Here’s this week’s list of bookish temptation. As usual the titles will be a mix of eBooks, paperbacks and hardbacks, all available to pre-order. Publication dates were correct as at time of writing. (NB the links used are affiliate links details of which are here).

The Quickening by Rhiannon Ward

Feminist gothic fiction set between the late 19th century and the early 20th century – an era of burgeoning spiritualism and the suffragette movement – that couldn’t be more relevant today.

England, 1925. Louisa Drew lost her husband in the First World War and her six-year-old twin sons in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. Newly re-married to a war-traumatised husband and seven months pregnant, Louisa is asked by her employer to travel to Clewer Hall in Sussex where she is to photograph the contents of the house for auction.

She learns Clewer Hall was host to an infamous séance in 1896, and that the lady of the house has asked those who gathered back then to come together once more to recreate the evening. When a mysterious child appears on the grounds, Louisa finds herself compelled to investigate and becomes embroiled in the strange happenings of the house. Gradually, she unravels the long-held secrets of the inhabitants and what really happened thirty years before… and discovers her own fate is entwined with that of Clewer Hall’s.

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The Innocents by Michael Crummey

In centuries past, a brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated outport cove on Newfoundland’s northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean and a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but their family’s boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to help them survive.

Muddling through the severe round of the seasons, through years of meagre catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each other that motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested.

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The Flip Side by James Bailey

One coin, one year and one new shot at love.

Josh thought he was doing everything right.

He found a girl. They adopted a rabbit. He finally found the perfect moment to propose.

She said no.

On the London Eye . . . On New Year’s Eve . . . Suspended 443ft in the air . . .

Now they’re awkwardly eating truffles and praying they’ll be back on the ground soon.

Realizing he can’t be trusted to make his own decisions, Josh decides to spend a year putting his faith in, well, fate.

From now on, every decision will be made by the flip of a coin. And maybe, just maybe, the coin will help him find the girl of his dreams.

After all, who says you can’t take a chance on love?

Hilarious, feel-good and uplifting. A romantic comedy perfect for anyone who has ever failed at love.

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Northernmost by Peter Geye

From the acclaimed author of Wintering: a thrilling ode to the spirit of adventure and the vagaries of loss and love

In 1897, Odd Einar Eide returns home from a near-death experience in the Arctic only to discover his own funeral underway. His wife, Inger, stunned to see him alive, is slow to warm back up to him, having spent many sleepless nights convinced she had lost both him and their daughter, Thea, who traveled to America two years earlier but has yet to send even a single letter back to them in Hammerfest, their small Norwegian town at the top of the earth.

More than a century later, Greta Nansen has finally begun to admit to herself that her marriage is over. Desperately unhappy and unfulfilled, she makes the decision to follow her husband from their home in Minnesota to Oslo, where he has traveled for work, to end it once and for all. But on impulse, for reasons unknown even to her, she diverts her travels to Hammerfest: the town of her ancestors, the town where her great-great-grandmother Thea was born–and for some reason never returned to.

Braiding together two remarkable stories of love and survival, Northernmost wades into the darkest recesses of the human heart and celebrates the remarkable ability of humans to endure nearly unimaginable trials.

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A Little London Scandal by Miranda Emmerson

Nik felt the mistake in his bones.
The man in the snakeskin suit reached down towards him and pulled Nik upright by the collar of his coat. Nik didn’t see what happened next but he felt the wall. He cried out and then someone hit him and he closed his eyes and waited for it to be over…

London. 1967.

Nik Christou has been a rent boy since he was 15. He knows the ins and outs of Piccadilly Circus, how to spot a pretty policeman and interpret a fleeting glance. One summer night his life is turned upside down, first by violence and then by an accusation of murder.

Anna Treadway, fleeing the ghosts of her past, works as a dresser in Soho’s Galaxy theatre. Experience has taught her never to put too much faith in the law, so, convinced Nik is innocent she determines to find him an alibi.

Merrian Wallis, devoted wife to an MP whose career has already been tarnished by scandal, just wants proof that her husband couldn’t have been involved.

As Anna searches for clues amongst a cast of MPs, actors, members of gentlemen’s clubs and a hundred different nightly clients, will anyone be willing to come forward and save Nik from his fate?

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The Undiscovered Country by Aidan McQuade

Amid the turmoil of an emerging nation, two young IRA members assigned to police a rural village discover the body of a young boy, apparently drowned. One of them, a veteran of the First World War, recognises violence when he sees it – but does one more corpse really matter in this time of bitter conflict? The reluctant detectives must navigate the vicious bloodshed, murky allegiances and savage complexities of a land defining itself to find justice for the murdered boy. Neither of them realises just how dangerous their task will become.

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As You Were by Elaine Feeney

Sinéad Hynes is a tough, driven, funny young property developer with a terrifying secret.

No-one knows it: not her fellow patients in a failing hospital, and certainly not her family. She has confided only in Google and a shiny magpie.

But she can’t go on like this, tirelessly trying to outstrip her past and in mortal fear of her future. Across the ward, Margaret Rose is running her chaotic family from her rose-gold Nokia. In the neighbouring bed, Jane, rarely but piercingly lucid, is searching for a decent bra and for someone to listen. Sinéad needs them both.

As You Were is about intimate histories, institutional failures, the kindness of strangers, and the darkly present past of modern Ireland. It is about women’s stories and women’s struggles. It is about seizing the moment to be free.

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The Sound Mirror by Heidi James

‘Tamara is going to kill her mother, but she isn’t the villain. Tamara just has to finish what began at her birth and put an end to the damage encoded in her blood. Quitting her job in Communications, Tamara dresses carefully and hires a car, making the trip from London to her hometown in Kent, to visit her mother for the last time. Accompanied by a chorus of ancestors, Tamara is harried by voices from the past and the future that reveal the struggles, joys and secrets of these women’s lives that continue to echo through and impact her own.’ The Sound Mirror spans three familial generations from British Occupied India to Southern England, through intimately rendered characters, Heidi James has crafted a haunting and moving examination of class, war, violence, family and shame from the rich details of ordinary lives.

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The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually by Helen Cullen

On an island off the west coast of Ireland, the Moone family are shattered by tragedy.

Murtagh Moone is a potter and devoted husband to Maeve, an actor struggling with her most challenging role yet – being a mother to their four children. Now Murtagh must hold his family close as we bear witness to their story before that tragic night.

We return to the day Maeve and Murtagh meet, outside Trinity College in Dublin, and watch how one love story gives rise to another. And as the Moone children learn who their parents truly are, we journey onwards with them to a future that none of the Moones could predict . . .

Except perhaps Maeve herself.

The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually is a celebration of the complex, flawed and stubbornly optimistic human heart.

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The Little Cottage in Lantern Square by Helen Rolfe

The Little Cottage in Lantern Square is Helen Rolfe’s four Lantern Square novellas collected together for the first time.

Step into the magic of Lantern Square…

Hannah went from high flyer in the city to business owner and has never looked back. In the cosy Cotswold village of Butterbury she runs Tied up with String, sending handmade gifts and care packages across the miles, as well as delivering them to people she thinks need them the most.

But when her ex best-friend Georgia turns up and wants in on the action, will Hannah be willing to forgive and forget? With her business in jeopardy she needs to maintain the reputation she’s established, and discover who she can trust…

Meanwhile, a mysterious care package lands on her own doorstep at Lantern Cottage. Who is trying to win her heart – and will she ever be willing to give it away?

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Between Beirut and the Moon by Naji Bakhti

Between Beirut and the Moon is the exuberant and hilarious debut from the hugely talented young Lebanese author, Naji Bakhti.

A young boy comes of age within the confines of post-civil-war Beirut, with conflict, and comedy lurking round every corner.

Adam dreams of becoming an astronaut but who has ever heard of an Arab on the moon? He battles with his father, a book-hoarding journalist with a penchant for writing eulogies, his closest friend, Basil, a Druze who is said to worship goats and believe in reincarnation, and a host of other misfits and miscreants in a city attempting recover from years of political and military violence.

Adam’s youth oscillates from laugh out loud escapades, to near death encounters, as he struggles to understand the turbulent and elusive city he calls home.

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The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War, The Mountains Sing is the enveloping, multi-generational tale of the Trần family, perfect for fans of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing.

Hà Nội, 1972. Hương and her grandmother, Trần Diệu Lan, cling to one another in their improvised shelter as American bombs fall around them. Her father and mother have already left to fight in a war that is tearing not just her country but her family apart. For Trần Diệu Lan, forced to flee the family farm with her six children decades earlier as the Communist government rose to power in the North, this experience is horribly familiar. Seen through the eyes of these two unforgettable women, The Mountains Sing captures their defiance and determination, hope and unexpected joy.

Vivid, gripping, and steeped in the language and traditions of Việt Nam, celebrated Vietnamese poet Nguyễn’s richly lyrical debut weaves between the lives of grandmother and granddaughter to paint a unique picture of the country’s turbulent twentieth-century history. This is the story of a people pushed to breaking point, and a family who refuse to give in.

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Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo

Welcome to a world turned upside down. One minute, Doris, from England, is playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the hold of a slave-ship sailing to the New World . . .

In this fantastically imaginative inversion of the transatlantic slave trade – in which ‘whytes’ are enslaved by black people – Bernardine Evaristo has created a thought-provoking satire that is as accessible and readable as it is intelligent and insightful. Blonde Roots brings the shackles and cries of long-ago barbarity uncomfortably close and raises timely questions about the society of today.

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All About Us by Tom Ellen

If you could turn back the clock, would you choose a different life?

Ben usually loves the month of December, but this year, with his relationship with Daphne on the rocks, it’s missing its usual magic. And then his old friend Alice gets back in touch. Ben’s always thought of Alice as the one that got away, and he can’t help but wonder: what if he’d done things differently all those years ago?

He never imagines he might get to find out… but when a stranger sells Ben a mysterious watch one freezing winter’s night, he’s astonished to wake up the next morning on 5th December 2005: the day he first kissed Daphne, leaving Alice behind.

Now Ben must make the biggest decision of his life, all over again. But this time around, will he finally find the courage to follow his heart?

Two loves. Two lives. One destiny…

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Beach Read by Emily Henry

January is a hopeless romantic who narrates her life like she’s the lead in a blockbuster movie.

Gus is a serious literary type who thinks true love is a fairy-tale.

But January and Gus have more in common than you’d think:

They’re both broke. They’ve got crippling writer’s block. And they need to write bestsellers before summer ends.

The result? A bet to swap genres see who gets published first.

The risk? In telling each other’s stories, their worlds might be changed entirely…

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The Last Charm by Ella Allbright

Leila’s charm bracelet tells a story of love, a story of loss, a story of hope.

This is the story of her… and the story of Jake.

When Leila Jones loses her precious charm bracelet and a stranger finds it, she has to tell the story of how she got the charms to prove she’s the owner. Each and every one is a precious memory of her life with Jake.

So Leila starts at the beginning, recounting the charms and experiences that have led her to the present. A present she never could have expected when she met Jake nearly twenty years ago…

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Eight detectives by Alex Pavesi

All murder mysteries follow a simple set of rules.

Grant McAllister, an author of crime fiction and professor of mathematics, once sat down and worked them all out.

But that was thirty years ago. Now he’s living a life of seclusion on a quiet Mediterranean island – until Julia Hart, a sharp, ambitious editor, knocks on his door. His early work is being republished and together the two of them must revisit those old stories.

An author, hiding from his past, and an editor, probing inside it.

But as she reads the stories, Julia is unsettled to realise that there are parts that don’t make sense. Intricate clues that seem to reference a real murder.

One that’s remained unsolved for thirty years . . .

If Julia wants answers, she must triumph in a battle of wits with a dangerously clever adversary.

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Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan

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.

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Here is the Beehive by Sarah Crossan

Ana and Connor have been having an affair for three years. In hotel rooms and coffee shops, swiftly deleted texts and briefly snatched weekends, they have built a world with none but the two of them in it.

But then the unimaginable happens, and Ana finds herself alone, trapped inside her secret.

How can we lose someone the world never knew was ours? How do we grieve for something no one else can ever find out? In her desperate bid for answers, Ana seeks out the shadowy figure who has always stood just beyond her reach – Connor’s wife Rebecca.

Peeling away the layers of two overlapping marriages, Here is the Beehive is a devastating excavation of risk, obsession and loss.

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One of the Family by Sadie Pearse

Samantha Jackson has been missing for eighteen years. Then, out of nowhere, she gets back in touch with her sister.

Sam needs Freya – now a grown woman with a family of her own – to take in her son.

But Dino is not a happy child, despite the warmth of Freya’s family he cannot settle. He startles at loud noises and he’s prone to angry, violent outbursts. He’s one of the family, Freya knows he is, but why doesn’t it feel like that?

In order to keep her daughters safe, Freya is forced to go in search of the truth. What is going on with Dino, and what really happened to her sister the night she left?

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One Perfect Morning by Pamela Crane

The deadliest secrets lie closest to home…

Mackenzie, Robin and Lily have been best friends since college. Twenty years on, they all live in the same neighbourhood with their perfect families, perfect houses, perfect lives…

It would seem that nothing could come between these three women.
Except for a betrayal.

Nothing could turn them against each other.
Except for a terrible past mistake.

Nothing could tear them apart.
Except for murder….

One dead husband. Three best friends who tell each other everything – apart from the truth…

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Growing Season by Seni Glaister

After a life-saving operation leaves Sam unable to have children, could a rural cottage be the fresh start she needs? Or is she running away from her problems?

For her husband Danny, this was never part of the plan. He likes predictability. The countryside is just a bit, well – wild. But he wants Sam to be happy, even if he isn’t.

If only Danny could tell Sam what is going on in his head. If only he knew what was really going on in hers. If only they knew that they’re equally afraid of what happens next.

Can the couple find a way to face the future together, or have they already grown too far apart?

Growing Season is a poignant and uplifting novel about how love and nature sometimes need a helping hand.

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The Governess by Wendy Holden

She Came From Nothing . . . and Raised a Queen

The drama of the Abdication, the glamour of the Coronation, the trauma of World War II – Marion Crawford, affectionately known as Crawfie, stood by the side of the royal family through it all.

In 1933, a progressive young teacher became governess to the little Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Determined to give her pupils a fun and normal childhood, she took them on buses, swimming at public baths and Christmas shopping at Woolworths.

For seventeen years she served at the heart of the royal family. But her devotion and loyalty counted for nothing when a perceived betrayal brought everything crashing down.

This sweeping, sumptuous novel brings her long-buried story to life and shines a completely new and captivating light into the world’s most famous family.

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The Bird in the Bamboo Cage by Hazel Gaynor

China, 1941. With Japan’s declaration of war on the Allies, Elspeth Kent’s future changes forever. When soldiers take control of the missionary school where she teaches, comfortable security is replaced by rationing, uncertainty and fear.

Ten-year-old Nancy Plummer has always felt safe at Chefoo School. Now the enemy, separated indefinitely from anxious parents, the children must turn to their teachers – to Miss Kent and her new Girl Guide patrol especially – for help. But worse is to come when the pupils and teachers are sent to a distant internment camp. Unimaginable hardship, impossible choices and danger lie ahead.

Inspired by true events, this is the unforgettable story of the life-changing bonds formed between a young girl and her teacher, in a remote corner of a terrible war.

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Chaos by A D Swanston

February 1574. Winter holds London in its icy grasp, but the city is also caught in a fervour of paranoia, superstition and rumour. Mob violence is commonplace. A whispered word is all it takes to condemn a woman to burn as a witch.

Following his success in foiling the ‘Incendium’ plot against the queen, Dr Christopher Radcliff’s standing within court is high. However, he has no time to reap any rewards. Counterfeit coins are circulating on London’s streets, bearing the likeness of his master, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. This in itself is a treasonous offence, but slogans have also begun to appear. Daubed on walls and doorways, they suggest that someone close to the queen harbours treacherous intent – none other than Leicester himself . . .

So Radcliff and his team of informants and amateur spies are sent out into the city’s markets, drinking dens and brothels to track down who might be behind such outrageous and subversive acts. The investigation will lead them down a murderous path to face an elusive foe with an extraordinary agenda. And time is running out: for when rumour and fear catch fire, then surely violent insurrection and bloody chaos will follow.

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Midnight at Malabar House by Vaseem Khan

Bombay, New Year’s Eve, 1949

As India celebrates the arrival of a momentous new decade, Inspector Persis Wadia stands vigil in the basement of Malabar House, home to the city’s most unwanted unit of police officers. Six months after joining the force she remains India’s first female police detective, mistrusted, sidelined and now consigned to the midnight shift.

And so, when the phone rings to report the murder of prominent English diplomat Sir James Herriot, the country’s most sensational case falls into her lap.

As 1950 dawns and India prepares to become the world’s largest republic, Persis, accompanied by Scotland Yard criminalist Archie Blackfinch, finds herself investigating a case that is becoming more political by the second. Navigating a country and society in turmoil, Persis, smart, stubborn and untested in the crucible of male hostility that surrounds her, must find a way to solve the murder – whatever the cost.

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The Liar’s Daughter by Claire Allan

Every family has it’s secrets…

Joe McKee – pillar of the Derry community – is dead. As arrangements are made for the traditional Irish wake, friends and family are left reeling at how cancer could have taken this much-loved man so soon.

But grief is the last thing that Joe’s daughter Ciara and step-daughter Heidi feel. For they knew the real Joe – the man who was supposed to protect them and did anything but.

As the mourners gather, the police do too, with doubt being cast over whether Joe’s death was due to natural causes. Because the lies that Joe told won’t be taken to the grave after all – and the truth gives his daughters the best possible motive for killing him…

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The Less Dead by Denise Mina

When Margo goes in search of her birth mother for the first time, she meets her aunt, Nikki, instead. Margo learns that her mother, Susan, was a sex worker murdered soon after Margo’s adoption. To this day, Susan’s killer has never been found.

Nikki asks Margo for help. She has received threatening and haunting letters from the murderer, for decades. She is determined to find him, but she can’t do it alone…

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Still Life by Val McDermid

The bodies never stay buried forever . . .’

On a freezing winter morning, fishermen pull a body from the sea. It is quickly discovered that the dead man was the prime suspect in a decade-old investigation, when a prominent civil servant disappeared without trace. DCI Karen Pirie was the last detective to review the file and is drawn into a sinister world of betrayal and dark secrets.

But Karen is already grappling with another case, one with even more questions and fewer answers. A skeleton has been discovered in an abandoned campervan and all clues point to a killer who never faced justice – a killer who is still out there.

In her search for the truth, Karen uncovers a network of lies that has gone unchallenged for years. But lies and secrets can turn deadly when someone is determined to keep them hidden for good . . .

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Blunt Force by Lynda La Plante

Things can’t get much worse for detective Jane Tennison.

Unceremoniously kicked off the adrenaline-fuelled Flying Squad, she’s been relegated to Gerald Road, a small and sleepy police station in the heart of London’s affluent Knightsbridge.

With only petty crime to sink her teeth into, Tennison can feel her career slowly flatlining. That is until the discovery of the most brutal murder Jane has ever seen: Charlie Foxley has been found viciously beaten to death, his body dismembered and disembowelled.

As a big-time showbiz agent, Foxley had a lot of powerful friends – but even more enemies. And alongside her old friend DS Spencer Gibbs, Tennison must journey into the salacious world of show business to find the killer, before they strike again . . .

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Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

In a small town in Sweden it appears to be an ordinary day. But look more closely, and you’ll see a mysterious masked figure approaching a bank…

Two hours later, chaos has descended. A bungled attempted robbery has developed into a hostage situation – and the offender is refusing to communicate their demands to the police.

Within the building, fear quickly turns to irritation for the seven strangers trapped inside. If this is to be their last day on earth, shouldn’t it be a bit more dramatic?

But as the minutes tick by, they begin to suspect that the criminal mastermind holding them hostage might be more in need of rescuing than they are…

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Cover Your Tracks by Claire Askew

‘What if I told you,’ he said, ‘that I believe my mother’s life to be in danger?’

Robertson Bennet returns to Edinburgh after a 25-year absence in search of his parents and his inheritance. But both have disappeared. A quick, routine police check should be enough – and Detective Inspector Helen Birch has enough on her plate trying to help her brother, Charlie, after an assault in prison. But all her instincts tell her not to let this case go. And so she digs.

George and Phamie Bennet were together for a long time. No one can ever really know the secrets kept between husband and wife. But as Birch slowly begins to unravel the truth, terrible crimes start to rise to the surface.

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Must I Go by Yiyun Li

Lilia Liska is 81. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press: the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair.

Increasingly obsessed by this fragment of intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events. Gradually she undercuts Roland’s charming but arrogant voice with an incisive and deeply moving commentary. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. And she returns inexorably to her daughter, Lucy, who took her own life at the age of 27.

Must I Go is an unconventional epistolary novel, a gleefully one-way correspondence between the very-much-alive Lilia and the long-departed Roland. Though mortality is ever-present, this is ultimately a novel about life, in all its messy glory. Life lived, for the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on its own terms. With exquisite subtlety and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart.

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Ordinary Hazards by Anna Bruno

Everyone always wants to know why relationships fail. It’s a spiteful curiosity thing, schadenfreude, but also a self-preservation thing. People want to understand how to avoid the fall.

The answer is complicated. There isn’t one reason, one event. It has something to do with smoking cigarettes and drinking all night. It takes into account thousands of hours of labour on a small house, projects finished and unfinished. It is late-night conversations and inside jokes and making love and having a child. The answer is wrapped up, shrouded and ensconced in prioritization, ambition and work. Caring about these things is not the problem. Not caring about them is death.

Emma has settled into her hometown bar for the evening. It was in this very room that she met Lucas a few years back, on a blind date. Nine months ago, in unimaginable circumstances, they divorced.

As Emma listens to the locals’ banter, key facts about her life story begin to emerge and the past comes bearing down on her like a freight train.

A powerhouse in the business world, why has she ended up here, now a regular in the last bar on the edge of a small town? What is she running away from? And what is she willing to give up in order to recapture the love she has lost?

As Emma teeters on the edge of oblivion, becoming more booze-soaked by the hour, her night begins to spin out of control with shocking results.

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Summerwater by Sarah Moss

On the longest day of the summer, twelve people sit cooped up with their families in a faded Scottish cabin park. The endless rain leaves them with little to do but watch the other residents.

A woman goes running up the Ben as if fleeing; a retired couple reminisce about neighbours long since moved on; a teenage boy braves the dark waters of the loch in his red kayak. Each person is wrapped in their own cares but increasingly alert to the makeshift community around them. One particular family, a mother and daughter without the right clothes or the right manners, starts to draw the attention of the others. Tensions rise and all watch on, unaware of the tragedy that lies ahead as night finally falls.

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The Nidderdale Murders by J R Ellis

In a Yorkshire Dales village everyone has a motive for murder—except the killer.

A retired judge is shot dead outside the Dog and Gun inn in the remote Yorkshire village of Niddersgill. There’s a witness who saw everything, and the gunman’s on the run; the case should be open-and-shut for DCI Jim Oldroyd. But the murderer had no motive for wanting Sandy Fraser dead and, what’s more, no trace of him can be found.

As Oldroyd and his team cast the net wider, they discover that Fraser wasn’t without enemies in Niddersgill. As the wealthy owner of a grouse moor, he’d clashed with farmers, debtors, hunt saboteurs and blackmailers. But none of them were at the scene of the murder. And when a local shopkeeper is gunned down in a second senseless attack, it’s clear that these killings are anything but random.

Surrounded by the dramatic beauty of the Yorkshire Dales, Oldroyd faces a race against time to connect the crimes and find who’s behind them. But with all the evidence sending him down dead ends, can he get one step ahead before someone else is killed?

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The Queen of Tuesday : A Lucille Ball Story by Darin Strauss

This indelible romance begins with a daring conceit–that the author’s grandfather may have had an affair with Lucille Ball. Strauss offers a fresh view of a celebrity America loved more than any other.

Lucille Ball–the most powerful woman in the history of Hollywood–was part of America’s first high-profile interracial marriage. She owned more movie sets than did any movie studio. She more or less single-handedly created the modern TV business. And yet Lucille’s off-camera life was in disarray. While acting out a happy marriage for millions, she suffered in private. Her partner couldn’t stay faithful. She struggled to balance her fame with the demands of being a mother, a creative genius, an entrepreneur, and, most of all, a symbol.

The Queen of Tuesday–Strauss’s follow-up to Half a Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award–mixes fact and fiction, memoir and novel, to imagine the provocative story of a woman we thought we knew.

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The Owens are tied to this Pembrokeshire land – no-one will part them from it.

Leah is tied to home and hearth by debts of love and duty – duty to her father, turned religious zealot after the tragic death of his eldest son, Tom; love for her wastrel younger brother Frank’s two motherless children. One of them will escape, the other will be doomed to follow in their grandfather’s footsteps.

At the close of the 19th century, Cwmderwen’stwenty-four acres, one rood and eight perches are hardwon, the holding run down over the years by debt and poor harvest. But they are all the Owens have and their rent is always paid on time. With Tom’s death a crack is opened up and into this chink in the fabric of the family step Jacob John and his wayward son Eli, always on the lookout for an opportunity.

Saving her family, good and bad, saving Cwmderwen, will change Leah forever and steal her dreams, perhaps even her life…

The Covenant is the shocking prequel to the bestselling A Time For Silence.

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The Company We Keep by Frances Itani

On Tuesday nights in the backroom of Cassie’s café, six strangers seek solace and find themselves part of a “Company of Good Cheer”

Hazzley is at loose ends, even three years after the death of her husband. When her longtime friend Cassandra, café owner and occasional dance-class partner, suggests that she start up a conversation group, Hazzley posts a notice on the community board at the local grocery store. Four people turn up for the first meeting: Gwen, a recently widowed retiree in her early sixties, who finds herself pet-sitting a cantankerous parrot; Chiyo, a forty-year-old fitness instructor who cared for her unyielding but gossip-loving mother through the final days of her life; Addie, a woman pre-emptively grieving a close friend who is seriously ill; and Tom, an antiques dealer and amateur poet who, deprived of home baking since becoming a widower, comes to the first meeting hoping cake will be served. Before long, they are joined by Allam, a Syrian refugee with his own story to tell.

These six strangers are learning that beginnings can be possible at any stage of life. But as they tell their stories, they must navigate what is shared and what is withheld. Which version of the truth will be revealed? Who is prepared to step up when help is needed? This moving, funny and deeply empathic new novel from acclaimed author Frances Itani reminds us that life, with all its twists and turns, never loses its capacity to surprise.

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The Missing Pieces of Me by Amelia Mandeville

Meet the couple you’ll fall for head over heels, and discover the novel that will break your heart and put it back together again

Willow and Dustin. They’re the perfect couple, everyone says so. And since the birth of their baby daughter, Dustin is sure his little family is all he will ever need.

So his world is shattered when he arrives home to find that Willow has disappeared, leaving only a cryptic note to say goodbye with no explanation of where she has gone or why she has left.

Determined to bring her home, Dustin sets out to find Willow. But the more he learns about the girl he loves most in the world, the more he feels like he’s trying to solve a puzzle without all the pieces.

Was Willow really keeping secrets from him?

Or was he just not looking closely enough in the first place?

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Some Like it Greek by Sue Roberts

There’s nothing like a summer escape. A sun-kissed story about living life to the full.

In the month from hell, incurable optimist Anna has lost her father and her job, and her trademark smile is dimming. Clearing out her dad’s house, she discovers a postcard of a beautiful sandy beach and a map with a route plotted to the Greek island of Kefalonia. With an empty summer stretching ahead, Anna’s eyes stray to her father’s old camper van. Next thing she knows, she’s hitting the road with friend Demi in tow, on a course from Salford to Skala!

Over one unforgettable summer, Anna and Demi make their rickety way along the sparkling Mediterranean coast, the hot sun shining down on their frequent mishaps with cheerful local characters. It’s the trip of a lifetime, and the scent of lemons in the air – as well as an unexpected romance – are just what Anna needs to awaken her inner Greek goddess.

But there are big surprises in store when they arrive at the island paradise, which could change both women’s lives forever. And as summer comes to an end, Anna has to decide whether she has had enough of the Greek life, or whether this is only just the beginning…

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The Best of Friends by Lucinda Berry

An unthinkable tragedy forever changes a group of teens and turns family against family in this edge-of-your-seat thriller that begs to be read in one sitting.

Best friends Lindsey, Kendra, and Dani endure every parent’s nightmare when a tragic accident befalls their teenage boys, leaving one dead, another in a coma, and a third too traumatized to speak.

Reeling from the worst night of their lives, the three mothers plunge into a desperate investigation of the bizarre incident. How could something so horrible happen in their wealthy Southern California suburb?

They soon discover that the accident was just the beginning, and troubling discoveries lead to chilling questions: Do they really know their children? Do they even know each other? As more secrets surface, a fog of doubt and suspicion threatens to poison their families, their friendships, and the whole community.

With the illusion of happiness and safety long gone, these women must now confront the hazards of heartbreak, the consequences of jealousy, and the dangers of living double lives.

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Knife Edge by Simon Mayo

You never know where danger may come from…

6.45am. A sweltering London rush hour. And in the last 29 minutes, seven people have been murdered.

In a series of coordinated attacks, seven men and women across London have been targeted. For journalist Famie Madden, the horror unfolds as she arrives for the morning shift.

The victims have one thing in common: they make up the investigations team at the news agency where Famie works. The question everyone’s asking: what were they working on that could prompt such brutal devastation?

As Famie starts to receive mysterious messages, she must find out whether she is being warned of the next attack, or being told that she will be the next victim…

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That’s all for this week folks, happy reading!!