Books

From two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead comes the thrilling and entertaining sequel to Harlem Shuffle

1971, New York City. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is going bankrupt, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney is trying to keep his head down, his business up and his life straight. But then he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up an old police contact, who wants favours in return.

For Ray, staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated – and deadly.

1973. The old ways are being overthrown by the thriving counterculture, but Pepper, Carney’s enduringly violent partner in crime, is a constant.

In these difficult times, Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem, finding himself in a world of Hollywood stars and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook – to their regret.

1976. Harlem is burning, while the country gears up for the Bicentennial.

Carney is trying to come up with a celebratory July 4th advertisement he can actually live with, while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire seriously injures one of Carney’s tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it, navigating a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent and the utterly corrupt.

In scalpel-sharp prose and with unnerving clarity and wit, Colson Whitehead writes about a city that runs on cronyism, threats, ego, ambition, incompetence and even, sometimes, pride.

Crook Manifesto is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem, and a searching portrait of how families work in the face of chaos and hostility.

Escape to Nantucket for delicious drama, sizzling secrets, and one unforgettable weekend.

Hollis Shaw, creator of the popular food blog Hungry with Hollis, finds her life turned upside down when her heart-surgeon husband is killed in a car accident on a snowy February morning. As Hollis searches for comfort, she discovers the idea of the ‘Five Star Weekend’: a gathering of the best friends from each stage of your life. But when Hollis decides to host her own version on Nantucket, the weekend isn’t exactly a Hallmark movie…

First, there’s Tatum, Hollis’s best friend growing up on Nantucket – and her husband’s best friend, Jack, who just happens to be Hollis’s first love. Then there’s Dru-ann, her best friend from college, now a prominent Black female sports agent in Chicago, whose Twitter comments have just landed her – and her marriage – in hot water. Brooke is the best friend who helped raise her kids with Hollis during their thirties, until she was ousted from the local mum’s group by Electra, self-appointed queen bee.

But Brooke and Electra are finally meeting up to make amends this weekend.

And lastly, Gigi, who reached out to Hollis on her food blog to become ‘internet besties’, but has never met her in real life. All the weekend needs is Hollis’s daughter Caroline, a documentary student, who wants to film the entire party. What could possibly go wrong?

Filled with the emotional depth and trademark cast-of-characters perspective of Hilderbrand’s novels, The Five-Star Weekend promises a story of a remarkable weekend between friends – old and new – like no other.

This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor. This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn t famous at all. It s about falling so wildly in love with him the way one will at twenty-four that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end.

It is spring and Lara s three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they ve always longed to hear of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance, years before.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents lead before their children are born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.

A CHILD WILL BE BORN WHO WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING

When a young American academic Talissa Adam offers to carry another woman’s child, she has no idea of the life-changing consequences.

Behind the doors of the Parn Institute, a billionaire entrepreneur plans to stretch the boundaries of ethics as never before. Through a series of IVF treatments, which they hope to keep secret, they propose an experiment that will upend the human race as we know it.

Seth, the baby, is delivered to hopeful parents Mary and Alaric, but when his differences start to mark him out from his peers, he begins to attract unwanted attention.

The Seventh Son is a spectacular examination of what it is to be human.

It asks the question: just because you can do something, does it mean you should? Sweeping between New York, London, and the Scottish Highlands, this is an extraordinary novel about unrequited love and unearned power.