Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

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Nagi Shimeno

After a long and happy life with a loving human family, tabby cat Fuuta has passed into the afterlife. But he is not as far from his owner Michiru as it seems. Sometimes the divide between the lands of the living and the dead can be traversed. 
 
Eager to see Michiru again, Fuuta interviews for a position at Café Pont, which sits in the liminal space between the two worlds. The café is known for its unique service: its living customers can request meetings with the person they'd most like to see again, through the specially selected spirits of messenger cats. 
 
Fuuta must investigate and deliver his messages without unnerving the living, or worse, upsetting the balance of the universe itself. It is a weighty task for a tabby cat, but Fuuta rises to the challenge. After all, the job offers a special reward: he will get to see Michiru again. And he'll do anything to reunite with his family.

Messenger Cat Café

Karl Ove Knausgaard

The haunting new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of A Death in the Family. 
 
The year is 1976. Syvert is on his way back to his wife and two sons after a work trip, when his car breaks down outside Arendal and he has to spend the night in the city. It is winter and bitterly cold, and ice lies all the way to the sea, so thick that cars can drive on it. There, almost home, but caught up in memories of his doomed love affair with Asya, a space opens up between the known and the unknown for Syvert. Both in the city, as he wanders along the streets in the dark, and in him. 
 
Arendal is a novel about impossible love and about impossible life. About ships of the dead, about fire and ice, dizzying starry skies and a man trying to find his foothold in the world. 
 
 
PRAISE FOR KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD: 
 
‘Absorbs you utterly’ Sunday Times 
‘One of the most genuinely suspenseful, alluring books I’ve ever read’ Brandon Taylor 
‘Addictive’ Daily Telegraph 
‘Brilliant storytelling . . . Epic’ Independent 
‘As accessible and creepy as anything by Stephen King and as addictive as your favourite TV drama’ Spectator 
‘Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive’ New York Times 
 
 
Arendal is set in the Morning Star universe.

Arendal

Ela Lee

The night the baby without a surname was born, the army rolled into his mother’s town 
 
Incheon, South Korea, 1985. The country is revolting against a dictatorship, but in the local boarding-house, the chaos inside is only just beginning. When Hana is pulled from school to work in her family’s minbak, all she wants is to escape her small town. When she finally does, she leaves as an exile, a ruin, or a martyr, depending on who you ask. Her mother Youngia is left behind with the torment of both of their decisions. 
 
London, 2008. Ada knows little about her mother, Hana. When tragedy hits, Hana has no choice but to move her daughter and ailing mother into a single room and turn the rest of their home into a minbak. As the past collides with the present, Ada is determined to unearth her mother’s secrets. But her obsession will lead to a discovery that unravels not just her family’s dark past, but that of an entire country’s. 
 
From Korea’s industrial estates to London’s suburbs, the three women cross continents and generations to find truth, forgiveness and compassion. 
 
‘Had me utterly engrossed. An incredible story of love, conflict and heartbreak.’ Rosie Price 
 
‘Lyrical and devastating MINBAK is a flawless meditation on memory, love and misunderstanding.’ Ella King 
 
‘A poignant and precise novel by a writer of great skill.’ Nicola Dinan

Minbak

Janet Tay

Every morning before sunrise, Lim Ah Hock opens the shutters of his small kitchen on Carpenter Street, lights an incense stick and prepares the best laksa soup in all of Kuching. According to Lim family legend, the laksa’s secret ingredient – their ancestral broth – was gifted to them by a deity, who promised the family prosperity as long as the broth is passed down through the generations. 
 
But Ah Hock is aging, and the broth’s quality is fading. His only son, Wei Ming, has no interest in the family business, having spent eight years in Hong Kong trying to prove himself as a chef. Now, he's struggling with gambling debts, embroiled in a love triangle, and the restaurant he's been left to run has lost its Global Restaurants Guild star. 
 
Invited home to Malaysia for his father's 60th birthday, Wei Ming sees a chance to escape his troubles. But when old conflicts resurface and a local businessman threatens to destroy the family legacy, father and son are forced to ask themselves what truly matters.

Early Mornings at the Laksa Cafe

Elin Anna Labba

Every summer, Ingá, her mother Rávdná, and her Aunt Ánne travel west to their village on the lake. But the summer Ingá is thirteen, they arrive to find their home and possessions have disappeared under water, the land flooded by a dam built to supply hydropower to a society that has continually stolen from them. 
 
The Home of the Drowned follows these women’s fortunes over forty years – from 1942 to 1982 – as the water their people have lived near for centuries is transformed into a menacing force that threatens all they hold dear. Defying the authorities, Rávdná decides to build a house on the lake to replace what was lost, becoming an unlikely activist. Meanwhile, Ánne’s health is in decline, and a concerned Ingá merely longs to live like everyone else – an impossible wish when the Swedish state is relentlessly drowning her world. 
 
Drawing on her own family’s history of forced relocation and violent colonial dispossession, Elin Anna Labba’s debut novel brings Sámi history to the fore. The Home of the Drowned reveals connections between land, water and people that hauntingly reverberate with the question: what is it that makes a home?

The Home of the Drowned

Out of the World is Karl Ove Knausgaard's award-winning debut novel. 
 
 26-year-old Henrik Vankel works as a teacher in northern Norway. At the school, he becomes infatuated with Miriam. But she is a student in his class. 
 
 Out of the World was the first ever debut novel to win the prestigious Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature.

Out of the World

'[An] almost dangerously immersive reading experience that will completely take over your life. . . by turns bleak, funny and horrifying, but never less than utterly captivating' Martin MacInnes, Booker longlisted author of IN ASCENSIONLondon. 1985. A city rife with possibility and desire. One young man who wants it all. 
 
Kristian Hadeland, newly arrived in the city, seethes with ambition and contempt. His family in Norway never understood him; his fellow photography students bore him. But he knows he and his art are destined for more. 
 
Then he meets Hans, an eccentric Dutch artist. With Hans, the future Kristian yearns for is tangible. All art is possible. Any line can be crossed. 
 
But success comes at a price. And when Kristian does the unthinkable, will he be prepared to pay it? 
 
Electrifying and unflinching, The School of Night is a singular novel about artistic creation and human corruption. It is the story of one terrible man's rise and fall, and a reckoning with the darkest parts of human nature. 
 
PRAISE FOR KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD: 
 
‘Absorbs you utterly’ Sunday Times 
‘One of the most genuinely suspenseful, alluring books I’ve ever read’ Brandon Taylor 
‘Addictive’ Daily Telegraph 
‘Brilliant storytelling . . . Epic’ Independent 
‘As accessible and creepy as anything by Stephen King and as addictive as your favourite TV drama’ Spectator 
‘Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive’’ New York Times 
 
 
 
The School of Night is set in the Morning Star universe.

The School of Night

Édouard Louis

Édouard’s brother spends much of his life dreaming. He lives in a poor, working-class world, where he imagines that he will become one of the finest butchers in France, that he will travel, that he will make his fortune, that he will restore cathedrals, that he will earn his father’s love. 
 
But his reality allows none of this. There is no way to escape, no one who can show him how, and everything about him – his drinking, his violence, his behaviour with women and with others – condemns him. 
 
At thirty-eight he is found dead on the floor of his small studio apartment. This book is the story of his collapse.

Collapse

Haruki Murakami

‘What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real.’ A lavishly illustrated edition of Murakami’s classic story. 
 
Katagiri found a giant frog waiting for him in his apartment. It was powerfully built, standing over six feet tall on its hind legs. A skinny little man no more than five foot three, Katagiri was overwhelmed by the frog's imposing bulk. 
‘Call me “Frog,”’ said the frog in a clear, strong voice. 
Katagiri stood rooted in the doorway, unable to speak. 
‘Don't be afraid. I'm not here to hurt you. Just come and close the door. Please.’ 
Briefcase in his right hand, grocery bag with fresh vegetables and canned salmon cradled in his left arm, Katagiri didn't dare move. 
‘Please, Mr. Katagiri, hurry and close the door, and take off your shoes.’ 
 
Fully illustrated and beautifully designed, this special edition of Murakami’s celebrated short story sees the bewildered Katagiri find meaning in his humdrum life through joining forces with Frog in an effort to save Tokyo from an existential threat. 
 
‘No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades’ Financial Times 
 
‘A master storyteller’ Sunday Times

Super-Frog Saves Tokyo

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