* "A brilliant story from a brilliant author" 5* "I enjoyed every bit of this book" 5* "The end had me in tears" 5* "Stays with you long after you've turned the last page" 5*

EVERY MOTHER'S WORST NIGHTMARE IS ABOUT TO COME TRUE...Based on a gripping and moving true story, The Stolen Baby is the new Second World War novel from bestselling author Diney Costeloe. Plymouth, 1941. As sirens blare all around, the Shawbrook family take refuge in a packed shelter. Bombs have already begun to fall through the night sky when they realise their infant son, Freddie, has been forgotten in the rush, left to sleep in his crib. Terrified, Vera, his young mother races to find him and bring him to safety. The next morning, police officer David Shawbrook returns from his watch to find the shelter pulverised, and his family seemingly all dead. Dirty footprints inside their home betray the looters who have rifled through the house. Meanwhile, Maggie waits alone for her husband. Since the death of her infant son, she passes her days at home with neither joy nor aim. But not this morning. For this morning her husband has brought home a child, found abandoned in the aftermath of the terrible raid - a child she is sure is the one she held in her arms so many months before. Praise for Diney Costeloe 'Truly captivating' Woman & Home 'This is a truly captivating read that brings together vibrant characters and a historical setting' Woman's Own 'A gripping saga' My Weekly 'A treat from the very first page. I could not put it down' Historical Novel Society

From 2022 Windham Campbell Prize winner Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu Book 2 in the City of Kings trilogy, including her multiple award-winning debut novel The Theory of FlightSet in a southern African country that is never named, this powerful tale of human fallibility--told with empathy, generosity, and a light touch--is an excursion into the interiority of the colonizer. Emil Coetzee, a civil servant in his fifties, is washing blood off his hands when the ceasefire is announced. Like everyone else, he feels unmoored by the end of the conflict. War had given him his sense of purpose, his identity. But why has Emil's life turned out so different from his parents', who spent cheery Friday evenings flapping and flailing the Charleston or dancing the foxtrot? What happened to the Emil who used to wade through the singing elephant grass of the savannah, losing himself in it? Continuing the interconnected stories she began in her award-winning novel The Theory of Flight, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu explores decades of history through the eyes of one man on his journey from boyhood to manhood, and the changes that befall him through love, loss, and war. With sympathy, complexity, and penetrating insight, The History of Man explores what makes a man, a father, and a nation.

The next heartwarming instalment of the Timber Girls Series. Perfect for fans of Elaine Everest and Pam Howes. Trixie and her fellow lumberjills are back in Scotland, newly stationed at the MacKay estate. When they arrive, they are shocked to find the place dilapidated and neglected and the taciturn and secretive Noah MacKay not at all happy to be meeting them. It quickly becomes apparent that MacKay was expecting men from the forestry commission to take charge, rather than four young women. Trixie, Jo, Hen and Vi decide he needs to be proven wrong - after all, don't they have stamina, skill and strength? But as the girls work to prove their worth, secrets from their own pasts threaten to follow them to Sutherland.

A heart-breaking wartime saga from the much-loved author of THE TILBURY POPPIES. Perfect for fans of Annie Murray and Donna Douglas How far would you go to protect your family? . . . Essex, 1950. The Empire is a pub run by Vi, Doris's mother. When Doris falls pregnant out of marriage, she is kicked out of the house and forced to fend for herself. Desperate to look after her daughter, Doris finds refuge in Southend and takes a job in a factory, hoping for a better life. When she finds herself cast out one night, Doris has nowhere to go but home - back to Tilbury. But she's still not welcome there and once again has to look for shelter and work. Homeless and as a single mother, life is tough for Doris. And it becomes harder when she helps a neighbour, Claude, to find a new life in Britain. Now Doris must decide where her heart lies . . . A heart-warming story of love, loss and friendship, set against the backdrop of post-war England REAL READERS love Sue Wilsher's novels: 'I absolutely loved this book - it was so gripping that I read it from cover to cover in one sitting' 'This story was fabulous. It won't be my last Sue Wilsher book' 'Brilliant author - you won't be disappointed' 'Couldn't put the book down. I cannot wait for her next novel'