Fiction

Fayne, a vast moated castle, lies to the misty southern border of Scotland, ruled by the Lord Henry Bell, Seventeenth Baron of the DC de Fayne, Peer of Her Majesty’s Realm of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

The mysterious Lord Bell keeps to his rooms by day, appearing briefly at night to dote over his beloved and peculiarly gifted child.

But even with all her gifts – intelligence, wit and strength of character – can Charlotte overcome the violently strict boundaries of contemporary society and establish her own place in the world?

This morning, I met the man who started the fire. He did something terrible, but then, so have I. I left him.

I left him and now he may be dead. Once upon a time there was a beautiful village that held a million stories of love and loss and peace and war, and it was swallowed up by a fire that blazed up to the sky. The fire ran all the way down to the sea where it met with its reflection.

A family from two nations, England and Greece, live a simple life on a tiny Greek island: Irini, Tasso and their daughter, lovely, sweet Chara, whose name means joy. Their life goes up in flames in a single day when one man starts a fire out of greed and indifference. Many are killed, homes are destroyed, and the island’s natural beauty wiped out.

In the wake of the fire, Chara bears deep scars across her back and arms. Tasso is frozen in trauma, devastated that he wasn’t there when his family most needed him. And Irini is crippled by guilt at her part in the fate of the man who started the fire.

But this family has survived, and slowly green shoots of hope and renewal will grow from the smouldering ruins of devastation. Once again, Christy Lefteri has crafted a novel which is intimate and epic, sweeping and delicate. The Book of Fire explores not only the damage wrought by human folly, but also – and ultimately – our powers of redemption and renewal.

This book is about an estate agent. Only she’s a vampire, the house on sale is haunted, and its ghost was murdered.

When Viola Marek hires Fox D’Mora to deal with her ghost-infested mansion, she expects a competent medium. But unbeknownst to Viola, Fox is a fraud – despite being the godson of Death.

As the mystery unfolds, Viola and Fox are drawn into a quest that neither wants nor expects. And they’ll need the help of a demonic personal trainer, a sharp-voiced angel and a love-stricken reaper. And it transpires that the difference between a mysterious lost love and a dead body isn’t nearly as distinct as you’d hope.

This edition features beautiful interior illustrations from Little Chmura.

NAMED AS ONE OF GRANTA MAGAZINE’S BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2023

A woman moves from the place of her birth to a remote northern country to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. The youngest child of many siblings – more than she cares to remember – from earliest childhood she has attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion. The country, it transpires, is the country of their family’s ancestors, an obscure though reviled people.

Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs – collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; the containment of domestic fowl; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. What is clear is that she is being accused of wrongdoing, but in a language she cannot understand and so cannot address.

And however diligently and silently she toils in service of the community, still she feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property. Inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill …

William Barrow finds himself in lonely retirement in West Cork. Once an internationally renowned pianist, a terrible skin disease has attacked his hands and made it impossible for him to perform. Tara is a piano teacher with barely enough pupils to pay the month’s rent.

In the local cafe, the elegant writing of a job advertisement catches her eye: ‘WANTED. HOUSEKEEPER.’ She begins to work in William’s house, keeping to herself the knowledge that they have met three times before, encounters that have changed her life. He is oblivious to this, while she spins tales of the well discovered in his back garden and of a mythical saint, of the healing powers of the water and the moss that surrounds it.

But as the moss begins to heal William’s troubled hands, the lines between legend and reality begin to blur, secrets resurface, and past and present collide in unexpected ways.

Gripping and lyrical, The Well of St Nobody is a marvellous new novel by the author of The Past, Night in Tunisia and Dream of a Beast.