Natalie Simpson

Abigail Wendover has no time for love. She is far too busy protecting her niece, who has fallen madly in love with a suspected fortune-hunter. But her efforts become vastly more complicated with the arrival of Miles Calverleigh, the black sheep of his family - a reckless bachelor with a scandalous past. Abby soon discovers that, despite successfully managing her niece's love life, she has far less control over her own unruly heart.

Here we are in extraordinary times.
Is this history?

What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other?
What have we lost?
What stays with us?
What does it take to unlock our future?

Following her astonishing quartet of Seasonal novels, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its forms.

After fifty years in London, Alice wants to live out her days in the land of her birth. Her three children are divided on whether she stays or goes.** 'Alice was thinking about her own next world and her own castle, which was not in Kingsbury or in Kilburn. It was far away from here, out in the fields near the edge of Benin City, a little house, long in the dreaming, which her relatives had been building for her for when it was time to go home . . .' In the wake of their father's death, the imagined stability of the family begins to buckle.

Meanwhile youngest daughter Melissa is forging a new life but has never let go of a love she lost. Michael too remains haunted by the failed perfection of their past, even within the sturdy walls of his marriage to the sparkling Nicole. As Alice's final decision draws closer, all that is hidden between Melissa and her sisters, Michael and Nicole, rises to the surface . . . Set against the shadows of Grenfell and a country in turmoil, Diana Evans's ordinary people confront fundamental questions. How should we raise our children? How to do right by our parents? And how, in the midst of everything, can we satisfy ourselves?

See me, see trouble

Ronke, Simi, Boo are three mixed-race friends living in London. They have the gift of two cultures, Nigerian and English, though they don't all choose to see it that way.

Everyday racism has never held them back, but now in their thirties, they question their future. Ronke wants a husband (he must be Nigerian); Boo enjoys (correction: endures) stay-at-home motherhood; while Simi, full of fashion career dreams, rolls her eyes as her boss refers to her 'urban vibe' yet again.

When Isobel, a lethally glamorous friend from their past arrives in town, she is determined to fix their futures for them.

Cracks in their friendship begin to appear, and it is soon obvious Isobel is not sorting but wrecking. When she is driven to a terrible act, the women are forced to reckon with a crime in their past that may just have repeated itself.

Ranging from the age of slavery to contemporary injustices, this groundbreaking history of race, gender and class inequality by the radical political activist Angela Davis offers an alternative view of female struggles for liberation. Tracing the intertwined histories of the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, Davis examines the racism and class prejudice inherent in so much of white feminism, and in doing so brings to light new pioneering heroines, from field slaves to mill workers, who fought back and refused to accept the lives into which they were born.