Heidi Perks is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Now You See Her, which was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, Come Back for Me, Three Perfect Liars, The Whispers and The Other Guest. The Last Resort is her sixth novel. Heidi is a voracious reader of crime and thrillers and is fascinated by the darker side of our closest relationships. Heidi lives in Bournemouth with her husband and two children.

Heidi Perks

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Hilary Fannin

‘Quite brilliant; beautifully, cleverly observed; funny, heart-breaking.’ – Roddy Doyle 
 
Hilary is four, not yet five, and she has a mother and a father and an older brother and sisters. She even has a name at home – Billy – that is different from her written-down name. But now that she is in Low Babies in the local convent school, it seems Hilary has something else called responsibilities. 
The world is a changing place. Hilary’s parents, themselves products of a country bathed in sanctifying grace, and presided over by leather-strapped Christian Brothers, wimpled nuns, and a strictly ingrained moral code, start to question their own life choices. As she begins to mature, Hilary’s perspective shifts from a confusing mosaic of half-understood conversations, bizarre rules and surreal religious symbolism, to a growing awareness of the eccentricities of the adult world around her, where money is tight, ideas are unorthodox and where living life to the full is the goal. 
As her parents’ unconventional lifestyle rubs against the grain of a pervasive Catholic society, the cracks begin to appear: siblings are expelled from school; final demands litter the hallway; and Hilary discovers the truth about the always-present but never-to-be-mentioned golden-haired lady. 
Hopscotch is a funny, poignant and beautifully written memoir, a spellbinding meditation on innocence, love and memory itself.

Hopscotch

A Memoir

Alison Jameson

On his way back up from the yard Bird had seen something white and round – a girl who had curled herself into a ball. Lifting her was like retrieving a ball of newspaper from out of the grass or an empty crisp bag that someone had flung over the ditch. She seemed to lack the bones and meat and muscle of real people. She felt as if she was filled with feathers. 
 
On the day Midge Connors comes hurtling into Bird Keegan’s life, she flings open his small, quiet world. He and his two sisters, Olive and Margaret, have lived in the same isolated community all their lives, each one more alone than the others can know. 
 
Taking in damaged, sharp-edged Midge, Bird invites the scorn of his neighbours and siblings. And as they slowly mend each other, family bonds – and the tie of the land – begin to weigh down on their tentative relationship. Can it survive the misunderstandings, contempt and violence of others? 
 
A poignant and powerful study of the emotional lives of three siblings and the girl who breaks through their solitude.

This Family of Things

Laura Quinn has lived on the same remote yet beautiful island off the West Coast of Ireland since she was born, and leaving it behind seems the only way for her life to really begin. 
 A year later, Laura is back, and this time she is not alone; the company of her new baby, Matthew, is all she needs. But the consequences of her return are astonishing, and soon Laura has courageous decisions to make – decisions that could last a lifetime and break her heart for ever. 
 Stylish and captivating, Little Beauty tells a powerful story of love, motherhood and one woman’s courage to survive.

Little Beauty

Donal Ryan

Winner of the An Post Irish Novel of the Year 2020 
Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 
 
'You have to truly love people to write like this' RACHEL JOYCE 
 
'One of the greatest novels of this century' SUNDAY INDEPENDENT 
 
'Gorgeously wrought' GUARDIAN 
 
 
In 1973, twenty-year-old Moll Gladney takes a morning bus from her rural home and disappears. 
 
Bewildered and distraught, Paddy and Kit must confront an unbearable prospect: that they will never see their daughter again. 
 
Five years later, Moll returns. What - and who - she brings with her will change the course of her family's life forever. 
 
Beautiful and devastating, this exploration of loss, alienation and the redemptive power of love reaffirms Donal Ryan as one of the most talented and empathetic writers at work today. 
 
_________ 
 
'Outstanding ... Tender and beautifully written' INDEPENDENT 
 
'All the beauty and sorrow of life can be found in these pages' KATHLEEN MACMAHON 
 
'Exquisite . . . Beautiful' ANNE GRIFFIN, author of WHEN ALL IS SAID 
 
'Ryan gathers together the fragments of broken lives and makes us something new and beautiful from them' RÓNÁN HESSION, author of LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL

Strange Flowers

Conor O'Callaghan

The critically acclaimed psychological chiller from a powerful new voice in Irish literary fiction. 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2017 
 
'As fine as it is frightening' JOHN BANVILLE 
 
'This one will stay with you like your shadow' Guardian 
 
'Extraordinary . . . pitch-perfect' Irish Times 
 
'Strange, beautiful and quietly terrifying' DONAL RYAN, author of The Spinning Heart 
 
'Like many great works, it could so easily have all gone wrong if it hadn’t been done exactly right' Sunday Independent 
 
 
It is the hottest August in living memory. 
 
 A frightened girl bangs on a door. A man answers. From the moment he invites her in, his world will never be the same again. 
 
 She will tell him about her family, and their strange life in the show home of an abandoned housing estate. The long, blistering days spent sunbathing; the airless nights filled with inexplicable noises; the words that appear on the windows, written in dust. 
 
Why are members of her family disappearing, one by one? Is she telling the truth? Is he? 
 
In a world where reality is beginning to blur, how can we know what to believe?

Nothing On Earth

From the twice Man Booker longlisted author of From a Low and Quiet Sea 
 
'Poetic, powerful and heart-rending' THE TIMES 
 
'An exquisite account of womanhood, friendship, prejudice and tradition that is both intimate in scale and awesome in achievement' IRISH INDEPENDENT 
 
 
Melody Shee is alone and in trouble. Her husband doesn't take her news too well. She can't tell her father yet because he's a good man and this could break him. She's trying to stay in the moment, but the future is looming - larger by the day - while the past won't let her go. What she did to Breedie Flynn all those years ago still haunts her. 
 
It's a good thing that she meets Mary Crothery when she does. Mary is a young Traveller woman, and she knows more about Melody than she lets on. She might just save Melody's life. 
 
_________ 
 
'A joy to read, for all that it breaks your heart' INDEPENDENT 
 
'One of the finest writers working in Ireland today ... worthy of Greek Drama' GUARDIAN 
 
'A stunning piece of work, utterly truthful and emotionally powerful' JOSEPH O'CONNOR 
 
'Work of genius ... I was entranced by it. Buckled by it' SEBASTIAN BARRY

All We Shall Know

Rosita Boland

'Utterly engaging.' - Sunday Times 
 
From her first life-changing solo trip to Australia as a young graduate, Rosita Boland was enthralled by travel. In the last thirty years she has visited some of the most remote parts of the globe carrying little more than a battered rucksack and a diary. 
 
Documenting nine journeys from nine different moments in her life, Elsewhere reveals how exploring the world – and those we meet along the way – can dramatically shape the course of a person’s life. From death-defying bus journeys through Pakistan to witnessing the majestic icescapes of Antarctica to putting herself back together in Bali, Rosita experiences moments of profound joy and endures deep personal loss. 
 
In a series of jaw-dropping, illuminating and sometimes heart-breaking essays, Elsewhere is a book that celebrates the life well-travelled in all its messy and wondrous glory.

Elsewhere

One Woman, One Rucksack, One Lifetime of Travel

Norma MacMaster

Sitting alone in her Dublin nursing home, Harriet Campbell reflects on a life that has become tainted by bitterness and regret. From a strictly Presbyterian community along the Irish border, at sixteen young Harriet is married off to Thomas, a respected church Elder but a cold, sober man twice her age. The birth of her son James, a bright boy destined for great things, brings joy and light to her life. But when he falls in love with a beautiful girl from the wrong faith, their relationship is torn apart. 
 
Written in startlingly beautiful prose, Norma MacMaster’s Silence Under a Stone is an intimate, deeply moving story of love, faith and the pain of an irreconcilable heart.

Silence Under A Stone

Francine Toon

WINNER of the McIlvanney Prize 2020 
Shortlisted for Bloody Scotland's Scottish Crime Debut of the Year 2020 
 
 
'It's both eerie and thrilling at once, and had me under its spell until the end' Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure 
 
They are driving home from the search party when they see her. The trees are coarse and tall in the winter light, standing like men. 
 
Lauren and her father Niall live alone in the Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out onto the road one Halloween night, Niall drives her back to their house in his pickup. In the morning, she's gone. 
 
In a community where daughters rebel, men quietly rage, and drinking is a means of forgetting, mysteries like these are not out of the ordinary. The trapper found hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Locked doors and stone circles. The disappearance of Lauren's mother a decade ago. 
 
Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father's turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it's no longer clear who she can trust. 
 
In the shadow of the Highland forest, Francine Toon captures the wildness of rural childhood and the intensity of small-town claustrophobia. In a place that can feel like the edge of the word, she unites the chill of the modern gothic with the pulse of a thriller. It is the perfect novel for our haunted times. 
 
'Hugely atmospheric, exquisitely written and utterly gripping' Lucy Foley, author of The Hunting Party

Pine

The spine-chilling Sunday Times bestseller

Shane Connaughton

‘The small room was thick with dark blue uniforms. Bull’s wool the men called the material. Silver buttons. Black boots. Caps. Batons holstered in shiny black leather cylinders. Handcuffs hanging from coat hooks, the keys dangling on thick green ribbon. Dusty files on shelves. Shiny whistles on silver chains. Ink. Nibbed pens. Blotting paper. The big map of the district on the wall and beside it a rainfall chart. The men having broken their “at ease” positions, gathered into the middle of the room. His father seemed lost. Like a man with a herd of cattle he could no longer control.’ 
 
An insignificant Irish border village at the tail-end of the 1950s. The Sergeant is nervous. His men are lined up for inspection in the day room of the Garda station. Chief Superintendent ‘The Bully’ Barry is on the warpath and any slip-ups will reflect badly on the Sergeant. But what can he do with the men under his command – all of them forcibly transferred from other more important stations in more important towns? Each garda has his own story, his own problems. How can a man be expected to keep the peace with such a bunch of misfits and ne’er-do-wells? 
 
Observing them with fascination, all but invisible in his own quiet corner, sits the Sergeant’s son. On the cusp of manhood, he is drawn in by these rough and ready men, stuck in this place and time, when all he wants is a chance to leave and start his life anew. Life at home in the station’s married quarters is both comfort and knife-edged, ruled over by his by-the-book father and his gentle, emotional mother. 
 
Taking up where his acclaimed A Border Station left off, Married Quarters is a funny, beautifully observed and deeply personal novel. and marks the return of Shane Connaughton, one of Ireland’s most cherished writers.

Married Quarters

Conor O'Clery

'O'Clery takes us into the hidden heart of Soviet Russia... An arresting and evocative story.' Keggie Carew, author of Dadland 
 
'A tour de force ... Love, politics, murder, wars, and the fracturing of ties, personal and ethnic. O'Clery is a gifted writer.' Luke Harding, bestselling author of Collusion 
 
The Soviet Union, 1962. Gifted shoemaker Stanislav Suvorov is imprisoned for five years. His crime? Selling his car for a profit. On his release, social shame drives him and his family into voluntary exile in Siberia, 5,000 kilometres from home. In a climate that's unfriendly both geographically and politically, it's their chance to start again. 
 
The Shoemaker and His Daughter is an epic story spanning the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union, taking in eighty years of Soviet and Russian history, from Stalin to Putin. Following the footsteps of a remarkable family Conor O'Clery knows well - he is married to the shoemaker's daughter - it's both a compelling insight into life in a secretive world at a siesmic moment in time and a powerful tale of ordinary lives shaped by extraordinary times.

The Shoemaker and his Daughter

'This is heartache for grown ups. The Weight of Love pulls you in and does not let go' ANNE ENRIGHT 
 
'Beautiful and painful, exquisitely written, shot through with nostalgia for our earlier selves' MARIAN KEYES 
 
London, 1996. Robin and Ruth meet in the staff room of an East London school. Robin, desperate for a real connection, instantly falls in love. Ruth, recently bereaved and fragile, is tentative. 
 
 When Robin introduces Ruth to his childhood friend, Joseph, a tortured and talented artist, their attraction is instant. Powerless, Robin watches on as the girl he loves and his best friend begin a passionate and turbulent affair. 
 
 Dublin 2017. Robin and Ruth are married and have a son, Sid, who is about to emigrate to Berlin. Theirs is a marriage haunted by the ghost of Joseph and as the distance between them grows, Robin makes a choice that could have potentially devastating consequences. 
 
 The Weight of Love is a beautiful exploration of how we manage life when the notes and beats of our existence, so carefully arranged, begin to slip off the stave. An intimate and moving account of the intricacies of marriage and the myriad ways in which we can love and be loved. 
 
'Delicate, powerful, hypnotic' DONAL RYAN 
 
'Fannin's novel is already likely to be a serious contender for one of the books of the year' SUNDAY TIMES

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