Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Stanley Middleton

'He had in some sense, prepared the trap and fallen into it. He shuddered inside his newly dead universe. ' As a young boy, Frank Stapleton stumbles upon an unanswerable question about life and its meaning, and is devastated at the outcome. Now, half a century later and in retirement after a successful professional career, Frank has to face his doubts again through the problems of his family, colleagues and friends; in particular his son Stuart and his wife Francesca, who despite giving the appearance of a successful modern couple are about to part. It takes an unexpected potential tragedy to bring the story to its climatic resolution, and to an answer to the question posed to Frank all those years before.

Brief Hours

John Taylor, an accountant, has been deserted by his wife, Stella, after three years of marriage. He struggles to make sense of his life. At a concert he meets his old music master, Michael Alexander, whose son Sebastian, an international cello virtuoso, is the evening's soloist. Stella soon returns to her husband's house, asking if he will take her back. Taylor, who is having an affair with his secretary, is much perplexed. The Taylors and the Alexanders, Michael, Sebastian and his opera-singer wife, meet, talk, and are gradually altered by the meetings. Slowly the estrangled Taylors come together, and the two families change to reach a compromise which is seen as love.

Catalysts

Julian Fane

A chance encounter with an old schoolfriend confronting a devastating disease leads Colin Turnbull to reassess his life. Everything had seemed in place: academic brilliance, marriage to his boss's daughter and a formidable career. But, as Colin discovers, these apparent certainties can swiftly evaporate.

Small Change

John Riley is in his early-thirties and has been separated from his wife, Helen, for two years. Deeply involved with his work as an accountant he has given little thought to saving his marriage until his mother announces that Helen wishes to see him. 
John's mother and father are also separated - his father has been confined to a nursing home due to the onset of Alzheimers - and as John and Helen work out their past differences his parents' relationship deteriorates. 
Stanley Middleton brilliantly explores the complexities of marriage and family relationships across the generations.

Mother's Boy

Robert Harris

'A writer who handles suspense like a literary Alfred Hitchcock' Nelson Mandela 
 
April, 1964. The naked body of an old man floats in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. In one week it will be Adolf Hitler's 75th birthday. A terrible conspiracy is starting to unravel . . . 
 
'Robert Harris has created the whole structure of a totally corrupt society in a way that makes the flesh creep' Sunday Times 
'Powerful and chilling . . . convincing in every detail' Daily Telegraph 
'Clever and ingenious . . . its breeding is by Orwell, out of P.D. James, a detective story inside a future shock' Daily Mail

Fatherland

Helen Dunmore

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Girl, Balancing &amp; Other Stories, by Helen Dunmore, read by Emilia Fox, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and Juliet Stevenson. 
 
Haunting, uplifting, beautiful: the final work from Helen Dunmore 
 
Helen Dunmore passed away in June 2017, leaving behind this remarkable collection of short stories. With her trademark imagination and gift for making history human, she explores the fragile ties between passion, love, family, friendship and grief, often through people facing turning points in their lives: 
 
A girl alone, stretching her meagre budget to feed herself, becomes aware that the young man who has come to see her may not be as friendly as he seems. 
 
Two women from very different backgrounds enjoy an unusual night out, finding solace in laughter and an unexpected friendship. 
 
A young man picks up his infant son and goes outside into a starlit night as he makes a decision that will inform the rest of his life. 
 
A woman imprisoned for her religion examines her faith in a seemingly literal and quietly original way. 
 
 This brilliant collection of Helen Dunmore’s short fiction, replete with her penetrating insight into the human condition, is certain to delight and move all her listeners.

Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

Noel's sister, Ethel, is dying, and for the first time since childhood, he spends a week in her company. As she drifts in and out of consciousness, he discovers more about her past, her fight for women's rights in education, and in the process reasses his own life. 
 
 Buried in this past is a secret infatuation for a man who reappears in Ethel's story, and that of her daughter, in a most unexpected way.

A Place to Stand

From the Booker-prize winning author

Richard Powers

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019 
 SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 
 THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
 A wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe 
 
 An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. 
 
 This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe. 
 
 ‘Really, just one of the best novels, period’ Ann Patchett 
 
 ‘The best book I’ve read in ten years’ Emma Thompson 
 
 ‘Dazzlingly written’ Robert Macfarlane 
 
© Richard Powers 2018 (P) Penguin Audio 2018

The Overstory

Wendy Walker

Meet: Gayle Beck, the matriarch of Hunting Ridge society, who struggles to reconcile her picture-perfect life with a numbing sense of unfulfilment; Love Welsh, adoring mother, who battles with memories of a childhood lived in the shadow of a genius father; Marie Passeti, over-stretched divorce lawyer and mother, who has lost her passion for life and for her husband; and Janie Kirk, yummy mummy, whose quest for acceptance knows no bounds. 
 
In a world where happiness comes second to appearances, their domestic discontent spirals into an irreversible course of risk-taking, secrecy and self-destruction. For these four wives perfection is just a façade and behind closed doors infidelity, self-doubt and deceit run rife.

Four Wives

In these words, the extraordinary, ordinary world of Stanley Middleton is delicately conjured: a finite world of infinite possibilities, the pattern there subliminally for his characters, but just out of reach. When Henry Shelton, a widower who teachers Latin part-time at a Midlands college, receives a letter from the forceful daughter of a woman with whom he had an affair as a schoolboy, the contact is not as it first seems, and he has cautiously to adjust to this and to his own lover's emotional vulnerability. The three of them inhabit a world which is nowhere near as stable as it first seems, although the chance of happiness is there, in a glimpse, for all of them. The path they tread toward the sea is charted by Stanley Middleton with all the skill of a master novelist.

Toward the Sea

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 
 
THE BRAND NEW NOVEL FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING, BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE OVERSTORY 
 
'It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it. . . . It changed how I see things and that's always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.' Barack Obama on The Overstory 
'Really, just one of the best novels, period.' Ann Patchett on The Overstory 
'Breathtaking.' Barbara Kingsolver on The Overstory 
_________________________ 
Picked as one of the 'Best Books of 2021' in the Sunday Times 
 
Theo Byrne is a promising young astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son Robin is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals, and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. He is also on the verge of being expelled from third grade, for smashing his friend's face with a metal thermos. 
 
What can a father do, when the only solution offered to his rare and troubled boy is to put him on psychoactive drugs? What can he say when his boy comes to him wanting an explanation for a world that is clearly in love with its own destruction? The only thing for it is to take the boy to other planets, while all the while fostering his son's desperate campaign to help save this one. 
_________________________ 
'The best book I've read in 10 years. A remarkable piece of literature ... a lodestone.' Emma Thompson on The Overstory 
 
'Radical and exciting.' Jessie Burton on The Overstory 
 
'A remarkable piece of fiction.' New York Times on The Overstory 
 
'An extraordinary novel.' Guardian on The Overstory

Bewilderment

'WITH NEARLY FORTY NOVELS UNDER HIS BELT, STANLEY MIDDLETON IS A SPECIES OF ALAN AYCKBOURN. . . HE DEALS WITH THE MARRIED MIDDLE CLASS. . AND FINDS POIGNANT TRUTHS AMID THEIR PREOCCUPATIONS. ' TIME OUT Sam Martin feels himself to be lucky. He lives in rich retirement and in good health despite his old age, busying himself with painting, walking and with the affairs of others he observes from his Norfolk bungalow. Confronted by a necessary and approaching end, the strong purpose of his earlier life seems to have diminished; but there are still surprises to be had, especially in a constricted life, as Sam, and those around him soon discover.

Necessary Ends

When Tim Hughes joins his precocious schoolfriend Julian in a holiday job sorting out the library of an elderly neighbour, Harald Meades, he doesn't comprehend the emotions, both adult and adolescent, with which he is about to tangle. Harald's mathematician son and his wife are planning to part, and the arrival of their daughter Harriet soon transforms the thoughts and feelings of both boys and puts each to a different test - while the life of their parents and of Meades himself are also changed radically. In his fortieth book, a tragi-comedy of three generations, Stanley Middleton triumphantly proves that he has lost none of the sureness of feeling for his characters, the sense of place or the psychological insights which are so much a part of his earlier novels.

Love in the Provinces

John Worth is an artist - not a Bohemian, but a stubborn and self-disciplined man. Friends and colleagues try to influence his work - his mistress wants him to introduce more political themes and his dealer urges him towards fugurative painting. But Worth, though tempted, resists all manipulation. The development must come from within himself; and through his painting Christ's Entry Into Jerusalem, he reveals an image of startling, shocking individuality. 
 
'Entry into Jerusalem is one of the best. Middleton has never written more economically or more pungently. He is a master of characterisation through dialogue adn of a succinct presentation of a complex relationship.' Sunday Telegraph 
 
'It makes me burst into superlatives.' Mail on Sunday

Entry into Jerusalem

'In a town like Beechnall there are all sorts of rivalries, enmities and feuds.' And many of them soon swirl around the amateur dramatic society's festival production of Twelfth Night, which is under a cloud after politics result in the departure of the established director. 
 
Extra-marital affairs, encroaching violence and emotional turmoil threaten what seems like a placid, middle-class Midlands town, and soon Alicia Smallwood, Middleton's heroine, is confronted with serious choices. 
 
Once again Stanley Middleton weaves a strong web of intrigue around ordinary provincial life - which turns out, as the plot unfolds, not to be so ordinary after all.

Her Three Wise Men

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