Recommended Reads
We would like to continue to recommend some of our favourite reads to you, for future reading lists or for right now, available from our libraries or to download from our eBooks and eAudiobooks app, Borrowbox.
October 2024
Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey
In the vast and often unforgiving city of London, two Irish outsiders seeking refuge find one another: Milly, a teenage runaway, and Pip, a young boxer full of anger and potential who is beginning to drink it all away. Over the decades their lives follow different paths, interweaving from time to time, often in one another’s sight, always on one another’s mind, yet rarely together. Forty years on, Milly is clinging onto the only home she’s ever really known while Pip, haunted by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, traipses the streets of London and wrestles with the life of the recovering alcoholic. And between them, perhaps uncrossable, lies the unspoken span of their lives. Dark and brave, this epic novel offers a rich and moving portrait of an ever-changing city, and a profound inquiry into character, loneliness and the nature of love.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
The Story Spinner by Barbara Erskine
The land of the Silures, 382 AD
Elen is a princess promised to a general of Rome. Macsen came to Wales seeking an alliance that would advance his quest for power.
Despite warnings her marriage is destined for heartache, Elen is determined to honour her vows.
But this union will change her destiny forever…
Camp Meadow, 2024
Cadi is a writer who has discovered Elen’s lost story. As she puts pen to paper, she hears the sound of ghostly marching feet.
Opening the gate to the ancient meadow behind her cottage, could the secret behind Elen’s fate lie closer than she thinks?
But someone is desperate to keep the past buried, plotting to destroy the meadow…
Can Cadi uncover Elen’s story before it’s lost to time?
Available form your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Frankie by Graham Norton
Frankie Howe has lived a long life, her small flat is crammed full of art, furniture – and memories. Damian, her young carer, listens as she gradually tells him parts of her story – a story that takes us into a progressive, daring world of New York artists on the brink of fame, aspiring writers and larger-than-life characters. Travelling from post-war Ireland to the dazzling art scene of 1960s New York by way of London, ‘Frankie’ is an immersive, decade-sweeping novel about love, bravery and what it means to live a significant life.
Available from your library
The Briar Club by Kate Quinn
Washington, D.C., 1950
Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, an all-female boarding house in the heart of the US capital, where secrets hide behind respectable facades.
But when the mysterious Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbours – a poised English beauty, a policeman’s daughter, a frustrated female baseball star, and a rabidly pro-McCarthy typist – into an unlikely friendship.
Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their troubled lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. And when a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?
Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Before we Forget Kindness by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
In the fifth book in the ‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold’ series, the mysterious Tokyo café where customers arrive hoping to travel back in time welcomes four new guests: the father who could not allow his daughter to get married; a woman who couldn’t give Valentine’s Day chocolates to her loved one; a boy who wants to show his smile to his divorced parents; and a wife holding a child with no name. They must follow the café’s strict rules, however, and come back to the present before their coffee goes cold.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudiobook
Safe and Sound by Laura McHugh
In a town no one ever leaves, there are only so many places to hide. As kids, Amelia and Kylee were found unharmed in their upstairs bedroom the night their teenage cousin Grace, who was babysitting them, vanished from the farmhouse in Beaumont, Missouri, leaving only a smear of blood on a door. Scrappy and driven, Grace had been on the verge of escaping their dead-end town, the first in their family to go to college instead of getting married and going to work at the meatpacking plant. Her disappearance is a warning to any local girl who dared hope for better.
Now, as their own high school graduation looms, Amelia and Kylee dream about getting out of Beaumont, but the likelihood of that happening seems as low as that of Grace being found. When human remains are discovered in town, the sisters think they finally know who took Grace-but as they dig deeper into her past, they unearth long-buried secrets and a growing list of suspects. Amelia and Kylee vow to find Grace, dead or alive. But as they draw closer to the truth and slip deeper into danger, they question how far someone would go to put a woman in her place, or to cover up a crime.
Available from your library
September 2024
Death at the sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson
Welcome to Rook Hall.
The stage is set. The players are ready. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed.
Ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off a bad case of midlife malaise when he is called to a sleepy Yorkshire town, and the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But one theft leads to another, including the disappearance of a valuable Turner from Burton Makepeace, home to Lady Milton and her family. Once a magnificent country house, Burton Makepeace has now partially been converted into a hotel, hosting Murder Mystery weekends.
As paying guests, a vicar, an ex-army officer, impecunious aristocrats, and old friends converge, we are treated a fiendishly clever mystery.
Available from you library
Berlin Duet by S.W. Perry
In 1938, English spy Harry Taverner and Jewish photographer Anna Cantrell spend the night dancing at Berlin’s most elegant hotel. Anna is married to another man, the Nazi shadow is rising over Europe and neither expects to ever meet again. But once peace is declared, they reunite in the ruins of Berlin, where Anna is searching for her missing children. With the blockade tightening and the Soviets set on conquest, Harry and Anna walk a treacherous line between love and duty, integrity and survival, loyalty and betrayal. And as the Cold War dawns, they are bound together by a secret that will only be revealed decades later, when Berlin finds itself on the cusp of another transformation…
Available from your library
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
Finn is in the grip of middle-age and on an enforced break from work: it might be that he’s ‘too emotional’ to teach history now. He is living in an America hurtling headlong into hysteria, after all.
High up in a New York hospice, he sits with his beloved brother Max as he slips from one world into the next.
A call from Illinois summons him back to his troubled old flame Lily, the great love of his life. Together, they’ll embark on a road trip that opens a trapdoor in reality. Just the two of them, side by side again for one last time, coming to terms with all they meant to each other, and how they might go at what is left of life alone.
Available from your library
What Have You Done? By Shari Lapena
Nothing ever happens in sleepy little Fairhill, Vermont. The teenagers get their kicks telling ghost stories in the old graveyard. The parents trust their kids will arrive home safe from school. Everyone knows everyone. Curtains rarely twitch. Front doors are left unlocked. But this morning all of that will change. Because Diana Brewer isn’t lying safely in her bed where she belongs. Instead she lies in a hayfield, circled by vultures, discovered by a local farmer. How quickly a girl becomes a ghost. How quickly a town of friendly, familiar faces becomes a town of suspects, a place of fear and paranoia. Someone in Fairhill did this. Everyone wants answers. And one innocent question could be deadly.
Available from your library
Columba’s Bones by David Greig
The Isle of Iona, 825. In a bloody, brutal raid, Abbot Blathmac is slain on the steps of his monastery for refusing to give away the location of the sacred relics of St Columba, the missionary who first brought Christianity to Scotland. Following a night of rampage and mayhem, one Viking wakes up the next morning to find himself alone, hungover, and abandoned by his crew mates. He can’t swim, there are no boats, and the only surviving monk on the island has taken his sword. With only his wits, he must survive long enough not only to rejoin his Viking comrades, but also to find the location of the elusive relics that brought him here in the first place. Rooted in the real history of Iona and its early monks, Columba’s Bones is an utterly unique and thrilling read, exploring the clash of early Christianity and paganism, and expanding into a sharp, witty meditation on philosophy, redemption, shame, violence, love, transcendence and reality. Shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize the Bookmark Book Festival Book of the Year.
Available from your library
Heart be at Peace by Donal Ryan
In a small town in rural Ireland, the local people have weathered the storms of economic collapse and are looking towards the future. The jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the marks of its history, new stories are unfolding.
But a fresh menace is creeping around the lakeshore and the lanes of the town, and the peace of the community is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way. Young people are being drawn towards the promise of fast money whilst the generation above them tries to push back the tide of an enemy no one can touch…
Available from your library
August 2024
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discovered an island where they could make a life together. More than a century later, the Honeys’ descendants remain there, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours: a pair of sisters raising three Penobscot orphans; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their nocturnal brood; the prophetic Zachary Hand To God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who carves Biblical images in a hollow tree.
Then comes the intrusion of ‘civilization’: eugenics-minded state officials determine to cleanse the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities’ institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah’s Ark. Full of lyricism and power, ‘This Other Eden’ explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference.
Available from your library
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.
Available from your library
The Divorce by Moa Herngren
THE DIVORCE explores the unravelling of a marriage from first the wife, then the husband’s point of view, as the picture becomes more nuanced and long-held secrets are unearthed . . . There are two sides to every story . . . Together for more than thirty years, Bea and Niklas live a comfortable life in Stockholm. But one evening, following a trivial argument, Niklas disappears. Weeks pass before it emerges that he has met someone else. To Bea’s horror, he insists they must divorce. But is this divorce really coming out of the blue? Is the person who does the leaving always the one at fault? What emerges once you begin scratching the surface?
Available from your library
The Polite Act of Drowning by Charleen Hurtubise
Michigan, 1985. The drowning of a teenage girl causes ripples in the small town of Kettle Lake, though for most the waters settle quickly. For sixteen year old Joanne Kennedy, however, the tragedy dredges up untold secrets and causes her mother to drift farther from reality and her family. When troubled newcomer Lucinda arrives in town, she offers Joanne a chance of real friendship, and together the teenagers push against the boundaries of family, self-image, and their sexuality during the tension of a long, stifling summer. But the undercurrents of past harms continuously threaten to drag Joanne and those around her under…
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
The Trial by Jo Spain
2014, Dublin: at St Edmunds, an elite college on the outskirts of the city, twenty-year-old medical student Theo gets up one morning, leaving behind his sleeping girlfriend, Dani, and his studies – never to be seen again. With too many unanswered questions, Dani simply can’t accept Theo’s disappearance and reports him missing, even though no one else seems concerned, including Theo’s father.
Ten years later, Dani returns to the college as a history professor. With her mother suffering from severe dementia, and her past at St Edmunds still haunting her, she’s trying for a new start. But not all is as it seems behind the cloistered college walls – meanwhile, Dani is hiding secrets of her own.
Available from your library
Hold Back the Night by Jessica Moor
March 2020. Annie is alone in her house as the world shuts down, only the ghosts of her memories for company. But then she receives a phone call which plunges her deeper into the past.
1959. Annie and Rita are student nurses at Fairlie Hall mental hospital. Working long, gruelling hours, they soon learn that the only way to appease their terrifying matron is to follow the rules unthinkingly. But what is happening in the hospital’s hidden side wards? And at what point does following the rules turn into complicity – and betrayal?
1983. Annie is reeling from the loss of her husband and struggling to face raising her daughter alone. Following a chance encounter, she offers a sick young man a bed for the night, a good deed that soon leads to another. Before long, she finds herself entering a new life of service – her home a haven for those who are cruelly shunned. But can we ever really atone?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
July 2024
The Painter’s Daughters by Emily Howes
1759, Ipswich. Sisters Peggy and Molly Gainsborough are the best of friends and do everything together. They spy on their father as he paints, they rankle their mother as she manages the books, they tear barefoot through the muddy fields that surround their home. But there is another reason they are inseparable: from a young age, Molly has had a tendency to forget who she is, to fall into confusion, and Peggy knows instinctively that no one must find out.
When the family move to Bath, Thomas Gainsborough finds fame as a portrait artist, while his daughters are thrown into the whirl of polite society. Here, the merits of marriage and codes of behaviour are crystal clear, and secrets much harder to keep. As Peggy goes to greater lengths to protect her sister, she finds herself falling in love, and their precarious situation is soon thrown catastrophically off-course. The discovery of a betrayal forces her to question all she has done for Molly – and whether any one person can truly change the fate of another . . .
Available from your library
The Cuckoo by Camilla Lackberg
As a heavy mist rolls into the Swedish coastal town of Fjällbacka, shocking violence shakes the small community to its core. Rolf Stenklo, a famous photographer, is found murdered in his gallery. Two days later, a brutal tragedy on a private island leaves the prestigious Bauer family devastated.
With his boss acting strangely, Detective Patrik Hedström is left to lead the investigation. Tensions rise threatening cracks in the team of officers at Tanumshede police station and pressure mounts as the press demand answers.
In pursuit of inspiration for her next true-crime book, Patrik’s wife Erica Falck leaves behind their three children and travels to Stockholm to research the unsolved decades-old murder of a figure from Rolf’s past. As Erica searches for the truth, she realizes that her mystery is connected to Patrik’s case. These threads from the past are woven into the present and old sins leave behind long shadows.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook.
Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan
Like young girls everywhere Katriona O’Sullivan grew up bright, enthusiastic, curious. But she was also surrounded by abject poverty and chaos, and after she became pregnant and homeless at 15, what followed was five years of barely surviving. Yet today Katriona is an award-winning academic whose work explores barriers to education for girls like her.
What set Katriona on this unexpected path were the mentors and supporters who truly saw her. The teachers who showed her how to wash in the school toilets or turned up at her door to convince her to sit at least one GCSE. The community worker who encouraged her to apply for training schemes. The friend who introduced Katriona to Trinity College’s access program while she was a cleaner. Simple acts that would help her turn her life around.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
For thy great pain have mercy on my little pain by Victoria MacKensie
1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich. Margery has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey. Her visions of Christ – which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband’s abuse – have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic. Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty–three years. She has told no one of her own visions – and knows that time is running out for her to do so. The two women have stories to tell one another. Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more powerful than the world is ready to hear. Their meeting will change everything.
Available from your library
Sandwich by Catherine Newman
For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their rustic beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, its quirky furniture and mismatched pots and pans greeted like old friends. Now, sandwiched between her children who are adult enough to be fun but still young enough to need her, and her parents who are alive and healthy, Rocky wants to preserve this golden moment forever. This one precious week when everything is in balance; everything is in flux. But every family has its secrets and hers is no exception. With her body in open revolt and surprises invading her peaceful haven, the perfectly balanced seesaw of Rocky’s life is tipping towards change.
Available from your library
Tinkers by Paul Harding
An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure.
A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost seven decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
June 2024
Long Island by Colm Tóibín
A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything changes. Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn – perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future.
And yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind. Did she make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
Hey, Zoey by Sarah Crossan
43-year-old Dolores O’Shea is logical, organised, and prepared to handle whatever comes her way. She keeps up with her job and housework, takes care of her mentally declining mother, and remains close with her old friends and her younger sister who’s moved to New York. Though her marriage with David, a doctor, isn’t what is used to be, nothing can quite prepare her for Zoey, the AI sex doll that David has secretly purchased and stuffed away in the garage. At first, Zoey sparks an uncharacteristically strong violence in Dolores, whose entire life is suddenly cast in doubt. But when they start to talk, what surfaces runs deeper than Dolores could have ever expected, with consequences for all of the relationships in her life, especially her relationship to herself. A novel about the painful truths of modern-day connection and the complicated and unexpected forms that love can take in a lifetime.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Horse by Geraldine Brooks
Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamour of any racetrack.
Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse – one studying the stallion’s bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.
Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred, Lexington, who became America’s greatest stud sire, Horse is an original, gripping, multi-layered reckoning with the legacy of enslavement and racism in America.
Available from your library
The Lagos Wife by Vanessa Walters
Nicole Oruwari has the perfect life: a handsome husband, a palatial house in the heart of glittering Lagos, Nigeria, and a glamorous group of friends. She left gloomy London and a dark family past behind for sunny, moneyed Lagos, becoming part of the Nigerwives – a community of foreign women married to wealthy Nigerian men. But when Nicole disappears without a trace after a boat trip, the cracks in her so-called perfect life start to show. As the investigation turns up nothing but dead ends, her Auntie Claudine decides to take matters into her own hands. Armed with only a cell phone and a plane ticket to Nigeria, she digs into her niece’s life and uncovers a hidden side filled with dark secrets, isolation, and even violence. But the more she discovers about her niece, the more Claudine’s own buried history threatens to come to light.
Available from your library
The Instruments of Darkness by John Connolly
In Maine, Colleen Clark stands accused of the worst crime a mother can commit: the abduction and possible murder of her child. Everyone – ambitious politicians in an election season, hardened police, ordinary folk – has an opinion on the case, and most believe she is guilty. But most is not all. Defending Colleen is the lawyer Moxie Castin, and working alongside him is the private investigator Charlie Parker, who senses the tale has another twist, one involving a husband too eager to accept his wife’s guilt, a disgraced psychic seeking redemption, and an old twisted house deep in the Maine woods, a house that should never have been built. A house, and what dwells beneath.
Available from your library
Girls by Kirsty Capes
At the time of her death, the press wrote many things about Ingrid Olssen: She was a brilliant artist. She was a terrible mother to her girls, Mattie and Nora. And that her legacy would live on forever. Even so, it’s unlikely the world will ever see another Ingrid Olssen exhibition – her last request to her daughters was to throw her ashes in the canyon and her paintings in the sea. But as Mattie and Nora reluctantly embark on an all-or-nothing trip to fulfil her wishes, they start to unpick the painful scars of their past. And soon they begin to realise that the ties that bound them, might also break them.
Available from your library
May 2024
This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs
Jane Start is thirty-three, broke, and recently single. Ten years prior, she had a hit song-written by world-famous superstar Jonesy-but Jane hasn’t had a breakout since. Now she’s living out of four garbage bags at her parents’ house, reduced to performing to Karaoke tracks in Las Vegas. Rock bottom.
But when her longtime manager Pippa sends Jane to London to regroup, she’s seated next to an intriguing stranger on the flight-the other Tom Hardy, an elegantly handsome Oxford professor of literature. Jane is instantly smitten by Tom, and soon, truly inspired. But it’s not Jane’s past alone that haunts her second chance at stardom, and at love. Is Tom all that he seems? And can Jane emerge from the shadow of Jonesy’s earlier hit, and into the light of her own?
Available from your library
The Amendments by Niamh Mulvey
Nell and her partner Adrienne are about to have a baby. For Adrienne, it’s the start of a new life. For Nell, it’s the reason the two of them are sitting in a therapist’s office. Because she can’t go into this without dealing with the truth: that she has been a mother before, and now she can hardly bring herself to speak to her own mother, let alone return home to Ireland. But to Ireland and the past is where she must go, and that is where ‘The Amendments’ takes us: to the heat of Nell’s teenage years in the early 2000s, as Ireland was unpicking itself from its faith and embracing the hedonism of the Celtic Tiger. To 1983, when Nell’s mother Dolores was grappling with the tensions of the women’s rights movement. And then to the farms and suburbs and towns that made and unmade the lives at the centre of this story, bound together by the terrible secret that Nell still cannot face.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
May 2021. London. Campbell Flynn – art historian and celebrity intellectual – is entering the empire of middle age. Fuelled by an appetite for admiration and the finer things, controversy and novelty, he doesn’t take people half as seriously as they take themselves. Which will prove the first of his huge mistakes. The second? Milo Manghasa, his beguiling and provocative student. Milo inhabits a more precarious world, has experiences and ideas which excite his teacher. He also has a plan. Over the course of an incendiary year, a web of crimes and secrets and scandals will be revealed, and Campbell Flynn may not be able to protect himself from the shattering exposure of all his privilege really involves. But then, he always knew: when his life came tumbling down, it would occur in public.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eAudioBook
Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff
For Geeta, life as a widow is more peaceful than life as a wife… Until the other women in her village decide they want to be widows, too. Geeta is believed to have killed her vanished husband – a rumour she hasn’t bothered trying to correct, because a reputation like that can keep a single woman safe in rural India. But when she’s approached for help in ridding another wife of her abusive drunk of a husband, her reluctant agreement sets in motion a chain of events that will change the lives of all the women in the village….
Available from your library
Emma Disappeared by Andrew Hughes
Everyone is talking about the disappearance of Emma Harte.
A high-achieving university graduate and young entrepreneur, she was last seen in the early hours of the morning on grainy CCTV footage in Dublin’s city centre before vanishing into thin air. While a national debate about women’s safety rages, eyes turn to Emma’s boyfriend, Tom – who is nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile, archivist James Lyster is following the story with undue interest. When a comment he makes about Emma goes viral on social media, he finds himself drawn into the world of a group of idealistic university students involved in the search – and attracting the attention of the police detective in charge of Emma’s case.
Then a body is discovered in scrubland near James’ flat …
As the police get closer to finding out what happened to Emma Harte, James’ life begins to unravel. Is he a victim or murderer? Feminist ally or callous liar.
For it turns out that James isn’t the only one with secrets …
Available from your library
My Husband by Maud Ventura
From the outside, she has an enviable life: a successful career, stunning looks, a beautiful house in the suburbs, two healthy children, and most importantly, an ideal husband. After fifteen years together, she is still besotted with him. But she’s never quite sure that her passion is reciprocated.
Determined to keep their relationship perfect, she meticulously prepares for every encounter they have, always taking care to make her actions seem effortless. She watches him attentively, charting every mistake and punishing him accordingly to help him improve.
And she tests him – setting traps to make sure that he still loves her just as much as he did when they first met.
Until one day she realizes she may have gone too far . . .
Available from your library
April 2024
Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? By Nicci French
1990. When beautiful and vivacious Charlotte Salter fails to turn up to her husband Alec’s 50th birthday party, her kids are worried, but Alec is not. As the days pass and there’s still no word from Charlie, her daughter, Etty, and her sons, Niall, Paul and Ollie, all struggle to come to terms with her disappearance.
How can anyone just vanish without a trace?
Left with no answers and in limbo, the Salter children try and go on with their lives, all the while thinking that their mother’s killer is potentially very close to home.
After years away, Etty returns home to the small East Anglian village where she grew up to help move her father into a care home. Now in his eighties, Alec has dementia and often mistakes his daughter for her mother.
Etty is a changed woman from the trouble-free girl she was when Charlie was still around – all the Salter children have spent decades running and hiding from their mother’s disappearance.
But when their childhood friends, Greg and Morgen Ackerley, decide to do a podcast about Charlotte’s disappearance, it seems like the town’s buried secrets – and the Salters’ – might finally come to light.
Available form your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
After the Funeral and other stories by Tessa Hadley
In each of the twelve stories in ‘After the Funeral’, small events have huge consequences. Heloise’s father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognise each other. Janie’s bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie’s own age – everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend’s death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend’s wife.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water follows a family in southern India that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning – and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century a twelve-year-old girl, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this poignant beginning, the young girl and future matriarch – known as Big Ammachi – will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life, full of the joys and trials of love and the struggles of hardship. A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang
When failed writer June Hayward witnesses her literary rival Athena Liu die in a freak accident, she sees her opportunity… and takes it.
So what if it means stealing Athena’s final manuscript?
So what if it means ‘borrowing’ her identity?
And so what if the first lie is only the beginning…
Catapulted to overnight success and with the whole world watching, how far will June go to protect her new life?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
The Wager by David Grann
On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, the Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2,500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.
Then, six months later, another, even more decrepit, craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with counter-charges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous captain and his henchmen. While stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death-for whomever the court found guilty could hang.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
The Maid on Fifth Avenue by Sinead Crowley
How far must you run to truly escape your past? Annie thinks she has found the answer when she leaves her home on the west coast of Ireland and boards a ship for New York. Irish maids are in demand in the 1920s, and she finds work with the wealthy Cavendish family in their opulent Fifth Avenue mansion. Annie soon makes a friend too, an Italian waitress named Elena. As their friendship deepens into something more passionate and dangerous for them both, however, Annie’s past rises up to haunt her. Once again she will be forced to flee. A century later, in post-pandemic Ireland, Emer is also running, and finds a haven in her family’s home in West Kerry. But here, too, the past is refusing to die, and as Annie and Emer’s lives intertwine, long buried secrets are about to be revealed. ‘A Maid on Fifth Avenue’ is a heart-stopping dual timeline novel.
Available from your library
March 2024
The Playdate by Carla Dillon
When Sara leaves her high-flying London life to move to Dublin, her only concern is her nine-year-old daughter, Lexie. For Lexie’s sake she tries to get to know other mothers at the school gates, but they appear uninterested – particularly their leader, the beautiful and charismatic Vanessa, whose daughter rules the playground.
After a simple misunderstanding between Vanessa and Sara, none of the other kids at school want anything to do with Lexie. Desperate to mend fences, Sara offers to look after Vanessa’s daughter one afternoon. But when the playdate ends in catastrophe, Vanessa is convinced that what happened wasn’t an accident.
With allegations flying in all directions, Sara is forced to ask herself what she has unleashed? And how far a mother will go to protect her daughter?
Available from your library.
Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain
Marianne Clifford, teenage daughter of a peppery army colonel and his vain wife, Lal, falls helplessly and absolutely for Simon Hurst, 18, whose cleverness and physical beauty suggest that he will go forward into a successful and monied future, helped on by doting parents. But fate intervenes. Simon’s plans are blown off course, and Marianne is forced to bury her dreams of a future together. Narrating her own story, characterising herself as ignorant and unworthy, Marianne’s telling use of irony and smart thinking gradually suggest to us that she has underestimated her own worth. We begin to believe that – in the end, supported by her courageous Scottish friend, Petronella – she will find the life she never stops craving. But what we can’t envisage is that beneath his blithe exterior, Simon Hurst has been nursing a secret which will alter everything.
Available from your library and from Borrowbox as an eBook and eAudiobook
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plant crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned. But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker – or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. As their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?
Available from your library and from Borrowbox as an eBook and eAudiobook
The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr
Baxter’s name isn’t George. But it’s 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he’ll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with ‘George.’ On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter’s memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.
Available from your library
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr Byrne, her best friend James helps her devise a plan to seduce him. But what begins as a harmless crush soon pushes their friendship to its limits.
Over the course of a year they will find their lives ever more entwined with the Byrnes’ and be faced with impossible choices and a lie that can’t be taken back…
Available from your library
In the Blink of an Eye by Jo Callaghan
In the UK, someone is reported missing every 90 seconds. Just gone. Vanished. In the blink of an eye. DCS Kat Frank knows all about loss. A widowed single mother, Kat is a cop who trusts her instincts.
Picked to lead a pilot programme that has her paired with AIDE (Artificial Intelligence Detective Entity) Lock, Kat’s instincts come up against Lock’s logic. But when the two missing person’s cold cases they are reviewing suddenly become active, Lock is the only one who can help Kat when the case gets personal.
AI versus human experience. Logic versus instinct. With lives on the line can the pair work together before someone else becomes another statistic?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook.
February 2024
Water by John Boyne
The first thing Vanessa Carvin does when she arrives on the island is change her name. To the locals, she is Willow Hale, a solitary outsider escaping Dublin to live a hermetic existence in a small cottage, not a notorious woman on the run from her past.
But scandals follow like hunting dogs. And she has some questions of her own to answer. If her ex-husband is really the monster everyone says he is, then how complicit was she in his crimes?
Escaping her old life might seem like a good idea but the choices she has made throughout her marriage have consequences. Here, on the island, Vanessa must reflect on what she did – and did not do. Only then can she discover whether she is worthy of finding peace at all.
Can you ever truly wash away your past?
Available from your library
The Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou
Eva Georgiou has just returned from her shift at the glamorous Café de Paris, when she’s summoned to her second job: Greek interpreter for the Metropolitan Police. There, she is tasked with representing Zina Pavlou, a Cypriot woman who has been accused of the brutal murder of her daughter-in-law who has been bludgeoned, strangled and then set alight. Eva gets to work as Zina’s translator, but her concern grows that the case may be more complicated than it seems. Then Zina changes everything when she reveals she’s been accused of murder once before, years ago in Cyprus. While Eva’s obsession with the case deepens, so does her bond with Zina. And soon she will discover that when you lend your voice to an accused murderer, it comes at a devastating cost. A compelling historical crime novel set in the Greek diaspora of 1950s London.
Available from your library
The Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard
Stranded on a dark road in the middle of the night, a young woman accepts a lift from a passing stranger. It’s the nightmare scenario that every girl is warned about, and she knows the dangers all too well – but what other choice does she have?
As they drive, she alternates between fear and relief – one moment thinking he is just a good man doing a good thing, the next convinced he’s a monster. But when he delivers her safely to her destination, she realizes her fears were unfounded.
And her heart sinks. Because a monster is what she’s looking for.
She’ll try again tomorrow night. But will the man who took her sister take the bait?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook.
I Heard a Fly Buzz when I Died by Amanda Flower
August 1856. The Dickinson family is comfortably settled in their homestead on Main Street. Emily’s brother, Austin Dickinson, and his new wife are delighted when famous thinker and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson comes to Amherst to speak at a local literary society and decides he and his young secretary, Luther Howard, will stay with the newlyweds. Emily has been a longtime admirer of Emerson’s writing and is thrilled at the chance to meet her idol. She is determined to impress him with her quick wit, and if she can gather the courage, a poem. Willa Noble, the second maid in the Dickinson home and Emily’s friend, encourages her to speak to the famous but stern man. But his secretary, Luther, intrigues Willa more because of his clear fondness for the Dickinson sisters. Willa does not know if Luther truly cares for one of the Dickinson girls or if he just sees marrying one of them to raise himself up in society. After a few days in his company, Willa starts to believe it’s the later.
Available from your library
The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino
A decade ago, Tokyo Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga went to collect the ashes of his recently deceased mother. Years before, she ran away from her husband and son without explanation or any further contact, only to die alone in an apartment far away, leaving her estranged son with many unanswered questions.
Now in Tokyo, Michiko Oshitani is found dead many miles from home. Strangled to death, left in the bare apartment rented under a false name by a man who has disappeared without a trace. Oshitani lived far away in Sendai, with no known connection to Tokyo – and neither her family nor friends have any idea why she would have gone there.
Hers is the second strangulation death in that approximate area of Tokyo – the other was a homeless man, killed and his body burned in a tent by the river. As the police search through Oshitani’s past for any clue that might shed some light, one of the detectives reaches out to Detective Kaga for advice. As the case unfolds, an unexpected connective emerges between the murder (or murders) now and the long-ago case of Detective Kaga’s missing mother.
Available from your library
Held by Anne Michaels
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast – as the snow falls. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river – alive, but not still whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand. So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.
Available from your library
January 2024
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital in 1987. Sadie is visiting her sister, Sam is recovering from a car crash. The days and months are long there, but playing together brings joy, escape, fierce competition — and a special friendship. Then all too soon that time is over, and they must return to their normal lives.
When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station, they are catapulted back to that moment. The spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love – creating virtual worlds to delight, challenge and immerse, finding an intimacy in the digital realm that eludes them in their real lives. Their collaborations make them superstars.
This is the story of the perfect worlds Sadie and Sam build, the imperfect world they live in, and of everything that comes after success: Money. Fame. Duplicity. Tragedy.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J.P. Morgan to curate a collection for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture on the New York society scene and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world as she helps build a world-class collection. But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle’s complexion isn’t dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white – her complexion is dark because she is African American.
Available from your library
After That Night by Karin Slaughter
After that night, nothing was ever the same again …Fifteen years ago, Sara Linton’s life changed forever when a celebratory night out ended in a violent attack that tore her world apart. Since then, Sara has remade her life. A successful doctor, engaged to a man she loves, she has finally managed to leave the past behind her.
Until one evening, on call in the ER, everything changes. Sara battles to save a broken young woman who’s been brutally attacked. But as the investigation progresses, led by GBI Special Agent Will Trent, it becomes clear that Dani Cooper’s assault is uncannily linked to Sara’s.
And it seems the past isn’t going to stay buried forever …
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
The Woman in Me by Britney Spears
In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice – her truth – was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. She reveals for the first time her incredible journey – and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history. Written with remarkable candour and humour, Spears’s ground-breaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love – and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he’s been teaching for twenty. Paired with stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these essays are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
Saunders approaches each of these stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it.
For the process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is as much a craft as it is a quality of openness and a willingness to see the world through new eyes.
Available from your library
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
Best friends and sisters, the four Padavano girls bring loving chaos to their close-knit Italian American neighbourhood. William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. So, when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano, it’s as if the world has lit up around him.
With Julia comes her family: Sylvie, the family’s dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book; Cecelia is a free-spirited artist; and Emeline patiently takes care of them all. But when darkness from William’s past begins to block the light of his future, it is Sylvie, not Julia, who becomes his closest confidante. The result is a catastrophic rift that leaves the family inhabiting two sides of a fault line.
Available from your library.
December 2023
Service by Sarah Gilmartin
When Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she’s thrown back to the summer she spent waitressing at his high-end Dublin restaurant – the plush splendour of the dining rooms, the wild parties after service, the sizzling tension of the kitchens. But Hannah also remembers how the attention from Daniel soon morphed from kindness into something darker.
Now the restaurant is shuttered and Daniel is faced with the reality of a courtroom. His wife Julie is hiding from paparazzi lenses behind the bedroom curtains. Surrounded by the wreckage of the past, Daniel, Julie and Hannah are all forced to reconsider what happened at the restaurant. Their three different voices reveal a story of power and complicity, of the lies that we tell and the courage that it takes to face the truth.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Demon’s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking ‘like a little blue prizefighter.’ For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn’t an idea, it’s as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn’t an abstraction, it’s neighbours, parents, and friends. ‘Family’ could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he’s willing to travel to try and get there.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.
How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudiobook
Hang the Moon by Jeannette Walls
Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid. Born at the turn of the twentieth century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie remembers little about her mother, who died in a violent argument with the Duke. By the time she is just eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. While Sallie is the Duke’s daughter, sharp-witted and resourceful, Eddie is his mother’s son, timid and cerebral. When Sallie tries to teach young Eddie to be more like their father, her daredevil coaching leads to an accident, and Sallie is cast out.
Nine years later, she returns, determined to reclaim her place in the family. That’s a lot more complicated than Sallie expected, and she enters a world of conflict and lawlessness. Sallie confronts the secrets and scandals that hide in the shadows of the Big House, navigates the factions in the family and town, and finally comes into her own as a bold, sometimes reckless bootlegger.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook.
All The Broken Places by John Boyne
Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same mansion block in London for decades. She leads a comfortable, quiet life, despite her dark and disturbing past. She doesn’t talk about her escape from Germany over seventy years before. She doesn’t talk about the post-war years in France with her mother. Most of all, she doesn’t talk about her father, the commandant of one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps.
Then, a young family moves into the apartment below her. In spite of herself, Gretel can’t help but begin a friendship with the little boy, Henry, though his presence brings back memories she would rather forget. One night, she witnesses a violent argument between Henry’s mother and his domineering father, one that threatens Gretel’s hard-won, self-contained existence.
Gretel is faced with a chance to expiate her guilt, grief and remorse and act to save a young boy – for the second time in her life. But to do so, she will be forced to reveal her true identity to the world. Will she make a different choice this time, whatever the cost to herself?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Body of Truth by Marie Cassidy
Rachel Reece, host of the popular true crime podcast Ireland’s Missing Women, has been brutally murdered. Dr Terry O’Brien has recently arrived in Ireland from Scotland to take up a position as state pathologist. As Terry gathers evidence to help with the police investigation, she becomes convinced that they’re following the wrong line of inquiry and begins her own research. She soon finds herself in the thick of cold cases of murdered Irish women, with questions mounting. What did Rachel Reece find out about the unsolved murder of Eileen McCarthy before she died? Who is feeding Terry anonymous information about the podcaster’s endeavours? And why do the powers that be seemed to want to thwart her at every turn? Another woman is murdered and, as pressure mounts to find the perpetrator, Terry’s post-mortem reveals something that might hold the key to everything.
Available from your library
November 2023
Trust by Hernan Diaz
Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth – all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage, and this wealthy man’s story – of greed, love and betrayal – is about to slip from his grasp.
Available from your library
One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin
Seventeen-year-old Lenni Pettersson lives on the Terminal Ward at the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital. Joining the hospital’s arts and crafts class, she meets the magnificent Margot, an 83-year-old who transforms Lenni in ways she never imagined. Though their days are dwindling, both are determined to leave their mark on the world. With the help of Lenni’s doting palliative care nurse and Father Arthur, Lenni and Margot devise a plan to create one hundred paintings showcasing the stories of the century they have lived – stories of love and loss, of courage and kindness, of unexpected tenderness and pure joy.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Be Mine by Richard Ford
Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is, here, once more our guide to the great American midway. Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colourful lives – sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent – Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all; caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter’s odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank in typical Bascombe fashion faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days.
Available from your library
The Figurine by Victoria Hislop
When Helena inherits her grandparents’ apartment in Athens, she is overwhelmed with memories of the summers she spent there as a child, when Greece was under a brutal military dictatorship. Her remote, cruel grandfather was one of the regime’s generals and as she sifts through the dusty rooms, Helena discovers an array of valuable objects and antiquities. How did her grandfather amass such a trove? What human price was paid for them?
Helena’s desire to find answers about her heritage dovetails with a growing curiosity for archaeology, ignited by a summer spent with volunteers on a dig on an Aegean island. Their finds fuel her determination to protect the precious fragments recovered from the baked earth – and to understand the origins of her grandfather’s collection.
Helena’s attempt to make amends for some of her grandfather’s actions sees her wrestle with the meaning of ‘home’, both in relation to looted objects of antiquity … and herself.
Available from your library
Stop Them Dead by Peter James
When a young farmer confronts intruders in the middle of the night he has no idea that just minutes later he will be left dying in a pool of blood. What’s more chilling is what the perpetrators were willing to kill for.
At the scene of the crime, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace soon realises this is no isolated robbery gone wrong but the tip of the iceberg of a nationwide crime wave, in which ruthless organised gangs are making more money from the illegal trade in dogs than drugs. A trade which pits him against some ruthless people who will kill anyone who gets in their way, because where there is greed, there is murder.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudiobook
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
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; 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.
Available from your library
October 2023
A Bird in Winter by Louise Doughty
Bird is a woman on the run. One minute, she’s in a meeting in her office in Birmingham – the next, she’s walking out on her job, her home, her life. It’s a day she thought might come, and one she’s prepared for – but nothing could prepare her for what will happen next. As she flees north using multiple disguises, Bird has to work out who exactly is on her trail, and who – if anyone – she can trust. Like many people, she has fantasised about escape for a long time, but now it’s actually happening. Is her greatest fear that she will be hunted down, or that she will never be found?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eAudiobook
Limelight by Daisy Buchanan
Frankie has a love-hate relationship with the spotlight. She secretly craves attention, but she is ashamed of that craving. And after a lifetime of comparison to her perfect sister Bean, she has never felt more invisible. She creates a new her, utterly unrecognisable from the real Frankie. Then the worst happens. Bean is diagnosed with cancer. While Frankie wants to fill the freezer with home cooked food, her mother decides she knows better and somehow launches a nationwide cancer fundraiser, with Frankie as the supportive-sister-spokesmodel. Now everyone has their eyes on Frankie. With her mum and sister no longer speaking to her, Frankie flounders in her newfound notoriety. Feminists and misogynists rage at her online, while she attracts hundreds of new subscribers. Whether they’re demanding apologies or expecting an empowering call to arms, everyone wants Frankie to explain herself.
Available from your library
Love Untold by Ruth Jones
Grace is about to turn ninety. She doesn’t want parties or presents or fuss. She just wants to heal the family rift that’s been breaking her heart for decades. But to do that she must find her daughter Alys – the only person who can help to put things right. And when she finds her – if she does – she risks betraying granddaughter Elin. Who is far less forgiving of the past, with its hurts and secrets and lies. Meanwhile Grace’s great-grand-daughter Beca is oblivious to all these worries, too busy navigating the highs and lows of teenage life and keeping secrets of her own. All families have their problems. And most of them get resolved. But Grace’s problem is thirty years old. And she doesn’t have time on her side. So is it too late for her to make peace? Or is reconciliation still within reach?
Available from your library
Outside by Ragnar Jónasson
When a deadly snowstorm strikes the Icelandic highlands, four friends seek shelter in a small, abandoned hunting lodge. It is in the middle of nowhere and there’s no way of communicating with the outside world. They are isolated – but they are not alone. As the night darkens, and fears intensify, an old tragedy gradually surfaces – one that forever changed the course of their friendship. Those dark memories could hold the key to the mystery the friends now find themselves in – and whether they will survive until morning.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Cleopatra And Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
New York is slipping from Cleo’s grasp. Sure, she’s at a different party every other night, but she barely knows anyone. Her student visa is running out, and she doesn’t even have money for cigarettes. But then she meets Frank. Twenty years older, Frank’s life is full of all the success and excess that Cleo’s lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a green card. She offers him a life imbued with beauty and art – and, hopefully, a reason to cut back on his drinking. He is everything she needs right now. Cleo and Frank run head-first into a romance that neither of them can quite keep up with. It reshapes their lives and the lives of those around them.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang
Athena Liu is a literary darling. Juniper Hayward is literally nobody. When Athena dies in a freak accident, Juniper steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name June Song. But as evidence threatens Juniper’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves. What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.
Available from your library and from BorrrowBox as an eBook
September 2023
73 Dove Street by Julie Owen Moylan
When Edie Budd arrives at a shabby West London boarding house in October 1958, carrying nothing except a broken suitcase and an envelope full of cash, it’s clear she’s hiding a terrible secret. And she’s not the only one; the other women of 73 Dove Street have secrets of their own.
Tommie, who lives on the second floor, waits on the eccentric Mrs Vee by day. After dark, she harbours an addiction to seedy Soho nightlife – and a man she can’t quit.
Phyllis, 73 Dove Street’s formidable landlady, has set fire to her husband’s belongings after discovering a heart-breaking betrayal – yet her fierce bravado hides a past she doesn’t want to talk about.
At first, the three women keep to themselves. But as Edie’s past catches up with her, Tommie becomes caught in her web of lies – forcing her to make a decision that will change everything.
Available from your library
So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan
After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently. All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude – and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eAudiobook
The Last Dance by Mark Billingham
He’s a detective, a dancer, he has no respect for authority — and he’s the best hope Blackpool has for keeping criminals off the streets. Meet Detective Declan Miller.
A double murder in a seaside hotel sees a grieving Miller return to work to solve what appears to be a case of mistaken identity. Just why were two completely unconnected men taken out?
Despite a somewhat dubious relationship with both reality and his new partner, can the eccentric, offbeat Miller find answers where his colleagues have found only an impossible puzzle?
Available from your library
Cheri by Jo Ann Beard
Cheri has been living with cancer for many years. Now, she is dying. As she navigates the final weeks of her life, and takes charge of the manner of her death, she is flooded with childhood memories, and returns to the present with a renewed appreciation for the brilliance of life around her: the autumn has never been so beautiful, her daughters never as radiant. Brave, incredibly strong and deeply loved, Cheri makes one last nerve-wracking journey across the country with her girls and her friends, knowing relief waits welcoming as a frozen lake on the other side.
Available from your library
The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
Nell – funny, brave and so much loved – is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell’s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel’s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. This is a meditation on love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A generational saga that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter – sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.
Available from your library
A Winter Grave by Peter May
It is the year 2051. Warnings of climate catastrophe have been ignored, and vast areas of the planet are under water, or uninhabitably hot. A quarter of the world’s population has been displaced by hunger and flooding, and immigration wars are breaking out around the globe as refugees pour into neighbouring countries. By contrast, melting ice sheets have brought the Gulf Stream to a halt and northern latitudes, including Scotland, are being hit by snow and ice storms. It is against this backdrop that Addie, a young meteorologist checking a mountain top weather station, discovers the body of a man entombed in ice. The dead man is investigative reporter, George Younger, missing for three months after vanishing during what he claimed was a hill-walking holiday. But Younger was no hill walker, and his discovery on a mountain-top near the Highland village of Kinlochleven, is inexplicable.
Available from your library
August 2023
How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney
Jamie O’Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe.
At age thirteen there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind these things are intimately linked. And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him.
Available from your library
Lazy City by Rachel Connolly
Following the death of her best friend, Erin has to get out of London. Returning home to Belfast, an au pair job provides a partial refuge from her grief and her volatile relationship with her mother. She spends late nights at the bar where her old friend Declan works, and there Erin meets an American academic who is also looking to get lost. Her unlikely, secretive relationship with religion offers a different kind of sanctuary altogether. ‘Lazy City’ explores coming of age in a place where everyone is picking up the pieces and belongs to a generation that, at the precipice of climate crisis, isn’t going to get the future it was expecting.
Available from your library
The Years That Followed by Catherine Dunne
It is 1966. Calista is seventeen, beautiful and headstrong. She meets the handsome Alexandros, and in an instant her whole life changes. Alexandros is magnetic, much older – and rich. He sweeps Calista off her feet. She leaves her safe, affluent Dublin home for a different life in Cyprus alongside her new husband. But his family treat her with suspicion.
Meanwhile, Pilar is desperate to leave the grinding poverty of her life in rural Extremadura, so she moves to Madrid. There, she meets a man who offers her excitement and opportunity. Petros charms Pilar, and she begins to imagine a future with him – although she knows it’s impossible for them to be together.
Unknown to both women, tragic events are unfolding that will inextricably link their lives in a way that neither could have imagined – events that will change them and their families forever.
Available from your library or from BorrowBox as an eBook
Tell Me What I Am by Una Mannion
Deena Garvey disappeared in 2004. She left behind a daughter and a sister. Deena’s daughter grows up in the country. She learns how to hunt, when to seed the garden, how to avoid making her father angry. Never to ask about her absent mother. Deena’s sister stays stuck in the city, getting desperate. She knows the man responsible for her sister’s disappearance, but she can’t prove it. Not yet. Over fourteen years, four hundred miles apart, these two women slowly begin to unearth the secrets and lies at the heart of their family, and the history of power and control that has shaped them both.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
Juno Loves Legs by Karl Geary
Juno loves Legs. She’s loved him since their first encounter at school in Dublin, the time she fought the playground bullies for him. Her bright spirit makes his courage flare; his tenderness makes her safe.
The two find their way from the backstreets and city’s pubs to its underground parties and squats, where, on the verge of adulthood, they find a breathing space to begin their real lives. Only Legs’s might be taking him somewhere Juno can’t follow.
Available from your library
Isabelle in the Afternoon by Douglas Kennedy
Before Isabelle I knew nothing of sex. Before Isabelle I knew nothing of freedom. Before Isabelle I knew nothing of life.
Paris in the early Seventies. Sam, an American student, meets a woman in a bookshop. Isabelle is enigmatic, beautiful, older and, unlike Sam, experienced in love’s many contradictions. Sam is instantly smitten – but wary of the wedding ring on her finger. What begins as a regular arrangement in Isabelle’s tiny Parisian apartment transforms into a true affair of the heart, and one which lasts for decades to come.
Available from your library
July 2023
Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan
It’s 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all – a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the ‘peasants’ – ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop – a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and ‘bad apples’ – the Greens.
At their heart sits Carmel – beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life – and love – got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there’s no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.
Kala by Colin Walsh
In the seaside village of Kinlough, on Ireland’s west coast, three old friends meet for the first time in years. They – Helen, Joe and Mush – were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann at its white-hot centre. But later that year, Kala disappeared without a trace. Now human remains have been discovered in the woods – including a skull with a Polaroid photo tucked inside – and the town is both aghast and titillated at the reopening of such an old wound.
On the eve of this gruesome discovery, Helen had reluctantly returned for her father’s wedding; the world-famous musician Joe had come home to dry out and reconnect with something authentic; and Mush had never left. But when two more girls go missing, they are forced to confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala’s disappearance.
Slant by Katherine O’Donnell
Ro McCarthy, single in her fifties and working a quiet job, is sustained by her love of books and her deep friendships. Although she still doesn’t approve of marriage – not even for the straights – she is canvassing for yes in the 2015 marriage equality referendum. But, as the ghosts of her activist past join her on the campaign trail and her eagerness to confront a familiar discrimination turns to obsession and fury, Ro must finally face the long-buried trauma and loss of her youth.
Thirty years earlier, Ro is a young Cork woman living her best life in Boston, undocumented and working multiple jobs, making life-long friends, and falling in love with Jenny. Soon, however, the young gay men who have become Ro’s new family – from Ireland and elsewhere – begin to die. Shocked and grieving, she finds purpose in AIDS activism and a community that is loving and living against all odds. In the wake of this macabre heyday which Ro just about survives, her charged entanglement with Jenny will bear witness to the resistance and survival of an invisible generation of warriors.
No One Saw A Thing by Andrea Mara
No one saw it happen.
You stand on a crowded tube platform in London. Your two little girls jump on the train ahead of you. As you try to join them, the doors slide shut and the train moves away, leaving you behind.
Everyone is lying.
By the time you get to the next stop, you’ve convinced yourself that everything will be fine. But you soon start to panic, because there aren’t two children waiting for you on the platform. There’s only one.
Someone is to blame.
Has your other daughter got lost? Been taken by a passing stranger? Or perhaps the culprit is closer to home than you think? No one is telling the truth, and the longer the search continues, the harder she will be to find…
Empty Bed Blues by William Wall
When Kate Holohan’s husband dies suddenly, the extent of his disastrous financial speculation is revealed – together with a mistress and a secret love-nest in the small Italian fishing port of Camogli.
Unwilling to take on the ocean of debt and deceit she has inherited, Kate abandons her home and teaching job and flees to Italy in the hope of making a new life.
Her new neighbour, Anna Ferrara, is a formidable and mysterious older lady who takes Kate under her wing, teaching her Italian, finding her work and offering her friendship and more. But it will be Anna’s past – as a journalist, writer, former Resistance fighter and a committed communist – that will also challenge
This Could Be Us by Claire McGowan
Kate has done the unthinkable. She’d worked hard to build a perfect life for herself, while ignoring her growing unhappiness. But when her second child was born profoundly disabled, reality hit. Unable to cope, Kate left – disappearing without a trace.
She ends up in LA, with a glittering career and a new family of sorts, but the guilt is still suffocating. Husband Andrew was left to pick up the pieces and care for their disabled daughter and angry, confused son. Bereft and broken, he leaned on Olivia, Kate’s best friend. She’s been by his side ever since, ignoring her own needs to meet his. Years later, Andrew has written a memoir about his daughter learning to communicate against all odds. But when Kate’s new producer husband decides he wants to make a film of it, their worlds collide once again. Now, Kate must return to the life she abandoned and reckon with what she did.
Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth
It’s the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she’s always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn’t appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.
Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.
Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah. But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. Neither will be easy, but only one will offer her happiness.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under – but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.
Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written – is there still time to find a happy ending?
June 2023
In a Thousand Different Ways by Cecelia Ahern
Alice sees the worst in people. She also sees the best. She sees a thousand different emotions and knows exactly what everyone around her is feeling. Every single day. But it’s the dark thoughts. The sadness. The rage. These are the things she can’t get out of her head. The things that overwhelm her. Where will the journey to find herself begin?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
The Lock Up by John Banville
1950s Dublin, in a lock-up garage in the city, the body of a young woman is discovered, an apparent suicide. But pathologist Dr Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford soon suspect foul play.
The victim’s sister, a newspaper reporter from London, returns to Dublin to join the two men in their quest to uncover the truth. But, as they explore her links to a wealthy German family in County Wicklow, and to investigative work she may have been doing in Israel, they are confronted with an ever-deepening mystery.
With relations between the two men increasingly strained, and their investigation taking them back to the final days of the Second World War, can they join the pieces of a hidden puzzle?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
Prize Women by Caroline Lea
In 1920s Toronto, best friends Lily di Marco and Mae Thebault used to be inseparable. They lived under the same roof and cared for each other’s children – in a world where men held all the power, they looked out for one another. But then the Great Depression hits, changing their relationship forever, as both women are forced to make impossible decisions to save themselves – and their families – from ruin.
As times get increasingly desperate, the fever of the Great Stork Derby grips the nation, where the woman who bears the most children is in line for a cash prize. The derby is both a cruel game and a welcome distraction, but for Lily and Mae, what bond will prove most sacred? That of family, or that of unimaginable wealth?
Available from your library
Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane
In the summer of 1974, a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessey is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of ‘Southie’, the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.
One night Mary Pat’s teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances.
The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched – asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don’t take kindly to any threat to their business.
Available from your library
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
With a series of heartbreaks under her belt, Sally Milz – successful script writer for a legendary late-night TV comedy show – has long abandoned the search for love.
But when her friend and fellow writer begins to date a glamorous actress, he joins the growing club of interesting but average-looking men who get romantically involved with accomplished, beautiful women. Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch, poking fun at this ‘social rule’. The reverse never happens for a woman.
Then Sally meets Noah, a pop idol with a reputation for dating models. But this isn’t a romantic comedy – it’s real life. Would someone like him ever date someone like her?
Available from your library
The Broken Places by Russell Franklin
In 1931, Gregory Hemingway’s life begins in Kansas City, Missouri. The third and favourite child of an overbearing father, Greg is a paragon: a star athlete, a crack shot, bright and handsome and built like a pocket battleship.
In 2001, Gloria Hemingway’s life ends in a Miami women’s correctional institution. Complex and contradictory, radiant and resilient, it is a life that has flourished against the odds and been lived to the full.
Available from your library
May 2023
Dirty Laundry by Disha Bose
Ciara, Lauren and Mishti are three mothers, friends, wives. But, underneath the perfectly managed routines of their lives, they are not the women you expect – and neither are the secrets they keep. We all have our dirty laundry to air, but when their carefully curated world is threatened, the devastation goes beyond scandal – it leads to murder.
Available from your library
Cult by Camilla Lackberg
A young child is snatched in broad daylight outside his nursery. Nobody in charge sees a thing, but the other children say a woman is the culprit.
Detective Mina Dabiri calls on her close friend Vincent to untangle the puzzle that surrounds the kidnapped boy. As he finds a link between the boy and other others who have gone missing, it becomes clear that time is running out for everyone involved.
Meanwhile, Mina’s estranged daughter gets caught up in the secretive world of Epicura, a shadowy organisation that claims to be a centre for leadership development. Can Mina protect her child—a child who doesn’t even know she exists?
Available from your library
Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey
Maggie’s marriage has ended just 608 days after it started, but she’s fine – she’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s alone for the first time in her life, can’t afford her rent and her obscure PhD is going nowhere . . . but at the age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new status as a Surprisingly Young Divorcé.
Soon she’s taking up ‘sadness hobbies’ and getting back out there, sex-wise, oversharing in the group chat and drinking with her high-intensity new divorced friend Amy.
As Maggie throws herself headlong into the chaos of her first year of divorce, she finds herself questioning everything, including: Why do we still get married? Did I fail before I even got started? How many Night Burgers until I’m happy?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
Nonfiction by Julie Myerson
Two parents stand by powerlessly as their only child seems intent on destroying herself. Meanwhile the mother – a novelist – attempts to understand her uneasy, unresolved relationship with her own mother.
Weaving between childhoods past and present, as well as a current narrative laced with temptation and betrayal, this is the delicate journey of a mother, daughter, wife and author struggling to make sense of her world.
But can a writer ever be trusted with the truth of her own story?
Available from your library
Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery
New York City, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Mae lives in a run-down apartment with her alcoholic mother and her mother’s sometimes-boyfriend, Mikey. She is turned off by the petty girls at her high school, and the sleazy men she typically meets. When she drops out, she is presented with a job offer that will remake her world entirely: she is hired as a typist for the artist Andy Warhol.
Warhol is composing an unconventional novel by recording the conversations and experiences of his many famous and alluring friends. Tasked with transcribing these tapes alongside several other girls, Mae quickly befriends Shelley and the two of them embark on a surreal adventure at the fringes of the countercultural movement. Going to parties together, exploring their womanhood and sexuality, should be the most enlivening experience of Mae’s life. But as she grows increasingly obsessed with the tapes and numb to her own reality, Mae must grapple with the thin line between art and voyeurism and determine how she can remain her own person as the tide of the sixties sweeps over her.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
The Favour by Nicci French
When Jude’s first love Liam turns up in her life after ten years of no contact, asking her for a favour, she just can’t say no. He will always be someone special to her.
But does she really know what she is getting herself into?
After she does the favour, Jude is contacted by the police. Liam has been found dead, and suddenly she is caught up in a murder investigation.
She realises this one decision could cost her everything – even her life…
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook.
April 2023
The Close by Jane Casey
At first glance, Jellicoe Close seems to be a perfect suburban street – well-kept houses with pristine lawns, neighbours chatting over garden fences, children playing together. But there are dark secrets behind the neat front doors, hidden dangers that include a ruthless criminal who will stop at nothing.
It’s up to DS Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent to uncover the truth. Posing as a couple, they move into the Close, blurring the lines between professional and personal as never before. And while Maeve and Josh try to gather the evidence they need, they have no idea of the danger they face – because someone in Jellicoe Close has murder on their mind.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Queen Bee by Ciara Geraghty
She’s earned her stripes. But the hive’s misbehaving . . .
Insomnia How do I have three extra adult males – and a small yappy dog – living in my house when I need to grow into a graceful and sexual midlife woman?
Rage Am furious.
Anxiety What’s going to happen to my career if I can’t get out of this rut?
Feel invisible. What is happening to me?
Fifty-year-old Agatha Doyle loves her empty nest – until hot flushes, a pair of killer heels and an overbearing man who won’t stop talking conspire to change her life. In one moment of madness, she unwittingly becomes a heroine to women everywhere.
But can she become the heroine of her own life?
Sometimes you just have to wing it.
Available from your library and from Borrowbox as an eBook and eAudioBook
Love & Virtue by Diana Reid
Michaela and Eve are two bright, bold women who befriend each other in their first year at a residential college at university, where they live in adjacent rooms. They could not be more different; one assured and popular – the other uncertain and eager-to-please.
But something happens one night in Orientation week – a drunken encounter, a foggy memory that will force them to confront the realities of consent and wrestle with the dynamics of power.
Initially bonded by their wit and sharp eye for the colleges’ mix of material wealth and moral poverty, Michaela and Eve soon discover how fragile friendship is, and how capable of betrayal they both are.
Available from your library
Other People’s Husbands by Elizabeth Noble
Sometimes friendship crosses a line . . .
A group of close friends, their bonds forged at the nursery gates two decades ago, have celebrated, commiserated and grown together: they thought they all knew each other so well.
Until the affair.
Now a crack appears in everything.
Could one betrayal really destroy it all?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman
Edi and Ash have been best friends for over forty years. Since childhood they have seen each other through life’s milestones: stealing vodka from their parents, the Madonna phase, REM concerts, unexpected wakes, marriages, infertility, children. As Ash notes, ‘Edi’s memory is like the back-up hard drive for mine.’
So when Edi is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ash’s world reshapes around the rhythms of Edi’s care, from chipped ice and watermelon cubes to music therapy; from snack smuggling to impromptu excursions into the frozen winter night. Because life is about squeezing the joy out of every moment, about building a powerhouse of memories, about learning when to hold on, and when to let go.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Other Women by Emma Flint
It is 1923 and a country is in mourning. Thousands of husbands, fathers, sons and sweethearts were lost in the war, millions more returned home wounded and forever changed.
Beatrice Cade is an orphan, unmarried and childless. London is full of invisible women who struggle to find somewhere to work through their grief. But Bea is determined to make a new life for herself. She takes a room in a Bloomsbury ladies’ club and a job in the City. Just when her new world is taking shape, a fleeting encounter threatens to ruin everything.
Kate Ryan is an ordinary wife and mother. Following the end of the war, she has managed to build an enviable life with her husband and young daughter. To anyone looking in from the outside, they seem like a normal, happy family. But when two policemen knock on her door one morning and threaten to destroy the façade Kate has created, she knows what she has to do to protect the people she loves. And suddenly, two women who never should have met are connected for ever . .
Available from your library and from Borrowbox as an eBook and eAudioBook.
March 2023
Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan
Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life. In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently.
Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
Don Tillman has got his love life planned out. He knows exactly who he wants, but is it who he needs?
Love isn’t an exact science – but no one told Don Tillman.
A thirty-nine-year-old geneticist, Don’s never had a second date. So he devises the Wife Project, a scientific test to find the perfect partner.
Enter Rosie – ‘the world’s most incompatible woman’ – throwing Don’s safe, ordered life into chaos.
But what is this unsettling, alien emotion he’s feeling? . . .
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
The Prisoner by B A Paris
She wakes up in a pitch-black room, not knowing where she is.
Why has she been taken? Who can she hear talking? And why does she soon feel safer here, imprisoned, than she had begun to feel with her husband, Jed? Amelie has always been a survivor, from losing her parents as a child in Paris to making it on her own in London.
Then she meets Carolyn and is soon swept up in a glamorous London lifestyle. Until it starts to go wrong.
Available from you library
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (Short Stories) by Deesha Philyaw
The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church’s double standards and their own needs and passions.
There is fourteen-year-old Jael, who nurses a crush on the preacher’s wife; the mother who bakes a sublime peach cobbler every Monday for her date with the married Pastor; and Eula and Caroletta, single childhood friends who seek solace in each other’s arms every New Year’s Eve.
With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are as seductive as they want to be, as vulnerable as they need to be, as unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be – and as free as they deserve to be.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
The Echo Chamber by John Boyne
The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster. George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a ‘national treasure’ (his words), his wife Beverley, a celebrated novelist (although not as celebrated as she would like), and their children, Nelson, Elizabeth, Achilles, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen.
Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian jungle of the modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant. Along the way they will learn how volatile, how outraged, how unforgiving the world can be when you step from the proscribed path.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
The Only Suspect by Louise Candlish
Alex lives a comfortable life with his wife Beth in the leafy suburb of Silver Vale. Fine, so he’s not the most extrovert guy on the street, he prefers to keep himself to himself, but he’s a good husband and an easy-going neighbour.
That’s until Beth announces the creation of a nature trail on a local site that’s been disused for decades and suddenly Alex is a changed man. Now he’s always watching. Questioning. Struggling to hide his dread . . .
As the landscapers get to work, a secret threatens to surface from years ago, back in Alex’s twenties when he got entangled with a seductive young woman called Marina, who threw both their lives into turmoil.
And who sparked a police hunt for a murder suspect that was never quite what it seemed.
It still isn’t.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
February 2023
A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny
It’s spring and Three Pines is re-emerging after the harsh winter. But not everything buried should come alive again. Not everything lying dormant should re-emerge.
As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators’ lives after many years. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered, leaving them damaged, shattered. Now they’ve arrived in the village of Three Pines.
Available from your Library
The Young Accomplice by Benjamin Wood
In a quiet Surrey village sits Leventree, an architectural practice set up by idealistic couple Florence and Arthur Mayhood, offering apprenticeships to young offenders after their release.
Motivated by his own memories of Borstal, Arthur aims to mentor young adults with a troubled upbringing and give them opportunities to succeed. Their first protégées are siblings, Joyce and Charlie Savigear, who quickly settle in; but when a dangerous figure from Joyce’s past comes knocking, the Mayhoods’ earnest hopes of doing good turn tragic.
Forced into betrayal, Joyce must make a decision that will change her brother’s life and threaten everything the Mayhoods have been trying to build.
Available from your Library
The Twins by L V Matthews
Margo is a solitary live-in nanny for an upper-class Kensingon family. Cora is a promiscuous dancer on the cusp of a big break, living hand-to-mouth in a run-down London flat.
Different though they are, an unspeakable incident from childhood haunts them both. When the terrible secret comes to light, their fragile existences shatter, pitting them against each other in a race for survival.
But can there be a winner when a secret is so dark?
Available from your library
Fight Night by Miriam Toews
Swiv has taken her grandmother’s advice too literally. Now she’s at home, suspended from school. Mom is pregnant and preoccupied – and so Swiv is in the older woman’s charge, receiving a very different form of education from a teacher with a style all her own.
Grandma likes her stories fast, troublesome and funny. She’s known the very worst that life can throw at you – and has met it every time with a wild, unnameable spirit, fighting for joy and independence every step of the way. But will maths lessons based on Amish jigsaws and classes on How to Dig a Winter Grave inspire the same fire in Swiv, and ensure it never goes out?
Time is running short. Grandma’s health is failing, the baby is on the way, as a family of three extraordinary women prepare to face life’s great changes together.
Available from your Library
Breaking Point by Edel Coffey
Susannah has two beautiful daughters, a high-flying medical career, a successful husband and an enviable life. Her hair is glossy, her clothes are expensive; she truly has it all.
But when – on the hottest day of the year – her strict morning routine is disrupted, Susannah finds herself running on autopilot. It is hours before she realises she has made a devastating mistake. Her baby, Louise, is still in the backseat of the car and it is too late to save her.
As the press close in around her, Susannah is put on trial for negligence. It is plain to see that this is not a trial, it’s a witch hunt. But what will the court say?
Available from your Library
The Antarctica of Love by Sara Stridsberg
Inni lives her life on the margins, but it is a life that is full and complex, filled with different shades of dark and light… Until she is brutally murdered one summer’s day, on a lake shore at the heart of a distant, rain-washed forest.
On the surface, this is the story of the moment her life is violently extinguished – a moment that will never end, not ever – but it is also about the time before, and about the lives that carry on afterwards. It’s about her children, her parents, her childhood of neglect, her volatile adolescence, and the chain of choices, tragedies and accidents that lead her to a life on the streets and take her into the wrong crowd, the wrong places and, finally, the wrong car with the wrong person.
Available from your library
January 2023
Wolf Pack by Will Dean
Rose Farm is home to a group of survivalists, completely cut off from the outside world. Until now.
A young woman goes missing within the perimeter of the farm compound. Can Tuva talk her way inside the tight-knit group to find her story?
As Tuva attempts to unmask the culprit, she gains unique access to the residents. But soon she finds herself in danger of the pack turning against her – will she make her way back to safety so she can expose the truth?
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Red Thread of Fate by Lyn Liao Butler
Two days before Tam and Tony Kwan receive their letter of acceptance for the son they are adopting, Tony and his cousin Mia are killed in an accident.
A shell shocked Tam learns she is named the guardian to Mia’s 5-year-old daughter, Angela. Tam has no choice but to agree to take in the girl she hasn’t seen since she was a baby. Tam must also decide if she will complete the adoption on her own and bring home the son waiting for her in a Chinese orphanage. But when her secret comes to light just as she and Angela start to bond, their fragile family is threatened, and everything may fall apart.
Available from your library
The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves
Fifty years ago, a group of teenagers spent a weekend on Holy Island, forging a bond that has lasted a lifetime. Now, they still return every five years to celebrate their friendship and remember the friend they lost to the rising waters of the causeway at the first reunion. Now, when one of them is found hanged, Vera is called in. Learning that the dead man had recently been fired after misconduct allegations, Vera knows she must discover what the friends are hiding, and whether the events of many years before could have led to murder then, and now. But with the tide rising, secrets long hidden are finding their way to the surface, and Vera and the team may find themselves in more danger than they could have believed possible.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook and eAudioBook
Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates
In the waning days of the turbulent 1970s, in the wake of unsolved killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together, with tragic consequences.
There is Hannah, wife of a prominent local businessman, who has begun an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger whose identity remains elusive; Mikey, a canny street hustler who finds himself on an unexpected mission to rectify injustice; and the serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and terrifying figure at the periphery of elite Detroit.
As Babysitter continues his rampage of killings, these individuals intersect with one another in startling and unexpected ways.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
Spies in Canaan by David Park
Michael has travelled a long way from his boyhood under the endless skies of the Midwest. His retirement is peaceful, if solitary. But one day there is a visitation: a mysterious car on the seafront, and a package delivered. From its contents, Michael understands that he has been commissioned to undertake a final journey. As Michael makes his way deep into a distant desert – a strange and liminal landscape that lies between hell and redemption – he undertakes another journey, into long-suppressed memories: of Vietnam and the dying days of war, and to face a final accounting for what was done. Taut, atmospheric and moving, Spies in Canaan is a powerful elegy to the pain of love, the guilt of old age, and the grace of atonement.
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
The Road Home by Rose Tremain
Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to Britain, seeking work. Behind him loom the figures of his dead wife, his beloved young daughter and his outrageous friend Rudi who – dreaming of the wealthy West – lives largely for his battered Chevrolet.
Ahead of Lev lies the deep strangeness of the British: their hostile streets, their clannish pubs, their obsession with celebrity. London holds out the alluring possibility of friendship, sex, money and a new career and, if Lev is lucky, a new sense of belonging…
Available from your library and from BorrowBox as an eBook
You must be logged in to post a comment.