Lois Chimimba

A year ago, a father and his fiancée were brutally stabbed in their opulent London townhouse, sparking the most high-profile murder investigation in recent history. Blood spatter expert Doctor Claudia O'Sheil's evidence put the killer behind bars - or so everyone believes. Since the trial, Claudia's learned a horrific truth: her evidence and her testimony were wrong. And someone she knows made sure of it.

Now, as she takes the stage to give a career-defining speech before London's elite, Claudia faces a devastating choice. Protect her children and her livelihood with her continued complicity or blow the whole conspiracy apart and reveal the truth: not only is the real murderer still out there, they're in the audience.

As Claudia steps toward the microphone, she revisits that fateful night. What really happened? And what speech will Claudia give?

There's Amy and there's Ash. There's ice and there's fire. There's England and there's Scotland. Ali Smith evokes the twin spirits of time and place in an extraordinarily powerful first novel, which teases out the connections between people, the attractions, the ghostly repercussions. 

By turns funny, haunting and disconcertingly moving, LIKE soars across hidden borders between cultures, countries, families, friends and lovers. Subtle and complex, it confounds expectations about fiction and truths.

Individually lucid and luminous, these tales resonate subtly together. In examining the distances and connections between ourselves and others, expertly inching us closer to the bone, Ali Smith's storytelling has never seemed so necessary, so moving or so joyous.

Alone in the world, Elspeth Swansome has taken the position of nanny to a family on the remote Scottish island of Skelthsea.

Her charge, Mary, is a strange child. Distracted and secretive, she hasn't uttered a word since the sudden death of her twin, William - just days after their former nanny disappeared.

With her charge defiantly silent, Elspeth turns to the islanders. But no one will speak of what happened to William.

Just as no one can explain the hypnotic lullabies sung in empty corridors.

Nor the strange dolls that appear in abandoned rooms.

Nor the faint whistling that comes in the night . . .

As winter draws in and passage to the mainland becomes impossible, Elspeth finds herself trapped.

But is this house haunted by the ghosts of the past?

OR THE SECRETS OF THE LIVING..?