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Criminologist Martin Knight lives a gilded life and is a thorn in the side of the police. But then his wife Liz goes missing. There is no good explanation and no sign of Martin.To make things worse, Liz is the ex-girlfriend of DCI Craig Gillard who is drawn into the investigation. Is it just a missing person or something worse? And what relevance do the events around the shocking Girl F case, so taken up by Knight, have to do with the present? The truth is darker than you could ever have imagined.

When a teenage girl is found dead in the woods, her body posed like an angel, Stockholm holds its breath. The kill bears a chilling resemblance to those of the Angel Maker, a serial killer caught two decades ago... One who just died in prison.

Detective Inspector Jamie Johansson is taking some much-needed time away from the London Met when the call comes in. Her father, one of Stockholm's most notorious detectives, caught the Angel Maker when she was just a girl, and Jamie has long since closed the door to that part of her life. But with the original case files missing, the threat of another kill looming, and her father's reputation at stake, Jamie is drawn back to the frozen streets of her hometown to finish what he started. Has a copycat emerged? Or did he catch the wrong man all those years ago?

This is the story of John Self, consumer extraordinaire. Rolling around New York and London, he makes deals, spends wildly and does reckless movie-world business, while grabbing everything he can to sate his massive appetites: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography, a mountain of junk food and more. Ceaselessly inventive and thrillingly savage, this is a tale of life lived without restraint; of money, the terrible things it can do and the disasters it can precipitate.

Meet Tony: the first Indian to set foot on American soil.

As a child, his homeland on the Coromandel Coast of India becomes a trading outpost for the English; as an orphaned teenager, he finds himself kidnapped from the streets of London and bound to servitude on a Virginia plantation. But Tony is not giving up on his dreams just yet.

Under the rule of a sadistic plantation owner, he forms a tender bond with a young boy who will haunt his nightmares; on an exploration inland alongside a trader and Native Americans, he realises the world is vaster and more mysterious than he could have imagined; and in Jamestown, he finally earns himself a position as a physician's apprentice, an ambition he has long harboured.

Who was Beethoven's 'Immortal Beloved'? After Ludwig van Beethoven's death, a love letter in his writing was discovered, addressed only to his 'Immortal Beloved'. Decades later, Countess Therese Brunsvik claims to have been the composer's lost love. Yet is she concealing a tragic secret? Who is the one person who deserves to know the truth?

Becoming Beethoven's pupils in 1799, Therese and her sister Josephine followed his struggles against the onset of deafness, Viennese society's flamboyance, privilege and hypocrisy and the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars. While Therese sought liberation, Josephine found the odds stacked against even the most unquenchable of passions...

Catherine Cookson's well-loved novels Hamilton and Goodbye Hamilton tell the story of Maisie, who invented an imaginary horse to keep her company through the long years of an unhappy marriage, and before she became a bestselling author. In this engaging sequel, Hamilton has vanished from Maisie's life and two human companions take his place. In the days of mourning that follow the death of her beloved second husband Nardy, Maisie takes comfort and joy in the company of the cheerful, bright-eyed little cockney boy called Harold.

Now, a year later, she decides to adopt him, and begins to find happiness once more and rarely needs to escape from reality into her imagination. She is even beginning to hope that true love could strike twice. But life is never simple and an unexpected friendship with a curious man could leave Maisie in grave danger...

Yeongdo, Korea - 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child: their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then, Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife. Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country in which she has no friends, no home, and whose language she cannot speak, Sunja's salvation is just the beginning of her story.

When their parents die at the tail end of the coronavirus pandemic, Louise and Mark Joyner are devastated but nothing can prepare them for how bad things are about to get.

The two siblings are almost totally estranged and couldn't be more different. Now, however, they don't have a choice but to get along. Both of them are facing bank accounts ravaged by the economic meltdown. Their one asset? Their childhood home. They need to get it on the market as soon as possible because they need the money.

Yet before her parents died they taped newspaper over the mirrors and nailed shut the attic door. As disturbing events stack up in the house, Louise and Mark have to learn that sometimes the only way to break away from the past, is to burn it all down.

Marnie is stuck. Stuck working alone in her London flat, stuck battling the long afternoons and a life that increasingly feels like it's passing her by. Michael is coming undone. Reeling from his wife's departure, increasingly reclusive, taking himself on long, solitary walks across the moors and fells. When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship. But can it survive the journey?

You Are Here is a novel of first encounters, second chances and finding the way home.

A thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three bosom companions - a healer, a weaver and a seer. If the men hunting her find them, they will kill her because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition. She is no lady: she is the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth. Shakespeare fed us the myth of the Macbeths as power-hungry murderous conspirators.

But now Val McDermid drags the truth out of the shadows, exposing the patriarchal prejudices of history. As the net closes in on the queen, we discover a tale of passion, forced marriage, bloody massacre and the harsh realities of medieval Scotland. At the heart of it, one strong charismatic woman who survived loss and jeopardy to finally outwit the endless plotting of a string of ruthless and ambitious men. Her struggle won her a country. But now it could cost her life.

Set two years before Dune, Princess of Dune is the never-before-told story of two key women in the life of Paul Muad’Dib - Princess Irulan, his wife in name only, and Paul’s true love, the Fremen Chani. Both women become central to Paul’s galaxy-spanning Imperial reign.

This brilliant collection of France's foremost nineteenth-century novelist and playwright delivers four of his most fascinating works - stories of love, rivalry, horror and adventure - all brought to life by a stellar cast included Stephen Fry and Alex Kingston.

A huge influence on many of the most famous writers from Proust to Kerouac to Dickens, Balzac delivers beautifully observed and complex characters with an unsurpassed attention to the details of society at the time, making him an exemplary of realism in European literature.

A wonderful collection from a superb author, performed by a stunning cast, this is a must listen for any fan of classic literature.

Philosopher, pacifist, psychonaut and prophet, Aldous Huxley was one of the 20^th century's pre-eminent intellectuals and writers. The author of over 50 books, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize nine times, and elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962, a year before his death.

Known for his mordant satire and visionary ideas, Huxley spanned the period from post-First World War disillusionment to mid-century mysticism, and the works in this collection reflect his literary evolution.

Valentine Cunningham presents, with contributions from Sybille Bedford, Lord Jenkins, Sir Stephen Spender, Gavin Ewart, Julian Symons and Lewis Wolpert, and archive recordings of Huxley, his brother Julian and contemporaries.

Sit back and enjoy this darkly comic full-cast adaptation of Andrey Kurkov's bestselling novel set in mid-90s Ukraine, plus a bonus interview with the author.

Viktor Alekseyevich Zolotaryov is an aspiring writer in Ukraine, with only his pet king penguin, Misha, for company. After Viktor gets a job writing obituaries for a local newspaper, he soon finds that his articles are being used as a hit list by some unknown organisation. Feeling as lost and unhappy as his penguin, Viktor's life takes a complicated turn when he takes in Sonya, the young daughter of an old friend, and hires Nina to be her nanny. Can Viktor protect everyone and keep himself (and his penguin) alive, or is he destined to become the subject of the paper's latest obituary?

These are tales of psyches pushed to their limits by the expectations of everyday life - from a woman who gets lost on her drive back to her plush suburban home and ends up breaking into a stranger's house, to a first-person account of a cloned 1940s magazine pinup girl being sold at auction and embodying America's ideals of beauty and womanhood.

Taken as a whole, the collection forms a poignant tapestry of regular people searching for their place in a social hierarchy, often with devastating and disastrous results. The stories comprising Night, Neon showcase Oates' mastery of the suspense story and her relentless use of the form to conduct unapologetically honest explorations of American identity. 

In a provincial university town, Caro Grimstone, a dissatisfied faculty wife, becomes the unwilling accomplice to her husband Alan's ambitions. When she volunteers to read to a blind, esteemed anthropologist in a nursing home, Alan seizes the opportunity to steal his papers - research that could both advance his reputation while refuting the findings of a respected colleague.

A delightful comedy of manners with a touch of mystery, An Academic Question is prime Barbara Pym territory.

When Viola Carroll was presumed dead at Waterloo she took the opportunity to live, at last, as herself. But freedom does not come without a price, and Viola paid for hers with the loss of her wealth, her title, and her closest companion, Justin de Vere, the Duke of Gracewood.

Only when their families reconnect, years after the war, does Viola learn how deep that loss truly was. Shattered without her, Gracewood has retreated so far into grief that Viola barely recognises her old friend in the lonely, brooding man he has become.

As Viola strives to bring Gracewood back to himself, fresh desires give new names to old feelings. Feelings that would have been impossible once and may be impossible still, but which Viola cannot deny. Even if they cost her everything, all over again.

Delhi, 1997. It is India's fiftieth year of independence, the year of Hindu nationalists and atomic bombs. But twelve-year-old Adi has a bigger problem: his Ma has gone missing - again. Left with an ailing grandmother, a raging father and no answers, he finds an unlikely ally: a talking vulture who reveals itself to be a bureaucrat from the 'Department of Historical Adjustment'. The Department holds Adi's family files, which will take him on a journey through time and memory, through fifty years of India's history, uncovering the darkest secrets of his Ma's past. But first, he must unlock them by facing his greatest fears.

As bright and hopeful as it is devastating, Remember, Mr Sharma explores the ways in which we view the past, its inescapable hold over us and the stories we tell to set ourselves free.

Jenneen, Kate, Ellamarie and Ashley are enviable women. They are desirable and powerful, with glamorous jobs in the media and the theatre and, most importantly, the closest of friendships.

But each of the friends has a dark secret, and none of them can ever be entirely safe from the passion, deceit and danger which threatens to seduce and then destroy them.

Single mum and all-round superwoman Sally Freeman wants a better life for herself and her son Charlie so she sets about improving things for them. Just as her mission begins, enter Spencer Knight who's offering Sally a ticket to a new life. He's got the looks, the charm - everything she could wish for. But is he really the answer to her prayers or does her hapless ex-boyfriend Johnny still hold the key to her heart?

Adam Gabriel has always been a child of nature. Raised on his parents' remote Yorkshire farm, where life is measured by the rhythms of the flock, the turn of the seasons, and the yearly arrival of an itinerant local monk, he seems destined for a quietly contented life. 

As Adam grows, Luke and Bethany see flickers of something extraordinary in their son - a healing touch that goes beyond his love for the land. But Adam's gentleness has always made him an outsider, and a powerful gift can also be a heavy burden...

When tragedy turns the Gabriels' life upside down, Adam faces a stark choice. Can he keep faith in his talents, even if it means risking the suspicion of others? Should he listen to the lure of new horizons, or does happiness lie closer to home? And when he needs it most, can he find the strength to save the people he loves?

In dark, wintry Lochdubh, Christmas Cheer is about as welcome as a flat tyre on a deserted road. The Calvinist element in town has always resisted what they view as secular frivolity, so for most of the townsfolk there'll be no carols, feasting, gifts - or even whisky on Christmas Day!

And for PC Hamish Macbeth there's no holiday from crime - he finds himself hunting for a missing cat belonging to a lonely spinster. Curt and unfriendly, the woman is convinced her pet has been stolen but once behind her heavily-bolted door, Hamish can spot her true problem - she lives in fear, though of who or what he cannot guess.

Then someone steals a Christmas tree and lights from the nearby village of Cnothan. So it is up to Hamish to sort all these problems out - and he had better do it quickly, for the church bells will soon peal on the eve of Christmas.

Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside.

The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organisation that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths.

In order to try to rescue Will, Strike's business partner Robin Ellacott decides to infiltrate the cult and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito amongst them. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her...

To Nicole and Jamie Maguire, their parents seem the ideal couple - a suburban double act, happily married for more than thirty years. So when Linda and Gerry announce that they've decided to separate, the news sends shockwaves through the siblings' lives, forcing them to confront their own expectations and desires.

Hardworking - and hard-drinking - Nicole pursues the ex she unceremoniously dumped six years ago, while people-pleasing Jamie fears he's sleepwalking into a marriage he doesn't actually want. But as the siblings grapple with the pressures of thirtysomething life, their parents struggle to protect the fragile façade of their own relationship, and the secrets they've both been keeping.

Set in 2018, Claire Powell's beautifully observed debut novel follows each member of the Maguire family over a tumultuous year of lunches, dinners and drinks, as old conflicts arise and relationships are re-evaluated.

DS Caitlin Fitzgerald has a secret - but it's one she's deleted from her memory. In the 1990s when she was at school, she and her friends killed a fellow pupil. Thirty years later, Caitlin is happily married and loves her job as a police officer.

One day her husband persuades her to go to a school reunion and another ex-pupil, Garfield Rice, is found dead, supposedly from a drug overdose. As Garfield was an eminent Labour MP and the investigation is high profile, it's headed by Caitlin's new boss, DI Harbinder Kaur. The trouble is, Caitlin can't shake the feeling that one of her old friends has killed again.

Is Caitlin right, or was Garfield murdered by one of his political cronies? It's in Caitlin's interest to skew the investigation so that it looks like the latter and she seems to be succeeding.

Until someone else is killed...

In this short prequel to Elizabeth of York, The Last White Rose, the young princess is born - and the future of England hangs in the balance.

The Palace of Westminster, 1466. As the Queen of England lies in her chamber, exhausted from childbirth, the court awaits news of the longed-for heir...

King Edward prays for a son to ensure the succession of his line. Godfather Warwick knows his influence over the King cannot last. Grandmother Cecily hopes her new grandchild will one day bring great fortune to England. Lord Hastings fears the growing hostility within King Edward's inner circle. The boy Henry does not yet know his own significance. Uncle Richard visits the new baby - and dreams that night of a golden crown...

When Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is asked to provide crowd control at a statistics lecture given at the Université de l'Estrie in Quebec, he is dubious. Why ask the head of homicide to provide security for what sounds like a minor, even mundane lecture?

But dangerous ideas about who deserves to live in order for society to thrive are rapidly gaining popularity, fuelled by the research of the eminent Professor Abigail Robinson. Yet for every person seduced by her theories there is another who is horrified by them. When a murder is committed days after the lecture, it's clear that within crowds can lie madness.

To uncover the truth, Gamache must put his own feelings about the divisive Professor to one side. But with her ideas gaining ground, the line separating good and evil, right and wrong, is quickly blurring - especially when the case leads unexpectedly close to home...

It is 1938 in China, and the Japanese are advancing. A young mother, Meilin, is forced to flee her burning city with her four-year-old son, Renshu, and embark on an epic journey across China. For comfort, they turn to their most treasured possession - a beautifully illustrated hand scroll. Its ancient fables offer solace and wisdom as they travel through their ravaged country, seeking refuge.

Years later, Renshu has settled in America as Henry Dao. His daughter is desperate to understand her heritage, but he refuses to talk about his childhood. How can he keep his family safe in this new land when the weight of his history threatens to drag them down?

Anxiously awaiting news from the residency program of her dreams, dental student Harper Horowitz is laser focused. So crashing (quite literally) into Dan Craige is exactly the sort of dreamy distraction that she is trying to avoid.

First-year student Dan may not have the same passion for pulling teeth that Harper does, but he's instantly smitten. When Harper makes it clear that she's not interested in trading fillings for feelings anytime soon, they set out to be 'just friends' - a plan with the best of intentions and the poorest of follow-throughs.

Late nights in the dental lab (and the rather unsubtle match-making efforts of their friends), draw Dan and Harper closer. Still, Harper can't shake the worry that a romance with Dan might risk everything she's worked so hard to build.

Harper may have no trouble acing her studies, but falling in love is a whole new challenge.

Yorkshire, 1890. Having lost her father and brothers in tragic circumstances, Olwen Malkon is forced to leave her childhood home to live with her uncle's family. In his chill vicarage, however, she fears that she is also losing her mind, as strange dreams take her into the life of Ælfwyn, a woman from a distant past whose fate is overshadowed by menace and betrayal.

In the grip of these afflictions, Olwen finds sympathy with the local doctor, John Osbourne, who is intrigued by her case. Suspecting darker undercurrents are at work, John comes into conflict with Olwen's family, who dismiss her as a hysteric and, when he seeks to protect her, with the law.

As the dreams intensify, danger awaits them both. But when they begin to mirror reality, she and John start to suspect that it is these visions of the past which hold the answers...

The death of a ninety-year-old woman with a heart condition should absolutely not be suspicious. DS Harbinder Kaur certainly sees nothing to concern her in carer Natalka's account of Peggy Smith's death. 

But when Natalka reveals that Peggy lied about her heart condition and that she had been sure someone was following her...
And that Peggy Smith had been a 'murder consultant' who plotted deaths for authors, and knew more about murder than anyone has any right to...
And when clearing out Peggy's flat ends in Natalka being held at gunpoint by a masked figure...

Well then DS Harbinder Kaur thinks that maybe there is no such thing as an unsuspicious death after all.

It's Una Darling's seventeenth birthday, but nobody feels much like celebrating. It's been exactly a year since the tragic death of her father Finn, and the people he left behind have been doing their best to get on with things. But it hasn't been easy.

Daphne is tired of sadness, of mourning the long life she and her husband were meant to share, but doesn't quite know how to get past it. And she can't seem to get through to her stepdaughter - they barely speak anymore, so Daphne knows nothing of the unexpected solace Una has found, or of the risk she's about to take.

When Una fails to appear for a birthday tea with her family, Daphne suddenly realises how large the distance between them has grown. Will she be given the chance to make things right?

The Four Realms-Life, Death, Light, and Darkness-all converge on the city of dusk. For each realm there is a god, and for each god there is an heir.

But the gods have withdrawn their favour from the once vibrant and thriving city. And without it, all the realms are dying.

Unwilling to stand by and watch the destruction, the four heirs-Risha, a necromancer struggling to keep the peace; Angelica, an elementalist with her eyes set on the throne; Taesia, a shadow-wielding rogue with rebellion in her heart; and Nik, a soldier who struggles to see the light- will sacrifice everything to save the city.

But their defiance will cost them dearly.

Olivia fled her abusive marriage to return to her hometown and take over the family beekeeping business when her son Asher was six. Now, impossibly, her baby is six feet tall and in his last year of high school, a kind, good-looking, popular ice hockey star with a tiny sprite of a new girlfriend.

Lily also knows what it feels like to start over - when she and her mother relocated to New Hampshire it was all about a fresh start. She and Asher couldn't help falling for each other, and Lily feels happy for the first time. But can she trust him completely?

Then Olivia gets a phone call - Lily is dead, and Asher is arrested on a charge of murder. As the case against him unfolds, she realises he has hidden more than he's shared with her.

It's the sweltering summer of 1944, and Newark is in the grip of a terrifying epidemic.

Decent, athletic twenty-three year old playground director Bucky Cantor is devoted to his charges and ashamed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As polio begins to ravage Bucky's playground - child by helpless child - Roth leads us through every emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering and the pain.

It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. In a small New England town a distinguished professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret that he has kept for fifty years.

This is the conclusion to Roth's brilliant trilogy of post-war America - a story of seismic shifts in American history and a personal search for renewal and regeneration.

Clare Cassidy is no stranger to tales of murder. As a literature teacher specialising in the Gothic writer R. M. Holland, she teaches a short course on them every year. Then Clare's life and work collide tragically when one of her colleagues is found dead, a line from an R. M. Holland story by her body. The investigating police detective is convinced the writer's works somehow hold the key to the case.

Not knowing who to trust, and afraid that the killer is someone she knows, Clare confides her darkest suspicions and fears about the case to her journal. Then one day she notices some other writing in the diary. Writing that isn't hers...

Meet Maddie. To her mostly-absent mum, she's Maame, the woman of the family. To her dad, she's his carer - even if he hardly recognises her. To her friends, she's the one who still lives at home, who never puts herself first.

It's time to become the woman she wants to be.

The kind who wears a bright yellow suit, says yes to after-work drinks and flirts with a thirty-something banker. Who doesn't have to google all her life choices. Who demands a seat at the table.

But to put ourselves together, sometimes we have to fall apart...

A year after a calamitous blunder by the Russian secret service left a British citizen dead from novichok poisoning, Diana Taverner is on the warpath. What seems a gutless response from the government has pushed the Service's First Desk into mounting her own counter-offensive - but she's had to make a deal with the devil first. And given that the devil in question is arch-manipulator Peter Judd, she could be about to lose control of everything she's fought for.

Meanwhile, still reeling from recent losses, the slow horses are worried they've been pushed further into the cold. Slough House has been wiped from Service records, and fatal accidents keep happening. No wonder Jackson Lamb's crew are feeling paranoid. But have they actually been targeted?

With a new populist movement taking a grip on London's streets, and the old order ensuring that everything's for sale to the highest bidder, the world's an uncomfortable place for those deemed surplus to requirements. The wise move would be to find a safe place and wait for the troubles to pass.

But the slow horses aren't famed for making wise decisions.

Investigative reporter Riley Gavin, abetted by laid-back ex-military cop Frank Palmer, sets out to discover why two ageing, long-forgotten gangland members have been executed on England's south coast. The trail leads to Spain's Costa Del Crime and sparks a chain of grisly murders. Soon Riley and Frank are fighting for their lives, caught in the deadly crossfire of a war to gain control of a criminal empire.

Between the amorous antique dealer Humphrey and his good-looking nephew James glides the magnificent Leonora, delicate as porcelain, cool as ice. Can she keep James in her thrall? Or will he be taken from her by a lover, like Phoebe... or Ned, the wicked American?

Grace and Ted Chapman married at the beginning of WW2, but then Ted was called up to fight. With the passage of time, Grace begins to create a new life in the arms of another man. Then along comes baby Barbara. Then one morning, Grace receives a telegram saying that Ted is alive and on his way home. Grace panics and she begs her sister Joan to look after her daughter. When Ted returns back to Birmingham, he is shell-shocked and fragile. How far is Grace willing to go, in order to protect her secret?