Kate Atkinson

Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, works in Cambridge. After years of investigating tragedies, nothing surprises him, but a small part of him believes that his job is to help people be good, rather than punish them for being bad. X rated, contains offensive language and explicit sex.

Three festive tales from the brilliant pen of Kate Atkinson, which offer a good introduction to the author's work and her quirky sense of humour.

Teddy Todd - would-be poet, heroic World War II bomber pilot, husband, father, and grandfather, - navigates the perils and progress of the 20th century. For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge will be to face living in a future he never expected to have.

Once it had been the great forest of Lythe. And here lived the Fairfaxes at Fairfax Manor. But over the centuries the forest had been destroyed, replaced by Streets of Trees. The Fairfaxes have dwindled too; now they live at the end of Hawthorne Close and are hardly a family at all. But Isobel Fairfax, knows about the past. She is sixteen and waiting for the return of her mother - whose disappearance is part of the mystery that still remains at the heart of the forest.

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? What if there were, in fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?

In this first full collection since Not the End of the World, we meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man whose luck changes when a horse speaks to him. With clockwork intricacy, inventiveness and sharp social observation, Kate Atkinson conjures a feast for the imagination, a constantly changing multiverse in which nothing is quite as it seems.

1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time. The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie's empire faces threats from without and within. For beneath the dazzle of Soho's gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost.

It's a day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a purchase she hadn't bargained for. One moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy's humdrum world to be turned upside down.

In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. She is sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers. Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence.

As a six-year-old Joanna Mason witnessed a gruesome crime, now she’s an Edinburgh GP who has gone missing and only her young nanny seems to be worried. Meanwhile ex-detective Brodie Jackson is on his way back to the same city on a journey that will end in carnage. Richard & Judy Bookclub