Ajay Chowdhury, the inaugural winner of the Harvill Secker-Bloody Scotland prize, is a tech entrepreneur and theatre director. His children’s book – Ayesha and the Firefish, was published in 2016 and adapted into a musical which premiered in San Francisco. 
 
 
The Waiter (Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month), was published in 2021, and is the first in his critically-acclaimed crime series about Detective Kamil Rahman, an ex-policeman from Kolkata who has moved to Brick Lane in London. It is being adapted for television by Moonage Pictures.The Cook (Guardian Top Crime Books of the Year) was published in May 2022 to excellent reviews and deals with the issue of homelessness. The third book in the series – The Detective (Sunday Times Top Crime Books of the Year) – is about government surveillance and AI. The Spy (Longlisted Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing), the fourth book, sees Kamil infiltrate a terrorist cell. The Shadow (A Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month) is the latest book in the series.

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Meera Sodha

FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF EAST, MADE IN INDIA AND FRESH INDIA 
 
‘The ability to put a good dinner on the table has become my superpower and I want it to be yours too.' 
 
Dinner is a fresh and joyful celebration of the power of a good meal all created to answer the question: What's for dinner? in an exciting and delicious way. 
 
Discover 120 vibrant, easy-to-make vegetarian and vegan main dishes bursting with flavour, including baked butter paneer, kimchi and tomato spaghetti, and aubergines roasted in satay sauce. There are also mouthwatering desserts, such as coconut and cardamom dream cake and bubble tea ice cream, and exciting side dishes, such as salt and vinegar potato salad and asparagus and cashew thoran. 
 
From quick-cook recipes to one-pan wonders and delectable dishes you can just bung in the oven and leave to look after themselves, Dinner is the essential companion for the most important meal of the day.

Dinner

120 vegan and vegetarian recipes for the most important meal of the day

The best Indian food is cooked (and eaten) at home. 
 
Real Indian food is fresh, simple and packed with flavour. In this book, Meera Sodha introduces Britain to the food she grew up eating here every day. Unlike the stuff you get at your local curry house, her food is fresh, vibrant and surprisingly quick and easy to make. 
 
In this collection, Meera serves up a feast of over 130 delicious recipes collected from three generations of her family: there's everything from hot chappatis to street food, fragrant curries, to colourful side dishes, and mouth-watering puddings. Made in India will change the way you cook, eat, and think about Indian food, forever.

Made in India

130 Simple, Fresh and Flavourful Recipes from One Indian Family

India Knight

This is partly a book about a feeling. We all know it, regardless of where we live. Home is when you open the front door and exhale. 
 
In this joyous, practical, wise and entertaining book, inspired by her phenomenally popular Substack newsletter, India Knight explores and celebrates the essence of what makes a home. 
 
Whether it is grand or modest, urban or rural, rented or owned, shared or occupied solo, her mission is to make you sigh with contentment the moment you’re through your front door. 
 
From understanding the best lightbulbs and the most flattering paint colours, or knowing what to make when you’ve asked people to dinner and have forgotten (or maybe never learned) how to cook, Home debunks intimidating ideas about ‘taste’ and celebrates the timeless importance of charm. 
 
Inspiring you to think imaginatively about how to use the things you’ve already got, advising you on what to look out for when buying a sofa, and opening your eyes to the transformative power of a well-chosen picture frame, India will steer you far, far away from trends and Instagram and helps you find, trust – and take pride in – what you like. 
 
Going from the hallway to the bedroom, via the bathroom, the kitchen, the sitting room and all the spaces in between, India shares everything she knows about how to create and find joy in every room. Along the way she shares life lessons, tips and stories of the things and people that have shaped her, and the places she has called home. 
 
So, step over the threshold and come on in.

Home

With over 500 million non-meat eaters, India is the best place for vegetarian food on this earth and previous cookbooks have barely scratched the surface. All the food in Fresh India is fresh, quick to cook and flavour-packed, with ingredients available from your local supermarket. Recipes include sweet potato kebabs, pomegranate and onion seed parathas, beetroot pachadi, cashew and lemon rice, fresh coconut chutney and so much more. People know they ought to be eating more vegetables, and love Indian food, but have historically been a bit scared of cooking both. This book shows how easy and exciting vegetarian Indian food can be.

Fresh India

130 Quick, Easy and Delicious Vegetarian Recipes for Every Day

With beauty, as with so much else, knowledge is power. 
Here's all of mine. 
 
Why has my favourite eyeliner stopped looking flattering? 
What can I do about the skin on my neck? 
Am I too old for contour? What is contour? 
 
Every week, tens of thousands of women turn to India Knight's beauty column in the Sunday Times Style Magazine, to be directed to beauty products that really work by someone they can trust - and who understands how much this stuff matters. 
 
It matters because looking, and therefore feeling, like yourself at every stage of life is fundamental. 
 
In this brilliant, essential, reassuring book, India has distilled her beauty wisdom into practical advice for every part of the face and beyond: from tips for thinning lips and thinning hair, to the best skincare for older faces, to the make-up products that really make a difference, to demystifying the scientific jargon beloved by the beauty industry. 
 
If you would rather not use 35 products on your face every morning or watch how-to videos on TikTok, or if you have ever looked in the mirror and found yourself thinking 'Who is that?', then India Knight's Beauty Edit is the book you've been waiting for. 
 
It is a glorious and indispensable celebration of how to be old(er) with minimum fuss and a generous helping of grace, confidence and style.

India Knight's Beauty Edit

Modern, vibrant, fuss-free food made from British ingredients but with an Eastern slant, East is a must-have whether you're vegan, vegetarian, or simply want to eat more delicious meat-free food. 
 
Drawing from her 'New Vegan' Guardian column, Meera Sodha's stunning new collection also features plenty of brand-new recipes inspired by a wide range of Asian cuisines. There are noodles, curries, rice dishes, tofu, salads, sides and sweets, all surprisingly easy to make and bursting with exciting flavours. Taking you from India to Indonesia, Singapore to Japan, by way of China, Thailand, and Vietnam, East will show you how to whip up a chard potato and coconut curry and a swede laksa; how to make Kimchi pancakes, delicious dairy free black dal, and chilli tofu. There are sweet potato momos for snacks and unexpected desserts like salted miso brownies and a no-churn Vietnamese coffee ice-cream.

East

120 Easy and Delicious Asian-inspired Vegetarian and Vegan recipes

Cassandra Neyenesch

I had tried to be a good person and live a nice, normal life. It wasn’t working out. Why was I such a no-but-er? I would be a yes-ander!... And after that moment, I didn’t give another little f*ck what I did. 
 
Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbour's anarcho-Marxist roofer, is a crisis. Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she’s pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he’s fifteen years younger, she’s terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret. Now it's three years later and Nando has been murdered. 
 
As her bewildered husband tries to make sense of the wildly unpredictable person his wife has become, Perdita has other things on her mind. For starters, who is the mysterious woman sitting outside her house in a parked car all day? How can she stop her adored baby brother from being pulled under by his opioid addiction? Can someone with a childhood like theirs ever be the mother her children deserve? 
 
And most of all, what should she do with the searing memories of the affair which turned her life upside down?

A Little Bit Bad

Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford's first novel, a set of completely incompatible and hilariously eccentric characters collide in a Scottish castle, where bright young things play pranks on their stodgy elders until the frothy plot climaxes in ghost sightings and a dramatic fire. 
 
Inspired in part by Mitford's youthful infatuation with a Scottish aristocrat, her story follows young Jane Dacre to a shooting party at Dulloch Castle, where she tramps around a damp and chilly moor on a hunting expedition with formidable Lady Prague, xenophobic General Murgatroyd, one-eyed Admiral Wenceslaus, and an assortment of other ancient and gouty peers of the realm, while falling in love with Albert, a surrealist painter with a mischievous sense of humour. 
Light-hearted and sparkling with witty banter, Highland Fling was Mitford's first foray into the delightful fictional world for which the author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate later became so celebrated. 
 
'A delightful comedy of manners' - The Times

Highland Fling

Claire Fuller

1987: After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care system, sixteen-year-old Ursula finds herself with a new job in the postroom of a local art school, a bed in a halfway house, and—delightfully— some new friends, including wild-child, Sue. When Ursula is invited to join a squat at The Underwood, a mysterious house whose owners met a terrible end, she can’t resist the promise of a readymade, hodgepodge family. 
 
But as Sue’s behaviour and demands become more extreme, Ursula who has always been hungry—for food—and more importantly for love, acceptance and belonging, carries out her friend’s terrible dare. It's a decision that will haunt her for decades. 
 
Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned, reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym in London when her identity is exposed by true-crime documentary-maker who is digging into an unsolved disappearance. But it is not only the filmmaker who has discovered Ursula’s whereabouts, and as her past catches up with her present, Ursula must work out whether the monsters are within her or without. 
 
From critically acclaimed and award-winning author, Claire Fuller, Hunger and Thirst is a compelling and chilling tale of loneliness and female friendship, of the dangerous line between wanting and needing, and of how far a person will go to truly belong.

Hunger and Thirst

Gabriel Tallent

Dan and Tamma are two Californian teenagers growing up dirt poor in the shadows of the Joshua Tree National Park, one of the world’s great rock climbing meccas. Their mothers had once been teenage waitresses and best friends until their paths diverged. Now Dan’s mother spends her days locked in her room, her dreams squandered and all her hopes pinned on getting her precociously clever son out of town and away to university. 
 
Tamma’s mother holds no such ambition for her mouthy, queer, truant-playing, snaggle-toothed daughter, who everyone but Dan believes to be a troublemaker and no-hoper. But Tamma and Dan are fuelled by dreams of becoming legendary rock climbers, of devoting their lives to summiting the most challenging climbs and defying all the expectations, both good and bad, that others have for them. 
 
Climbing at sun-up, on cliff faces that test their bodies to the limit, is where their friendship is forged. It’s also the one thing that gives them hope. But as their final year of high school unfolds and their climbs become ever more dangerous, and their home lives ever more extreme, it’s inevitable that something is going to snap...

Crux

Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance. 
 
But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly cruel and unyielding world as their mother's secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake. This is a powerful novel of betrayal and resilience, love and survival. It is a portrait of life on the fringes of society that explores with dazzling emotional power how we can build our lives on broken foundations, and spin light from darkness.

Unsettled Ground

Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2021

Anna Hope

The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home – twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone – to bury Philip: husband, father and the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember. 
 
Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn. Each believes their father has given them his blessing, setting them on a collision course with each other. 
 
Isa has long suspected that her father thought only of himself, and hopes to seek out her childhood love, who still lives on the estate, to discover whether it is her feelings for him that are creating the fault lines in her marriage. 
 
And then there is Clara, who arrives in their midst from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.

Albion

Joanna Miller

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight. They have come here from all walks of life, and they are thrown into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship. 
 
Dora was never meant to go to university, but, after losing both her brother and her fiancé on the battlefield, has arrived in their place. Beatrice, politically-minded daughter of a famous suffragette, sees Oxford as a chance to make her own way – and her own friends – for the first time. Socialite Otto fills her room with extravagant luxuries but fears they won’t be enough to distract her from her memories of the war years. And quiet, clever, Marianne, the daughter of a village vicar, arrives bearing a secret she must hide from everyone – even The Eights – if she is to succeed. 
 
But Oxford’s dreaming spires cast a dark shadow: in 1920, misogyny is still rife, influenza is still a threat, and the ghosts of the Great War are still very real indeed. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time, their friendship will become more important than ever.

The Eights

Rupert Dastur

It is autumn 2004 and in a farmhouse on the hills outside Llandudno, a family endures the agonizing wait for their son to return from Iraq. His decision to join up has left them reeling, yet there are other pressing concerns to be met at home: the working of the farmland that has been theirs for generations and what to do with their troubled younger son. 
 
Catrin’s childhood sweetheart comes back to their small town, giving the boys’ doting mother a glimpse into the life she could have had. And John, their father, falls once more into his gambling habit, even as the farm sits on the brink of bankruptcy. 
 
As each member of the family grasps at their own tenuous lifeline, they drift further from one another – until, on a cold winter evening, there is a fateful knock at the door. 
 
Written in luminous, exquisitely calibrated prose, Cloudless is a masterful portrayal of the fragility and resilience of human connection.

Cloudless

Susanna Crossman

In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years. 
 
While the Adults adopted new names and liberated themselves from domestic roles, the Kids ran free. In the community, nobody was too young to discuss nuclear war and children learned not to expect wiped noses or regular bedtimes. Instead, they made a home in a house with no locks or keys, never knowing when they opened doors whether they’d find violent political debates or couples writhing under sheets. 
 
Decades later, and armed with hindsight, Crossman asks what happens to children who are raised as the product of social experiments. Revisiting her past, she turns to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and anthropology to examine the society she grew up in, and the many meanings of family and home.

Home Is Where We Start

Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream

Kathryn Stockett

“You give a girl a taste of fresh air and then you take it away—she’ll grow fierce and wild to get it back.” 
 
Oxford, Mississippi, 1933. 
 
Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. 
 
Ever since her beloved mother failed to come home last Christmas Eve, she’s been one of the “unadoptable” big girls at the town’s orphanage where she fights each day to keep her wits sharp and her spirit unbowed. 
 
When she meets Birdie, a young woman set on confronting the socialite sister who believes she’s left her impoverished family behind, for the first time in a long while it seems someone else might care about Meg’s future. 
 
But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie discovers her sister’s charmed life is balanced precariously upon a tapestry of lies. Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman haunted by loss who has been pushed to the brink with nothing left to lose. 
 
Drawn together by circumstance, they find unexpected kinship among a disreputable, determined band of women. But in a town steeped in hypocrisy, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences… 
 
Bold, heartwarming, and riotously funny, The Calamity Club is an unforgettable story of resilience and friendship, and a sisterhood of underestimated women who risk everything to take back control of their fates.

The Calamity Club

Chloë Ashby

Since they first met at university twenty years ago, Maggie and Will have spent the last two weeks of every summer in France with their close friends, Lydia and Roland. Both families always look forward to this annual ritual – but this summer things are different. 
 
Will has been hiding something from his wife, and is struggling to keep his deceit from seeping into the cracks in their marriage. Maggie is worried about their withdrawn teenage son. Roland is grappling with how to grieve the death of his first wife. Lydia is trying to ignore past chemistry with an old friend while learning to play second fiddle to a ghost. 
 
Into this already conflicted fray steps Issy, Roland’s beguiling, irrepressible daughter from his first marriage. And as the August heat beats down, and the children behave in unexpected ways, the two couples find that tensions they have been trying their best to temper have begun to bubble over… 
 
Family Friends is a deeply atmospheric, sophisticated and compelling novel about what happens when the ties of love and loyalty are stretched to the breaking point, how relationships change (and don’t change) over time, and how we navigate the challenges thrown at us in every season of life.

Family Friends

Rosanna Pike

Born a vagabond, Tibb Ingleby has never had a roof of her own. Her mother has taught her that if you’re not too bound by the Big Man’s rules, there are many ways a woman can find shelter in this world. But now her ma is gone. 
 
As she journeys through the fields and forests of medieval England, Tibb discovers that there are people who will care for her, as well as those who mean her harm. And there are a great many others who are prepared to believe just about anything… 
 
So, when the opportunity presents itself to escape the shackles society has placed on them, Tibb and her new friends conjure an audacious plan: her greatest trickerie yet. But before they know it, their hoax takes on a life of its own, drawing crowds - and vengeful enemies - to their door.

A Little Trickerie

Leila Mottley

When Adela Woods tells her parents she’s pregnant, they immediately send her a thousand miles away to stay with her grandmother in Padua Beach. The intention is that she will leave her baby in 'the forgotten Panhandle of Florida'. and resume her suburban life nine months later as though nothing happened. But Adela’s plans are soon washed away by the tide. 
 
First, Adela meets Emory, a new mother determined to defy the expectations of everyone around her, returning to high school with her newborn baby strapped to her chest. Then she meets Simone, ringleader of ‘the Girls,’ a group of young mothers who create a village together in the back of her red truck—dancing, breastfeeding, raising their children and themselves. 
 
The town thinks they’ve lost their way. Really, they are finding it. 
 
But as they look for love, make and break friendships, navigate the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood, Adela, Emory and Simone also find themselves on an inescapable collision course with one another.

The Girls Who Grew Big

Roxy Dunn

Elliot. Joe. Tommy. Nathanael. Wren. Oliver. Malik. Zach. Frank. Patrick. Noah. These are the men Margot has loved, liked, lusted over. 
 
Since she was seventeen, she's pictured them like stepping stones - each one bringing her closer to finding someone to share her life with and, eventually, father the children she's always imagined in her future. 
 
From her first sexual encounter, to her first love, from grown-up dilemmas to spontaneous thrills, she's soaked up every experience available to her, discovering friendship, joy and despair. Through all of this she's refined her search until she believes she's arrived at 'the ending' to her story. 
 
So how did she find herself here, single at thirty-four, and about to make the biggest decision of her life?

As Young as This

Set at the outbreak of World War II, Lady Sophia Garfield dreams of becoming a beautiful spy but manages not to notice a nest of German agents right under her nose. Until the murder of her maid and the kidnapping of her beloved bulldog force them on her attention, with heroic and absurd results. 
 
One of Mitford's earliest novels and written before Christmas 1939, Pigeon Pie is delivered with a touch lighter than that of her later masterpieces but no less entertaining. This comedy combines glamour, wit, and a fiendishly absurd plot into an irresistible literary confection. 
 
'This sparking and deliciously acid commentary of the social world.' - The Scotsman

Pigeon Pie

Andrev Walden

Once I had seven fathers in seven years. This is the story of those years. 
 
I’m fizzing. I love not being his son. 
Yes. I can feel it in my whole body. A great thrill – as if an adventure has begun. As if I’m the boy in a book about a boy who finds out his dad is the king of a magical and distant land. 
 
Christmas, 1983. In the aftermath of yet another furious argument, seven-year-old Andrev’s mother lets him in on a secret: his father is, in fact, not his father. And so begins a new kind of childhood, in which fathers come and go, arriving in red Volvos and sweeping his mother off her feet. Fathers can be magicians or murderers, artists or thieves, and, like growing pains, or the weather, they appear uninvited and leave without warning. Fathers are drawn to his mother like moths to a flame – but even she can’t control how they behave. 
 
Vivid and joyful, raw and tender, Bloody Awful in Different Ways is a novel about growing up in the chaos of social change; about how love begins and ends; and above all, about men. Because after all, you learn an awful lot about this strange species when you have seven fathers in seven years.

Bloody Awful in Different Ways

Fran Fabriczki

'Now, remember, Mila, we live about a five-minute drive away, your mother works at an office, and you’re not Russian, your mother just liked the sound of your name.” Mila nods vigorously—a model pupil, for now, at least.“Any follow-up questions, then what do we say?” “Mind your own business.” “That’s right.' 
 
Porcupines begins in 1989 when the world has opened up again after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Szonja Imre travels from Budapest to visit her older sister in Los Angeles. She’s an eighteen-year-old in search of adventure in the land of the free. But she is surprised to find that the sister she’s always idolised has a very different idea of what it means to live the American dream. 
 
Porcupines also begins in 2001, when Mila, Sonia’s precocious, socially awkward 10-year-old daughter, concocts a scheme, inspired by those excellent life-bibles Sleepless in Seattle and The Parent Trap, to get her mother and the man Mila is kind of sure must be her father to reconnect. 
 
The plan involves Sonia being corralled into chaperoning an orchestra of nine-year-olds (most of whom seem to be called Megan) on a road trip from LA to San Francisco, some badly spelled emails, a jar of several thousand jelly beans and a whole bunch of misassumptions. 
 
Porcupines shuttles dazzlingly between these two time lines as the fallout from Mila’s best laid plans has repercussions far beyond her imaginings, and the secrets Sonia has been holding tight to for the last decade spill out all over her carefully constructed life. 
 
This is a deliciously funny and poignant story about family and history, immigration and belonging, and what happens when walls begin to come down.

Porcupines

Grace Murray

If I ever woke up with an ungodly dread — that I could change it all now, turn around, and confess — I ignored it. I had never been good, and there was no point in trying now. 
 
On a small liberal arts campus in upstate New York, Charlotte begins her final year with a lie. Her father died over the summer, she says. Heart attack. Very sudden. 
 
Charlotte had never been close with her classmates but as she repeats her tale, their expressions soften into kindness. And so she learns there are things worth lying for: attention, affection, and, as she embarks on a relationship with fellow student Katarina, even love. All she needs to do is keep control of the threads that hold her lie – and her life – together. 
 
But six thousand miles away, alone in the grey two-up-two-down Staffordshire terrace she grew up in, her father is very much alive, watching television and drinking beer. Charlotte has always kept difficult truths at arm’s length, but his resolve to visit his distant daughter might just be the one thing she can’t control.

Blank Canvas

Marina Lewycka

After walking out on his wife to shack up with 'Brexit Brenda' next door, George Pantis thinks he's got it made - especially when he wins millions on a Kosovan lottery he barely remembers entering. Unfortunately, he can't access the money because he's forgotten his password. What is he meant to tell all the forceful people who keep appearing at his doorstep desperate to know his mother's maiden name? The situation is shadier than he thinks, and George is need of rescue. But will his dysfunctional family be able to save him, and in the process, can they save each other?

The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid

Martina Hefter

Juno Isabella Flock is a dancer and performance artist who spends her days caring for her ailing husband, and her nights chatting to love scammers online. She’s aware of the risks these men pose – she’s watched a documentary about them – but she’s also discovered a heady freedom in these online conversations, and the things they allow her to say. 
 
When Juno meets Owen_Wilson223 – or, to use his real name, Benu - she senses an immediate connection between them, even though they're separated by thousands of miles. Gradually, they reveal more and more about themselves to each other: about their real selves, and about who they really want to be. And just as Juno sees through Benu’s lies, he sees through hers too. 
Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? is a whirlwind of a novel. It’s about yearning to stay young while age marches on; it’s about how to stay truthful while the internet changes everything; it’s about love and desire in all their many, conflicting forms. And most of all, it’s a novel about the way we are all connected, by the same constellations and the same night sky, however different our circumstances.

Hey, Good Morning, How are you?

Stanley Tucci

Before Stanley Tucci became a household name with The Devil Wears Prada, The Hunger Games, and the perfect Negroni, he grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the table. Taste is an intimate reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about growing up in Westchester, NY, preparing for and filming the foodie films Big Night and Julie & Julia, falling in love over dinner, and teaming up with his wife to create conversation-starting meals for their children. Each morsel of this gastronomic journey through good times and bad, five-star meals and burnt dishes, is as heartfelt and delicious as the last. Written with Stanley's signature wry humour and nostalgia, Taste is a heartwarming read for anyone who knows the power of a home-cooked meal.

Taste

My Life Through Food

Róisín Lanigan

Renting is a nightmare. 
 
Áine should be feeling happy with her life. She’s just moved in with Elliot. Their new flat is in an affluent neighbourhood, surrounded by bakeries, yoga studios and organic vegetable shops. They even have a garden. And yet, from the moment they move in, Áine can't shake the sense that there's something not quite right about the place... 
 
It's not just the humourless estate agent and nameless landlord: it's the chill that seeps through the draughty windows; the damp spreading from the cellar door; the way the organic fruit and veg never lasts as long as it should. And most of all, it’s the upstairs neighbours, whose very presence makes peaceful coexistence very difficult indeed. 
 
The longer Áine spends inside the flat - pretending to work from home; dissecting messages from the friends whose lives seem to have moved on without her - the less it feels like home. And as Áine fixates on the cracks in the ceiling, it becomes harder to ignore the cracks in her relationship with Elliott...

I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There

Angela Tomaski

‘We shall be forgotten.’ he said. ‘We shall be lost. They will scrub us away like a set of dirty fingerprints on a plastic kettle.’ 
 
The crumbling Gothic mansion of Thornwalk, long-term home of the Gilbert family, is being handed over to a chain of luxury ‘historic’ hotels. Millions will be spent in its restoration. But for every ‘improvement’, what will be lost? What value can there possibly be in a threadbare carpet, a tarnished spoon and a thousand empty jam jars? 
 
Before the hotel people arrive, with their clipboards and their skips and their bottles of bleach, Maximus, loyal guardian of the Gilberts’ legacy, invites us on a final tour of the once-stately home, where each room holds a secret. From the bolt on the blue room door to the tiny dents in the bars at the nursery window … these are the keys that will unlock the lives of the five fatherless Gilbert children. 
 
A frustrated romantic, a stubborn traditionalist, a dreamer, a diva and an explorer: The Infamous Gilberts will be cast adrift on the irresistible tides of the twentieth century, buoyed by love, buffeted by loss, and tangled together in an unputdownable story where the lines between eccentricity and madness, cruelty and love become hilariously, heartbreakingly blurred.

The Infamous Gilberts

Independence seems to be drifting away from Misty. Just months ago, she was living with her fiancé and planning their life together. Now she’s single, back in her childhood bedroom, on crutches from knee surgery, and relying on her mother to help her with the smallest of tasks. This isn’t how thirty-two was meant to look. 
 
When Misty turns to dating apps, she's she’s immediately intrigued by charismatic, handsome Christopher – so intrigued that she doesn't doesn’t even notice the acronym ‘ENM’ on his profile. By the time she discovers that it stands for ‘ethical non-monogamy' – and that he’s in a long-term open relationship – she already feels such undeniable, dizzying chemistry that she decides to give things a go. 
 
And so Misty makes a pact with herself to date Christopher for the next six weeks while his partner is away. It’s all part of her plan: she wants to learn to become less attached, and to prepare herself for her next ‘real’ relationship. But is what she wants really what she needs?

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