Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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David J Schwartz

A party in a college flat in May 2001. A case of dodgy home-brewed beer. A violent storm. Next day: the mother of all hangovers. What would you do if you the morning after the night before brought a banging head, a raging thirst... Oh, and your very own superpower? 
 
Meet the All-Stars: Harriet, Charlie, Caroline, Mary-Beth and Jack. Harriet can make herself invisible, Charlie can read your mind, Caroline can fly, and Jack, well, Jack can run faster than a speeding bullet. 
 
Determined to become costumed crime-fighters, but baffled by the lack of super-villains to tackle, the quintet soon finds that the ramifications of their new powers are more complicated than they anticipated, and that humans (even themselves) are much more fragile than they'd realised.

Superpowers

Alice Hoffman

When the women in the Sparrow family reach thirteen, they develop a unique ability. In young Stella's case, the gift, which is both a blessing and a curse, is the ability to see a person's probable future. Stella foresees a gruesome murder, and tells her charming, feckless father about it, but it is too late - the murder has already been committed and suspicion falls on him. 
 
Hoffman unlocks the caskets of family life and the secret history of a community in this magical story about young love and old love, about making choices - usually the wrong ones - about foresight and consequences, all suffused with the haunting scent of roses and wisteria, and the hum of bees on a summer evening.

The Probable Future

Haruki Murakami

A mesmerising mystery story about friendship from the internationally bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and 1Q84 
 
Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning ‘red pine’, and Oumi, ‘blue sea’, while the girls’ names were Shirane, ‘white root’, and Kurono, ‘black field’. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it. 
 
One day Tsukuru Tazaki’s friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, ever again. 
 
Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Ben Rice

Pobby and Dingan live in Lightning Ridge, New South Wales, the opal capital of Australia. They are friends with Kellyanne Williamson, the daughter of a miner: indeed only she can see them. Pobby and Dingan are imaginary. Ashmol Williamson, Kellyanne's brother thinks his sister should grow up and stop being such a fruit loop - until the day when Pobby and Dingan disappear. As Kellyanne, grief-stricken, begins to fade away, Ashmol recruits the whole town in the search for Pobby and Dingan. In the end, however, he discovers that only he can find them, and he can only find them if he too begins to believe they are real.

Pobby and Dingan

Anne Haverty

One Day As A Tiger tells the story of Martin Hawkins, a brilliant young historian, who turns his back on a promising academic career and returns to the family sheep-farm in Tipperary where he finds himself at odds with his conscientious brother, Pierce. Hostile to the people around him, and secretly in love with Pierce's restless wife, Etti, Martin begins to harbour strange convictions about an adopted lamb he calls Missy. One of a flock that has been 'improved' with the introduction of human genes, Missy starts to make significant impact on Martin's imagination. When Etti starts to share these sentiments, she and Martin embark on a reckless and terrible adventure.

One Day As A Tiger

Keith Donohue

Angels of Destruction is the mesmerising story of Norah, a nine-year-old girl who seems to materialise out of thin air when she arrives one bitterly cold night on the doorstep of Margaret Quinn. A widow who lives alone, Margaret has never got over the loss of her own child, a runaway called Erica who fled with her high school sweetheart, Wiley, to join a '60s-style band of West Coast revolutionaries known as Angels of Destruction. 
 
Norah becomes Margaret's secret, a child possessed of magical qualities. But who is she really? And what is her purpose here? And what is this strange child's connection to Margaret's missing daughter?

Angels of Destruction

Yan Lianke

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2017 
 
With the Yi River on one side and the Balou Mountains on the other, the village of Explosion was founded a thousand years ago by refugees fleeing a volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era, the name takes on a new significance as the rural community grows explosively from a small village to a town to a city to a vast megalopolis. 
 
Behind this rapid expansion are three rival clans linked together by a web of ambition, madness and greed. Together they transform their hometown into a Babylon of modern times -- an unrivalled urban superpower built on lies, sex and thievery. 
 
'One of the masters of modern Chinese literature' Jung Chang

The Explosion Chronicles

Chuck Palahniuk

'Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison' 
 
Meet Madison, whip-tongued daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, abandoned at a Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off adopting more orphans. Madison dies of a marijuana overdose and awakes to find herself in Hell, sharing her cell with a motley crew of young sinners that's almost too good to be true. 
 
Welcome to the afterlife as only Palahniuk could imagine it - he makes eternal torment, well, simply divine.

Damned

M. Suddain

This is the story of M. Francisco Fabrigas, explorer, philosopher, heretical physicist, who took a shipful of children on a frightening voyage to the next dimension, assisted by a teenaged Captain, a brave deaf boy, a cunning blind girl, and a sultry botanist, all the while pursued by the Pope of the universe and a well-dressed mesmerist. 
 
Dark plots, demonic cults, murderous jungles, quantum mayhem, the birth of creation, the death of time, and a creature called the Sweety: all this and more waits beyond the veil of reality.

Theatre of the Gods

Douglas Westerbeke

PARIS, 1885. On an otherwise ordinary night, Aubry Tourvel – spoiled, stubborn and nine years old – is suddenly struck down by a mysterious illness at the family dinner table. 
 
When a visit to a doctor only makes her worse, Aubry flees to the outskirts of the city, where she realises that it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. 
 
She has no choice: she must run from this curse. And so begins her incredible lifelong journey across the world. 
 
But with risk at every turn, what will it take for Aubry to survive?

A Short Walk Through a Wide World

Rachel Yoder

*NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING AMY ADAMS* 
 
Are you looking for a book with bite? 
 
'OUTRAGEOUS, SMART, FUN' Bonnie Garmus, Sunday Times bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry 
 
'BRILLIANT' Stylist 
 
One day, the mother was a mother but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else... 
 
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. Her husband, always travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind. 
 
Instead, she starts gaining things, surprising things that happen one night when her child will not sleep. New appetites, new instincts. And from deep within herself, a new voice... 
 
'INCREDIBLE' Carmen Maria Machado 
 
'I TORE THROUGH IT' Lisa McInerney 
 
'FUNNY AND UNNERVING AS HELL' Jenny Offill 
 
'The spiritual successor to Angela Carter' Evening Standard

Nightbitch

The bestselling Damned chronicled Madison’s journey across the unspeakable (and really gross) landscape of the afterlife to confront the Devil himself. But her story isn’t over yet. In a series of electronic dispatches from the Great Beyond, Doomed describes the ultimate showdown between Good and Evil. 
 
After a Halloween ritual gone awry, Madison finds herself trapped in Purgatory – or, as mortals like you and I know it, Earth. She can see and hear every detail of the world she left behind, yet she’s invisible to everyone who’s still alive. Not only do people look right through her, they walk right through her as well. The upside is that, no longer subject to physical limitations, she can pass through doors and walls. Her first stop is her parents’ luxurious apartment, where she encounters the ghost of her long-deceased grandmother. For Madison, the encounter triggers memories of the awful summer she spent upstate with Nana Minnie and her grandfather, Papadaddy. As she revisits the painful truth of what transpired over those months, her saga of eternal damnation takes on a new and sinister meaning. Madison has been in Satan’s sights from the very beginning, as through her and her narcissistic celebrity parents he plans to engineer an era of eternal damnation. For everyone. 
 
Once again, our unconventional but plucky heroine must face her fears and gather her wits for the battle of a lifetime. Dante Alighieri, watch your back; Chuck Palahniuk is gaining on you.

Doomed

Margo Lanagan

In her inspired re-working of the fairy-tale Snow White and Rose Red Margo Lanagan has created characters that are vivid, passionate, flawed and fiercely devoted to their hearts' desires, whether these desires are good or evil. It is the story of two worlds - one real, one magical - and how, despite the safe haven her magical world offers to those who have suffered, her characters can never turn their backs on the real world, with all its beauty and brutality. 
 
Tender Morsels is an astonishing novel, fraught with the tension between love and horror, violence and tenderness, despair and hope.

Tender Morsels

Steven Amsterdam

'Okay, tell me which do you want: to be able to fly or to be invisible?' 
 
This question leads to thirty years of discoveries, extraordinary strengths and closely guarded secrets. 
 
'To tell you the narrative concens a family whose members have superpowers is only to graze the surface of a moving and beautifully realised meditation on what it is to be an ordinary human being' 
Australian 
 
'A wonderful novel: imaginative, intelligent, empathetic... Like a cross between The Corrections and The Slap' 
Sydney Morning Herald 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2012 ENCORE AWARD

What the Family Needed

Grace McCleen

'An extraordinary and peculiarly haunting novel' Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand 
 
 
A RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK 
 
 
 
My name is Judith McPherson. I am ten years old. On Monday a miracle happened. 
 
Judith doesn’t have much. The house she shares with her devoutly religious father is full of dusty relics, reminders of the mother Judith never knew. Bullied at school, she finds comfort in creating a miniature world in her bedroom – a world of wonder she calls The Land of Decoration. Perhaps, she thinks, if she makes it snow in The Land of Decoration there will be no school on Monday. 
 
Sure enough, when Judith opens her curtains the next day, the world beyond her window has turned white. 
 
And that's when her troubles begin.

The Land of Decoration

Marie Phillips

Being immortal isn't all it's cracked up to be. Life's hard for a Greek god in the 21st century: nobody believes in you any more, even your own family doesn't respect you, and you're stuck in a delapidated hovel in north London with too many siblings and not enough hot water. But for Artemis (goddess of hunting, professional dog walker), Aphrodite (goddess of beauty, telephone sex operator) and Apollo (god of the sun, TV psychic) there's no way out... Until a meek cleaner and her would-be boyfriend come into their lives, and turn the world literally upside down. 
 
Gods Behaving Badly is that rare thing, a charming, funny, utterly original first novel that satisfies the head and the heart.

Gods Behaving Badly

Anne Enright

Man Booker winner Anne Enright’s moving and darkly funny debut novel of sex, death and reproduction 
 
Grace is a TV producer whose life is transfigured when she answers the door to a fully-fledged angel. Stephen was a bridge-builder in Canada before he killed himself, but now that he has come to stay with Grace he spends the night hanging by the neck in her shower, to help himself think. She falls in love, moving steadily from the spiritual to the anatomical. 
 
Meanwhile, as her TV day job on the 'Love Quiz' begins to spiral out of control, on the other side of her life is her father, benign, bewigged and stricken by a stroke - apparently mad but probably the sanest person in her life. As the three worlds meet and merge in a forest of contradictions, we watch Grace take the pacific path from cynicism to innocence, as all around her the novel thunders to a conclusion. 
 
‘Reckless intelligence, savage humour, slow revelation, no consolation: Anne Enright's fiction is jet dark - but how it glitters’ New York Times Book Review

The Wig My Father Wore

Myriam Lacroix

What if you could rewrite your relationship, again and again, until it worked out? 
 
‘A cause for celebration’ GEORGE SAUNDERS 
‘A stunner of a debut’ NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH 
'Hilarious, heart-rending, grotesque, delightful, utterly brilliant' DAISY JOHNSON 
‘Exhilaratingly good’ KELLY LINK 
 
When Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals: 
 
What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? 
What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh? 
How much darker - or sexier - would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee? 
 
From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of heartbreak, each reality builds to complete a brilliant and painfully funny portrait of love’s many promises and perils. 
 
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING: 
 
'Wow. I will be reading everything Myriam Lacroix puts out' 
 
'Everything Everywhere All at Once for U-haul lesbians... I'm diving in again' 
 
'I haven't read anything like it before... Fantastic debut'

How It Works Out

Peter Høeg

The woman is Madelene, rich, beautiful and alcoholic; the ape, intelligent and illegally imported to London by Madelene's husband Burden. Burden has plans, so does Madelene, and so, as it happens, does the ape. This most controversial of Høeg's novels takes us from Society London, across its roof-tops to a forest idyll, to make for a fable at once hilarious and thought-provoking.

The Woman And The Ape

Julie Myerson

Flynn is a thirteen-year-old girl caught between her violent, out-of-control brother, Sam, and her mother, who is struggling to cope. And then, one impossibly hot night, a strange half-feral boy called Alex turns up at the bottom of Flynn's garden. Alex is one of three runaways; there's also Diana, who has just had a baby, and Mouse, who is only six and already an accomplished arsonist. 
 
With Flynn and Sam in tow, the rag tag group of children venture into the deserted countryside, pursued by a terrifying and unseen man. Deep in the woods, they stumble across an abandoned cottage which seems to offer refuge but soon begins to reveal its dark and terrifying secrets...

Out of Breath

Holly Gramazio

**READER FAVOURITE IN THE FIRST-EVER GOOD HOUSEKEEPING GOOD BOOKS COLLECTION** 
**SOON TO BE A MAJOR APPLE TV SERIES** 
 
‘Properly laugh-out-loud funny, this was one of the most original novels I’ve read in years’ RED, *Books of the Year* 
‘A witty, ingenious debut novel… An enormously entertaining story that is both silly and sophisticated’ SUNDAY TIMES, *Books of the Year* 
 
What if you could change husbands as easily as a lightbulb? 
 
One night Lauren finds a strange man in her flat who claims to be her husband. All the evidence – from photos to electricity bills – suggests he’s right. And then another one appears. Lauren’s attic, she slowly realises, is creating an endless supply of husbands for her. There’s: 
 
The one who’s too hot (there must be a catch). 
The one who pretends to play music on her toes. 
The one who can calm her unruly thoughts with a single touch. 
 
But when you can change husbands as easily as changing a lightbulb, how do you know whether the one you have now is the good-enough one, or the wrong one, or the best one? And how long should you keep trying to find out? 
 
'Huge fun' KATE ATKINSON 
'A wonderful, wonderful novel' JENNIE GODFREY 
'The most fun I've had reading in the longest time' MARIAN KEYES 
'A time-bending gem' GABRIELLE ZEVIN 
 
THE NO 1 KINDLE BESTSELLER 
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
BEST SUMMER READ IN THE GUARDIAN, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, RED & DAILY MAIL 
RUNNER-UP IN THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT BOOK PRIZE 
 
***READERS LOVE THE HUSBANDS!!**** 
‘This book was INCREDIBLE! So inventive, funny and different’ 
‘I clapped out loud and cried’ 
‘I adored this book. Fast-paced and funny with heart’ 
‘Incredibly vivid, completely original’ 
'So many husbands so many personalities so much confusion so much fun!

The Husbands

Kevin Brockmeier

Something strange is going on. 
 
All over the world, pain is manifesting itself as light. Cuts and bruises blaze and flash. Arthritic joints glow. Injured troops emit radiant white shards into the desert night. On the news, they're calling it 'The Illumination'. 
 
As this breathtaking phenomenon takes holds, a private journal of love notes passes into the keeping of Carol Ann Page, a lonely hospital patient, and from there through the hands of five other people. Each of them will find their lives changed forever over a story which spans decades and continents, a story that shines a spectacular light on the wounds we all bear...

The Illumination

Alice Hoffman is at her electrifying best in this fairy tale for grown-ups. The story begins with a little girl who makes a wish one snowy night and ruins her life. She grows up with a splinter of ice in her heart until one day, standing by her kitchen window, she is struck by lightning. 
 
Instead of killing her, this cataclysmic event sparks off a new beginning. She seeks out Lazarus Jones, a fellow lightning survivor. He is her opposite, a burning man whose breath can boil water and whose touch scorches. As an obsessive love affair begins between them, both are forced to hide their most dangerous secrets - what turned one to ice and the other to fire. 
 
The Ice Queen is a haunting story of passion, loss, second chances and the secrets that come to define us, if we're not careful.

The Ice Queen

Seven-year-old Henry Day is kidnapped by fairy changelings living in the dark forest near his home - ageless beings whose secret community is threatened by encroaching modern life. They give Henry a new name, Aniday, and the gift of agelessness - now and forever, he will be seven years old. 
 
The group has left another child in Henry's place. This changeling boy, who has morphed himself into Henry's duplicate, must adjust to a new way of life and hide his true identity from the Day family. But he can't hide his extraordinary talent for the piano, and his near-perfect performances prompt his father to suspect that he is an impostor. 
 
As he grows older the new Henry Day becomes haunted by vague but persistent memories of life in another time and place. Both Henry and Aniday search obsessively for who they were before they changed places in the world.

The Stolen Child

Erin Morgenstern

THE TIKTOK SENSATION 
 
Discover the enchanting, magical bestseller from the author of The Night Circus, now in a stunning new edition. 
 
We are all stardust and stories... 
 
When Zachary Rawlins stumbles across a mysterious book containing details from his own life among its pages, it leads him on a quest unlike any other. 
 
Following the clues inside, he is guided to a masquerade ball, a dangerous secret club, and finally to an ancient library hidden far beneath the surface of the earth. What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians - it is a place of lost cities and seas, lovers who pass notes across time, and of stories whispered by the dead. 
 
But when the library is threatened, Zachary must race through its twisting tunnels and sweetly soaked shores, searching for the end of his story. 
 
 
PRAISE FOR THE STARLESS SEA: 
'Enchanting read... an ode to stories and storytelling itself, and the joy of reading' Guardian 
'Spellbinding' Daily Mirror 
'A magical mix of quests and fables...beautifully written' Heat

The Starless Sea

The spellbinding Sunday Times bestseller

Toby Barlow

An ancient race of lycanthropes survives in modern L.A. and its numbers are growing as packs convert the city's downtrodden into their fold. Stuck in the middle are a local dogcatcher and the woman he loves, whose secret past haunts her as she fights a bloody one-woman battle to save their relationship. 
 
Sharp Teeth is a novel-in-verse that blends epic themes with dark humour, dogs playing cards, crystal meth labs, and acts of heartache and betrayal in Southern California.

Sharp Teeth

Robert Masello

When journalist Michael Wilde is commissioned to write a feature about a remote research station deep in the frozen beauty of Antarctica he is prepared for some extraordinary sights. But on a diving expedition in the polar sea he comes across something so extraordinary to be almost unbelievable - a man and woman chained together, deep in the ice. The doomed lovers are brought to the surface but as the ice begins to thaw the scientists discover the unusual contents of the bottles buried behind the pair, and realise they are all in terrible danger...

Blood and Ice

Umberto Eco

The year is 1643. Roberto, a young nobleman, survives war, the Bastille, exile and shipwreck as he voyages to a Pacific island straddling the date meridian. There he waits now, alone on the mysteriously deserted Daphne, separated by treacherous reefs from the island beyond: the island of the day before. If he could reach it, time - and his misfortunes - might be reversed. But first he must learn to swim...

Island of the Day Before

Kirsty Logan

'Absolutely obsessed. Savage, strange and spicy' Lucy Rose, author of Lamb 
 
Can 'no' be a declaration of love? What happens when love is savage, dangerous and all-consuming? In this gorgeous and unsettling collection, women navigate the complexities and cruelties of desire across time and place, from a medieval convent to a Victorian parlour to a 1990s high school. 
 
Intensely atmospheric, surprising and darkly funny, No & Other Stories is a richly flavoured feast from a brilliant writer in full command of the form. 
 
'Unsettling and addictive, glistening with transgressive thrills and erotic appetites' Daily Mail 
 
'Gleefully depraved, gloriously queer and thrillingly bold' Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells 
 
'A dark delight, steeped in blood red honey' Heather Parry, author of Orpheus Builds A Girl 
 
'A gothic homage to the visceral, haunting, unnerving nature of human connection' Alice Slater, author of Death of a Bookseller 
 
'Full of strange beauty and shining humour' Stylist 
 
'No one writes about the horrific and the erotic, and the tangled up intersections of both, like Kirsty Logan' Anna Bogutskaya, author of Feeding The Monster 
 
'Darkly graceful, innovative, sexy and funny. Kirsty Logan is a jewel' Camilla Grudova, author of The Doll's Alphabet 
 
'Crackling with smarts, marvellously formally varied, deliciously strange' Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie

No & Other Love Stories

Marina Warner

Inspired by The Tempest, Indigo traces the scars of colonialism across continents, family blood-lines and three centuries. Rich, sensual and magical in its use of myths and fairytales Indigo explores the intertwined histories of the Everard family and the imaginary Caribbean island where Ariel, Caliban, and his mother, the healer and dyer of indigo, Sycorax once lived.

Indigo Or Mapping The Waters

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