All Maya Galen wanted was a happy family, stifling the inner urges she had to explore the wider world, for the sake of being there for her children. But parenting with her husband, Con, wasn’t always easy. Their eldest...

Brilliant and illuminating, this astonishing debut novel by the award-winning writer Yiyun Li is set in China in the late 1970s, when Beijing was rocked by the Democratic Wall Movement, an anti-Communist groundswell designed to move China beyond the...

Dahlia Delaney’s marriage just imploded, her friend group picked a side (not hers), and her fancy San Francisco life now fits into a single suitcase. Armed with a broken heart, a freelance marketing gig, and one blurry childhood memory...

In 1914, Sir Anthony Valentine builds a chalet high up in the French Alps and every summer les rosbifs arrive, to the benefit of the curious locals who work for them. For Mathilde, one of the domestic ‘uglies’ chosen...

Shetland: a place of sheep and soil, of harsh weather, close ties and an age-old way of life. A place where David has lived all his life, like his father and grandfather before him, but where he abides only...

September 1939. When Jimmy is evacuated to a small village in Wales, it couldn’t be more different from London. Green, quiet and full of strangers, he instantly feels out of place. But then he finds a skull hidden in...

‘Valley of the Squinting Windows’ is a classic Irish novel set in central Ireland c. 1914-16. Garradrimna is a tiny village where everyone is interested in everyone else’s business and wishes them to fail. Twenty years before the events...

Growing up in near-poverty and denied a formal education, Freya Stark had nurtured a fascination for the Middle East since reading Arabian Nights as a child. But it wasn’t until she was in her thirties that she was able...

Youssef Tigha lives in a makeshift camp in the centre of Paris. He’s twelve years old. An Arab. Michael Finistere is a financier with several homes. Chance, or fate, brings the migrant and the multi-millionaire together. For one of...

Horror historians Gary D. Rhodes and John Edgar Browning present a long lost slice of American literature: The Vampire is a detective dime novel that predates both Dracula and the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, and it’s sure to...