Books

  • The Devil and the Dark Water

    The Devil and the Dark Water

    12.50

    Three impossible crimes. Two unlikely detectives. One deadly voyage. It’s 1634 and Samuel Pipps, the world’s greatest detective, is being transported from the Dutch East Indies to Amsterdam, where he is set to face trial for a crime that no one dares speak of. But no sooner is the ship out to sea than devilry begins to blight the voyage.

    Strange symbols appear on the sails. A figure stalks the decks. Livestock are slaughtered.

    Passengers are plagued with ominous threats, promising them three unholy miracles. First: an impossible pursuit. Second: an impossible theft.

    Then: an impossible murder. With Pipps imprisoned in the depths of the ship, can his loyal bodyguard, Arent Hayes, solve the mystery before the ship descends into anarchy?

    From the author of the dazzling The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, winner of the Costa Best First Novel Award, comes an adventurous and wildly entertaining murder mystery.

    Think of a Holmes and Watson-style duo operating in a Pirates Of The Caribbean-style universe‘ Metro

    A glorious mash-up of William Golding and Arthur Conan Doyle‘ Val McDermid

    A superb historical mystery: inventive, twisty, addictive and utterly beguiling … A TRIUMPH‘ Will Dean

    CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, DAILY MAIL, FINANCIAL TIMES, DAILY EXPRESS AND i PAPER; LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA IAN FLEMING STEEL DAGGER AWARD

  • The Thursday Murder Club

    The Thursday Murder Club

    12.50
    Description
    ‘Such a beacon of pleasure’ KATE ATKINSON’So smart and funny. Deplorably good’ IAN RANKIN’A gripping read’ SUNDAY TIMESTHE FIRST BOOK IN THE #1 BESTSELLING THURSDAY MURDER CLUB SERIES BY TV PRESENTER RICHARD OSMANIn a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case.
  • It Ends With Us

    It Ends With Us

    12.50

    Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up – she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.

    Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily, but Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.

    As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan – her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.

    With this bold and deeply personal novel, It Ends With Us is a heart-wrenching story and an unforgettable tale of love that comes at the ultimate price.

  • Is It Four O'Clock Yet

    Is It Four O’Clock Yet

    12.50

    Twenty-two-year-old teacher Stephen Daly cannot wait to start dating women, drinking copious amounts of alcohol and living life to the full. He had lived at home during his college years and missed out on much of the student experience. He was usually tucked up in his bed while his classmates partied endlessly in student haunts or made out in grotty little flats. Now that he had graduated and secured his first teaching job, he is determined to start a more carefree life and escape the sadness in his background.

  • Ugly Love

    Ugly Love

    12.50

    When Tate Collins meets airline pilot Miles Archer, she doesn’t think it’s love at first sight. They wouldn’t even go so far as to consider themselves friends.

    The only thing Tate and Miles have in common is an undeniable mutual attraction. Once their desires are out in the open, they realize they have the perfect set-up. He doesn’t want love, she doesn’t have time for love, so that just leaves the sex.

    Their arrangement could be surprisingly seamless, as long as Tate can stick to the only two rules Miles has for her.

    Never ask about the past.
    Don’t expect a future.

    They think they can handle it, but realize almost immediately they can’t handle it at all.

    Hearts get infiltrated.
    Promises get broken.

    Rules get shattered.
    Love gets ugly.

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    That Old Country Music

    12.50

    Description
    LONGLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE’One of the best collections you’ll read this year’ Sunday Times’Wild, witty stories . . .

    Exhilarating’ ObserverIn this rapturous story collection we encounter a ragbag of west of Ireland characters, many on the cusp between love and catastrophe, heartbreak and epiphany, resignation and hope. These stories affirm Kevin Barry as one of the world’s most accomplished and gifted writers, and show an Ireland in a condition of great flux but also as a place where older rhythms, and an older magic, somehow persist.

  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

    The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

    12.50

    Ageing and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself.

    Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of why Evelyn has selected her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

    Summoned to Evelyn’s luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the ’80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn’s story near its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.

    The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a mesmerizing journey through the splendour of old Hollywood into the harsh realities of the present day as two women struggle with what it means and what it costs to face the truth.

  • Without Merit

    Without Merit

    12.50

    The Voss family is anything but normal. They live in a repurposed church, newly baptized Dollar Voss. The once cancer-stricken mother lives in the basement, the father is married to the mother’s former nurse, the little half-brother isn’t allowed to do or eat anything fun, and the eldest siblings are irritatingly perfect.

    Then, there’s Merit. Merit Voss collects trophies she hasn’t earned and secrets her family forces her to keep. While browsing the local antiques shop for her next trophy, she finds Sagan.

    His wit and unapologetic idealism disarm and spark renewed life into her – until she discovers that he’s completely unavailable. Merit retreats deeper into herself, watching her family from the sidelines, when she learns a secret that no trophy in the world can fix. Fed up with the lies, Merit decides to shatter the happy family illusion that she’s never been a part of before leaving them behind for good.

    When her escape plan fails, Merit is forced to deal with the staggering consequences of telling the truth and losing the one boy she loves. Poignant and powerful, Without Merit explores the layers of lies that tie a family together and the power of love and truth.

  • Islands of Abandonment

    Islands of Abandonment

    12.50

    This is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place. In Chernobyl, following the nuclear disaster, only a handful of people returned to their dangerously irradiated homes. On an uninhabited Scottish island, feral cattle live entirely wild.

    In Detroit, once America’s fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods. This book explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live – or survive in tiny, precarious numbers – to give us a possible glimpse of what happens when mankind’s impact on nature is forced to stop. From Tanzanian mountains to the volcanic Caribbean, the forbidden areas of France to the mining regions of Scotland, Flyn brings together some of the most desolate, eerie, ravaged and polluted areas in the world – and shows how, against all odds, they offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.

    By turns haunted and hopeful, this luminously written world study is pinned together with profound insight and new ecological discoveries that together map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we’re gone, and how far can our damage to nature be undone?

  • Reacher Killing Floor

    Reacher Killing Floor

    12.50

    Killing Floor is the first book in the phenomenal bestselling Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. It introduces Reacher for the first time, as the tough ex-military cop of no fixed abode. Trained to think fast and act faster, he is the perfect action hero for when times get tough.

    Margrave is a no-account little town in Georgia. Jack Reacher steps off a bus and walks fourteen miles in the rain to reach it, in search of a dead guitar player. But Margrave has just had its first homicide in thirty years.

    And Reacher is the only stranger in town. He seems the obvious fall guy. As the body count mounts, only one thing is for sure: they picked the wrong guy to frame for murder.

  • Trespasses

    Trespasses

    12.50

    * LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023 *
    * WINNER OF THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2022 *
    * SHORTLISTED FOR BRITISH BOOK OF THE YEAR: DEBUT FICTION *
    * SHORTLISTED FOR THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE 2022 *
    * AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST OF 2022 *
    * A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME *

    One by one, she undid each event, each decision, each choice. If Davy had remembered to put on a coat. If Seamie McGeown had not found himself alone on a dark street.

    If Michael Agnew had not walked through the door of the pub on a quiet night in February in his white shirt. There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever.

    As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like ‘petrol bomb’ and ‘rubber bullets’. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.

    Tender and shocking, Trespasses is an unforgettable debut of people trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary times.

     

     

  • Oh William!

    Oh William!

    12.50

    SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022

    THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

    The Pulitzer Prize-winning, Booker-longlisted, bestselling author returns to her beloved heroine Lucy Barton in a luminous novel about love, loss, and the family secrets that can erupt and bewilder us at any point in life. Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband – and long-time, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage, and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a portrait, stunning in its subtlety, of a tender, complex, decades-long partnership.

    Oh William! captures the joy and sorrow of watching children grow up and start families of their own; of discovering family secrets, late in life, that alter everything we think we know about those closest to us; and the way people live and love, against all odds. At the heart of this story is the unforgettable, indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who once again offers a profound, lasting reflection on the mystery of existence. ‘This is the way of life,’ Lucy says. ‘The many things we do not know until it is too late.’

    ‘A superbly gifted storyteller and a craftswoman in a league of her own’ Hilary Mantel

    ‘A terrific writer’ Zadie Smith

    ‘She gets better with each book’ Maggie O’Farrell

    ‘One of America’s finest writers’ Sunday Times

    ‘This is meticulously observed writing, full of probing psychological insight. Lucy Barton is one of literature’s immortal characters – brittle, damaged, unravelling, vulnerable and, most of all, ordinary – like us all’ Booker Prize Judges

  • The Whalebone Theatre

    The Whalebone Theatre

    12.50

    This is the story of an old English manor house by the sea, with crumbling chimneys, draping ivy and a library full of dusty hardbacks. It’s the story of the three children who grow up there, and the adventures they create for themselves while the grown-ups entertain endless party guests: the worlds they imagine from books they aren’t supposed to read, and the lessons they learn from eavesdropping through oak-panelled doors. This is the story of a whale that washes up on a beach, whose bones are claimed by a twelve-year-old girl with big ambitions and an even bigger imagination.

    An unwanted orphan who grows into an unmarriageable young woman, chafing under the confines of her traditional upbringing and fiercely determined to do things differently. But as the children grow to adulthood, another story has been unfolding in the wings. And when the war finally takes centre stage, they find themselves cast, unrehearsed, into roles they never expected to play.

    They raised themselves on stories. Now it’s time for them to write their own …

  • Too Big For His Roots

    Too Big For His Roots

    12.50

    Robert O Connor was not expecting cheering crowds to greet him on his return to
    Dromahair. Few there were likely to view him as a war hero. Nobody believed he had
    acted out of principle when he enlisted, as the man had never served any cause other
    than his own. That did not bother Robert. If anything, he revelled in the notoriety.
    After all, he was destined for bigger and better things than his home village could
    offer.

  • The Colony

    The Colony

    12.50

    He handed the easel to the boatman, reaching down the pier wall towards the sea. Mr Lloyd has decided to travel to the island by boat without engine – the authentic experience. Unbeknownst to him, Mr Masson will also soon be arriving for the summer.

    Both will strive to encapsulate the truth of this place – one in his paintings, the other by capturing its speech, the language he hopes to preserve. But the people who live on this rock – three miles long and half-a-mile wide – have their own views on what is being recorded, what is being taken and what is given in return. Soft summer days pass, and the islanders are forced to question what they value and what they desire.

    As the autumn beckons, and the visitors head home, there will be a reckoning.

  • Forever Interrupted

    Forever Interrupted

    12.50

    Elsie Porter is an average twentysomething and yet what happens to her is anything but ordinary. On a rainy New Year’s Day, she heads out to pick up a pizza for one.

    She isn’t expecting to see anyone else in the shop, much less the adorable and charming Ben Ross. Their chemistry is instant and electric. Ben cannot even wait twenty-four hours before asking to see her again.

    Within weeks, the two are head over heels in love. By May, they’ve eloped. Only nine days later, Ben is out riding his bike when he is hit by a truck and killed on impact.

    Elsie hears the sirens outside her apartment, but by the time she gets downstairs, he has already been whisked off to the emergency room. At the hospital, she must face Susan, the mother-in-law she has never met-and who doesn’t even know Elsie exists. Interweaving Elsie and Ben’s charmed romance with Elsie and Susan’s healing process, Forever, Interrupted will remind you that there’s more than one way to find a happy ending.