Author Archive | admin

 Sophie Hannah

A killer the police have dubbed Billy Dead Mates is killing pairs of best friends, one by one. Just before each murder, he sends his victim a small white book…
Three regional police forces are working together to identify and catch Billy. For five months, they’ve been failing. Then a fifth victim, scared by what she’s seen and heard on the news, comes forward to seek help. Unlike Billy’s first four victims, she isn’t dead. Yet.
Stand-up comedian Kim Tribbeck has one of Billy’s peculiar white books. A stranger gave it to her after a gig she did a year ago. Was he Billy? Now Kim’s life depends on working out why she – a woman who has no close friends because she trusts no one – should attract the attention of the Best Friends Killer… And, if Billy has her in his sights, why has he waited so long to strike?

 Harriet Evans

What magic is this? You follow the hidden creek towards a long-forgotten house.
They call it Keepsake, a place full of wonder … and danger. Locked inside the crumbling elegance of its walls lies the story of the Butterfly Summer, a story you’ve been waiting all your life to hear. This house is Nina Parr’s birthright. It holds the truth about her family – and a chance to put everything right at last.

 Robyn Cadwallader

England, 1255. What could drive a girl on the cusp of womanhood to lock herself away from the world forever?
Sarah is just seventeen when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman shut away in a cell that measures only seven by nine paces, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing a much-loved sister in childbirth as well as pressure to marry the local lord’s son, she decides to renounce the world–with all its dangers, desires, and temptations–and commit herself to a life of prayer.

But it soon becomes clear that the thick, unforgiving walls of Sarah’s cell cannot protect her as well as she had thought. With the outside world clamoring to get in and the intensity of her isolation driving her toward drastic actions, even madness, her body and soul are still in grave danger. When she starts hearing the voice of the previous anchoress whispering to her from the walls, Sarah finds herself questioning what she thought she knew about the anchorhold, and about the village itself.

With the lyricism of Nicola Griffith’s Hild and the vivid historical setting of Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, Robyn Cadwallader’s powerful debut novel tells an absorbing story of faith, desire, shame, fear, and the very human need for connection and touch. Compelling, evocative, and haunting, The Anchoress is both quietly heartbreaking and thrillingly unpredictable.

 S.J. Watson

The sensational new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of Before I Go To Sleep. She loves her husband. She’s obsessed by a stranger.
She’s a devoted mother. She’s prepared to lose everything. She knows what she’s doing. She’s out of control. She’s innocent. She’s guilty as sin. She’s living two lives. She might lose both . . .

 J.D. Rob

Dennis Mira just had two unpleasant surprises. First he learned that his cousin Edward was secretly meeting with a real estate agent about their late grandfather’s magnificent West Village brownstone, despite the promise they both made to keep it in the family. Then, when he went to the house to confront Edward about it, he got a blunt object to the back of the head.

Luckily Dennis is married to Charlotte Mira, the NYPSD’s top profiler and a good friend of Lieutenant Eve Dallas. When the two arrive on the scene, he explains that the last thing he saw was Edward in a chair, bruised and bloody. When he came to, his cousin was gone. With the mess cleaned up and the security disks removed, there’s nothing left behind but a few traces for forensics to analyze.

As a former lawyer, judge, and senator, Edward Mira mingled with the elite and crossed paths with criminals, making enemies on a regular basis. Like so many politicians, he also made some very close friends behind closed—and locked—doors. But a badge and a billionaire husband can get you into places others can’t go, and Eve intends to shine some light on the dirty deals and dark motives behind the disappearance of a powerful man, the family discord over a multimillion-dollar piece of real estate . . . and a new case that no one saw coming.

 Helen Russell

Denmark is officially the happiest nation on Earth. When Helen Russell is forced to move to rural Jutland, can she discover the secrets of their happiness? Or will the long, dark winters and pickled herring take their toll?

A Year of Living Danishly looks at where the Danes get it right, where they get it wrong, and how we might just benefit from living a little more Danishly ourselves.

 Van Velzen

Long before Robyn Davidson wrote Tracks, the extraordinary Ernestine Hill was renowned for her intrepid travels across Australia’s vast outback.

After the birth of her illegitimate son, Ernestine Hill abandoned her comfortable urban life as a journalist for a nomadic one, writing about this country’s vast interior and bringing the outback into the popular imagination of Australians.

Throughout the 1930s Ernestine’s hugely popular stories about Australia’s remotest regions appeared in newspapers and journals around the nation. She still remains famous for her bestselling books The Great Australian Loneliness, The Territory,Flying Doctor Calling and My Love Must Wait.

Call of the Outback provides a vivid portrait of Ernestine, from the early brilliance she showed as a child in Brisbane to her later life. In particular it evokes Ernestine’s larger-than-life personality, the exotic landscapes she explored and the remarkable characters she met on her travels.

Xinran

With journalistic acumen and a novelist’s flair, Xinran tells the remarkable stories of men and women born in China after 1979 – the recent generations raised under China’s single-child policy. At a time when the country continues to transform at the speed of light, these generations of precious ‘one and onlies’ are burdened with expectation, yet have often been brought up without any sense of responsibility. Within their families, they are revered as ‘little emperors’ and ‘suns’, although such cosseting can come at a high price: isolation, confusion and an inability to deal with life’s challenges.

From the business man’s son unable to pack his own suitcase, to the PhD student who pulled herself out of extreme rural poverty, Xinran shows how these generations embody the hopes and fears of a great nation at a time of unprecedented change. It is a time of fragmentation, heart-breaking and inspiring in equal measure, in which capitalism vies with communism, the city with the countryside and Western opportunity with Eastern tradition. Through the fascinating stories of these only children, we catch a startling glimpse of the emerging face of China.

Dr Reb

As a newly graduated vet Dr. Reb signed up for a two-year stint with the Peace Corp Volunteers, and found himself in Malawi. A national fuel shortage meant no delivery of supplies, and he had to improvise at every turn. Then he was introduced to a local witch doctor, Dr. Mzimba, and two very sick puppies, Skippy and Bozo. After shaking my hand, Dr. Mzimba took hold of both of my wrists and turned them over so that the palms faced upward. As he studied them, they began to tingle.

The Peace Corps had given me extensive crosscultural training, but I didn’t recall anything about greetings of this nature. Then he stared into my eyes and while the tingling in my hands began to fade, my cheeks now felt as if an electrical charge was passing through them. Through a smile that filled his face, he said, “I’ve been waiting a long time for you, Dokotala.”

So began Dr. Reb’s strange and wonderful adventures, where he discovered that in Africa anything can happen and usually does, especially when puppies become your companions in body as well as spirit.