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**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**
Brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money David Nicholls
Anyone can pick up Flesh and appreciate it Jennette McCurdy
Brilliance on every page Samantha Harvey
So much searing insight into the way we live now Observer
Through chance, luck and choice, one man s life takes him from a modest apartment in Hungary to the elite society of London in this captivating new novel about the forces that make and break our lives
Moving from 60s Italy to contemporary Ireland, Ripeness is a breathtaking story of love and the search for belonging from Sarah Moss, bestselling author of Summerwater. On the brink of adulthood and just out of school, Edith finds herself travelling to rural Italy. She has been sent by her mother with strict instructions: to see her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, through the final weeks of her pregnancy, help at the birth and then make a phone call which will change all of their lives.
Decades later, happily divorced and newly energized, Edith is living in contentment and comfort in Ireland. When her best friend Méabh receives a call from an American man claiming to be her brother, Méabh must decide if she will meet him, and Edith finds herself plunged back into her own past and the story of the baby she once knew and loved.
It is 1895, and turn-of-the-century Paris is as chaotic as it is glamorous. Industry and invention have created ever greater wealth and terrible poverty. One autumn morning, an anarchist boards the Granville to Paris express train, determined to make her mark on history.
Aboard the train are others from across the globe: the railway crew who have built a life together away from their wives, a little boy travelling alone for the first time, an artist far from home, a wealthy statesman and his invalid wife, and a young woman with a secret hidden under her dress.
All their fates are bound together as the train speeds towards the City of Light …
Inspired by a famous rail disaster, The Paris Express is a thrilling ride and a literary masterpiece that evokes an era not so different from our own.
Fennell, a journalist, is in pursuit of a story buried at the bottom of the sea: the network of tiny fibre-optic tubes that carry the world’s information across the ocean floor – and what happens when they break. So he has travelled to Cape Town to board the George Lecointe, a cable repair vessel captained by Chief of Mission John Conway. Conway is a talented engineer and fearless freediver – and Fennell is quickly captivated by this mysterious, unnerving man and his beautiful partner, Zanele.
As the boat embarks along the west coast of Africa, Fennell learns the rhythms of life at sea, and finds his place among the band of drifters who make up the crew. But as the mission falters, tensions simmer – and Conway is thrown into crisis. A terrible, violent tragedy is unfolding in the life he has left behind on land; and, trapped out at sea, it seems as if the vast expanse of the ocean is closing in.
Then Conway disappears; and Fennell must set out to find him. As taut and propulsive as a thriller, and a timeless exploration of narrative and truth, Twist is the work of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.
He doesn’t even have a suit. Instead, he’s brought memories, a shared sense of humour – and a cat looking for a new home. Just as Gail is wondering what’s next, their daughter Debbie discovers her groom has been keeping a secret…As the big day dawns, the exes just can’t agree on what’s best for Debbie.
Gail is seriously worried, while Max seems more concerned with whether to opt for the salmon or prime rib at the reception, if they make it that far. The day after the wedding, Gail and Max prepare to go their separate ways again. But all the questions about the future of the happy couple have stirred up the past for Gail.
‘Domestic noir at its finest.’ I PAPER
‘The Cleaner is a masterclass in tension.‘ – JENNIE GODFREY, Sunday Times bestselling author of The List of Suspicious Things
‘Beautiful, dark, visceral, truly spellbinding.‘ – ANDREA MARA, Sunday Times No. 1 bestselling author
‘Taut, twisty and beautifully atmospheric.‘ – KIA ABDULLAH, author of Waterstones Thriller of the Month Those People Next Door
It’s not dust she’s looking for.
It’s dirt.
Esmie is supposed to be invisible. Just a cleaner with a foreign accent that no one quite has time to place.
Her uniform of leggings and a duster allows her to explore the homes of the wealthy, unseen; an outsider creeping around the edges of privilege.
But as she sweeps through the exclusive Woodlands gated neighbourhood, cleaning is the last thing on her mind. Treading silently over the polished wooden floorboards and cloud-soft carpets, Esmie gathers up the mess of broken marriages, quiet deceptions and careless failures. She tucks away their fragments, keeping them safe.
‘Compulsive reading. Compassionate, lyrical and full of devilment’ Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses
1973. In a close-knit community on Ireland’s west coast, a baby is found abandoned on the beach.
Named Brendan Bonnar by Ambrose, the fisherman who adopts him, Brendan will become a source of fascination and hope for a town caught in the storm of a rapidly changing world.
Ambrose, a man more comfortable at sea than on land, brings Brendan into his home out of love. But it’s a decision that will fracture his family and force him to try to understand himself and those he cares for.
Bookended by the arrival and departure of a single mesmerizing boy, Garrett Carr’s The Boy From the Sea is an exploration of the ties that make us and bind us, as a family and community move irresistibly towards the future.
Jerry Drain, a local famer, is stealing hay from the barn, someone is making nasty phone calls to the house at night and darkness is gathering at the edges of their lives. With his ferocious imagination the boy will do everything in his power to protect his family. But Jerry will not go away and Mum seems to be falling under his spell.
It will be a year of major wins and baffling defeats for the boy, as Jerry’s true nature insists on revealing itself. Dark, funny, tender and raw, Frogs for Watchdogs thrums with the intensity of childhood. Above all, it is an ode to the blended family: the bewildering joy, wary safety and profound new bonds of love.
This official IRFU story of Irish rugby marks the union’s 150-year anniversary and considers the scaffolding that upholds Irish rugby today: the provinces, the clubs, the schools and the underage structure.
Featuring interviews with a who’s who of Irish rugby including Ollie Campbell, Peter Clohessy, Fiona Coghlan, Ciaran Fitzgerald, Jack Kyle, Paul O’Connell, Brian O’Driscoll, Ronan O’Gara, Tony O’Reilly, Joe Schmidt, Fiona Steed and Tony Ward, it shows that perhaps the greatest service that Irish rugby has given the island over the last 150 years is to be a very rare unifying force. In our history, where a ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality has been such a recurring feature, rugby has offered an alternative vision and showcased a different path towards creating the harmony of ‘the four proud provinces of Ireland’.
Beautifully illustrated with over 150 photographs from INPHO photographic agency, it captures the richness of the story of Irish rugby.
The brand-new novel from million-copy bestseller and national treasure Graham Norton – a dazzling, decades-sweeping story about love, bravery and what it means to live a significant life.
Always on the periphery, looking on, young Frankie Howe was never quite sure enough of herself to take centre stage – after all, life had already judged her harshly. Now old, Frankie finds it easier to forget the life that came before. Then Damian, a young Irish carer, arrives at her London flat, there to keep an eye on her as she recovers from a fall.
A memory is sparked, and the past crackles into life as Damian listens to the story Frankie has kept stored away all these years. Travelling from post-war Ireland to 1960s New York – a city full of art, larger than life characters and turmoil – Frankie shares a world in which friendship and chance encounters collide. A place where, for a while, life blazes with an intensity that can’t last but will perhaps live on in other ways and in other people.
But as Frankie’s past slowly emerges, her spirit and endurance are revealed as undeniable . . .
Skulls, heads, hands, height, legs, sex organs, blood, brains, stomachs, ears and corpses – discover Irish history through the prism of the body. From the brutal beheading of the 25-year-old, red-headed Clonycavan Man some 2,000 years ago, and the rich vein of information that has been preserved in his ‘bog body’, to the ancient skulls stolen from islands off Ireland’s west coast believed to be those of giants – here medical historian Dr Ian Miller brings readers on a uniquely entertaining journey through Irish history.
Encounter the famous scribes, including St Patrick, who preserved our knowledge of ancient Ireland by hand. Discover the fears of excessive tea drinking that were once such a great cause for concern on this isle. Meet the doctors who revolutionised Irish medicine in the 19th century – along with the gruesome bodysnatching that accompanied it. Here, fact and folklore intertwine to take you on a fascinating journey through Irish history as you’ve never experienced it before.
From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable.
But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother.
Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Following the arc of two centuries, from the horrors of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 to the early 21st century, Wandering Stars is an indelible novel of America’s war on its own people.
It is also the tender, shattering story of several generations of a Native American family, searching for ways through displacement and pain, towards home and hope: a wondrous novel of poetry, music, rage and love, from one of the most astonishing voices of his generation.