Here’s this week’s list of new fiction titles. These are titles appearing in hardback/paperback for the first time. In some cases the ebook might already be available. All titles are based on the listings found in The Bookseller, so I’m not working from a list of all titles being published.
Just a reminder I don’t see any advance copies, my choices are based on the blurb, gut instinct and what takes my fancy at the time.
There’s a slight change to the format over the coming month or so as I’m prepping these posts ahead of impending surgery and the subsequent convalescence. Adding the normal purchasing links is just eating into what little time I have to get them done, so I’m afraid I’m just including the Amazon link (as I take the images and blurb from Amazon it seems only fair).
(NB This post features Affiliate links from which I earn a small commission on qualifying purchases)
Index
Historical (I tend to take this as pre 1960’s ie not in my lifetime!)
Non-Fiction added extras
Crime, Thriller & Mystery
Night Hunters by Oliver Bottini
Over the course of several days one hot summer, a female student from Freiburg disappears, a father is murdered in a brutal attack, a teenage boy drowns in the Rhine in suspicious circumstances. It soon becomes evident to Chief Inspector Louise Boni and her colleagues at Freiburg’s criminal police that the three cases are connected – and that others are now in terrible danger. Including Boni herself.
In the fourth of the Black Forest Investigations, Louise Boni is confronted with the grim secrets of outwardly respectable citizens. Sometimes it takes very little to unleash the monster in man.
Oliver Bottini takes his readers to moments of heightened tension before allowing them to peer into the abysses of human evil. He is an exceptional storyteller.
The Courier by Holly Down
She sees much more than you think . . .
Five years ago, Laurel Lovejoy had it all. The high-powered city job, the loving husband, the perfect daughter. Now, she is forty and alone, and working for a courier service. But she has discovered that being a delivery driver comes with a superpower: it makes her invisible. People accept her presence without question. They go about their lives, unaware of just how much she sees – how much she knows.
Laurel is particularly fascinated by the residents of Paradise Found, an exclusive gated cul-de-sac. She sometimes even finds her way there when she’s not working, using her days off to soak up as much information about the inhabitants and their lives as she can. Everyone needs a hobby.
Then one day Laurel sees something in one of the houses – something that blows her whole world apart, and will have devastating consequences for everyone involved . . .
Safe at Home by Lauren North
What if you left your child alone, and something terrible happened?
Anna James is an anxious mother. So when she has to leave eleven-year-old Harrie home alone one evening, she can’t stop worrying about her daughter. But nothing bad ever happens in the sleepy village of Barton St Martin.
Except something goes wrong that night, and Anna returns to find Harrie with bruises she won’t explain. The next morning a local businessman is reported missing and the village is sparking with gossip.
Anna is convinced there’s a connection and that Harrie is in trouble. But how can she protect her daughter if she doesn’t know where the danger is coming from?
The Midnight Hour by Elly Griffiths
Brighton, 1965
When theatrical impresario Bert Billington is found dead in his retirement home, no one suspects foul play. But when the postmortem reveals that he was poisoned, suspicion falls on his wife, eccentric ex-Music Hall star Verity Malone.
Frustrated by the police response to Bert’s death and determined to prove her innocence, Verity calls in private detective duo Emma Holmes and Sam Collins. This is their first real case, but as luck would have it they have a friend on the inside: Max Mephisto is filming a remake of Dracula, starring Seth Billington, Bert’s son. But when they question Max, they feel he isn’t telling them the whole story.
Emma and Sam must vie with the police to untangle the case and bring the killer to justice. They’re sure the answers must lie in Bert’s dark past and in the glamorous, occasionally deadly, days of Music Hall. But the closer they get to the truth, the more danger they find themselves in…
General/Contemporary Fiction
To Italy with Love by Nicky Pellegrino
Love happens when you least expect it…
Assunta has given up on love. She might run her little trattoria in the most romantic mountain town in Italy, but love just seems to have passed her by.
Sarah-Jane is finished with love. She’s buying an old convertible and driving around Italy this summer – it’s the perfect way to forget all about her hot celebrity ex-boyfriend!
But when Sarah-Jane’s car breaks down in Montenello, she has to stay longer than she intended! And the trouble is, love is everywhere…
The Wish by Nicholas Sparks
What if the person you needed most, turned up when you least expected them?
Maggie hasn’t told this story in years. More than two decades ago, she fell in love. She was sixteen and far from home, waiting to give her baby up for adoption. Bryce showed Maggie how to take photographs and he didn’t judge her for the way her belly swelled under her jumper. They had the perfect first kiss. Theirs was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of love.
Now, as Maggie sits by the Christmas tree in her gallery telling her story, surrounded by the photographs that made her famous – the photographs Bryce never saw – her new gallery assistant asks her a question. If she had one wish, what would she wish for this Christmas?
Maggie always thought she knew the answer to that question. But before she can say ‘I’d go back to that winter with Bryce’, she stops herself. It is all she has ever wanted but suddenly here, on this dark night under the twinkling stars, there is something else she wants. She wants to find her baby.
The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard
One long night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Kathrine, a priest, is flying home from a Bible seminar, questioning her marriage. Journalist Jostein is out drinking for the night, while his wife, Turid, a nurse at a psychiatric care unit, is on a nightshift when one of her patients escapes.
Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears blazing in the sky. It brings with it a mysterious sense of foreboding.
Strange things start to happen as nine lives come together under the star. Hundreds of crabs amass on the road as Arne drives at night; Jostein receives a call about a death metal band found brutally murdered in a Satanic ritual; Kathrine conducts a funeral service for a man she met at the airport – but is he actually dead?
The Morning Star is about life in all its mundanity and drama, the strangeness that permeates our world, and the darkness in us all. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s astonishing new novel goes to the utmost limits of freedom and chaos, to what happens when forces beyond our comprehension are unleashed, and the realms of the living and the dead collide.
The Antarctica of Love by Sara Stridsberg
After a childhood of neglect, Inni is a rebellious teenager, a volatile young woman, a drug addict, a sex worker, an unreliable mother . . . She lives her life on the margins, but it is a life that is full, complex, full of different shades of dark and light – until it is brutally ended one summer’s day on a lake shore at the heart of a distant, rain-washed forest.
On the surface, this is the story of Inni’s death – but really it is about her life before, and the lives that carry on afterwards. It’s about her children, her parents, her childhood, adolescence and the chain of choices, tragedies and accidents that lead her to life on the streets and take her into the wrong crowd, the wrong places, and finally the wrong car with the wrong person.
The Daughter’s Choice by S D Robertson
Is her whole life built on a lie?
Rose has always been close to her father. Her mother died soon after she was born, so it’s been just the two of them for as long as she can remember.
But a chance encounter days before she’s due to get married leaves Rose questioning everything she has ever known.
The man she trusts most in the world has been keeping a secret from her.
And the truth will leave her with an impossible choice…
Historical
The Collector’s Daughter by Gill Paul
An unforgettable discovery
In 1922, Lady Evelyn Herbert’s dreams are realised when she is the first to set foot inside the lost tomb of Tutankhamun for over 3,000 years.
A cursed life
But the months after the discovery are marred by tragedy, when Eve’s father dies suddenly and her family is torn in two. Desperate to put the past behind her, Eve retreats into a private life with her new husband.
A deadly choice
But she is harbouring a dark secret about what really happened in Egypt. And when a young woman comes asking questions years later, the happiness Eve has finally found is threatened once more…
Non-Fiction – bonus extra!
Humble Pie and Cold Turkey by Caroline Taggart
In this highly entertaining book, language enthusiast and Sunday Times best-selling author Caroline Taggart browses through thousands of years of history to shed light on why we use the words and phrases we do. Arranged by themes including food, the household, childhood, romance and more, this intriguing book looks at the origins of our language from their historical context. For example, did you know that:
If you rest on your laurels, you’re imitating a complacent Roman general?
If you eavesdrop, you’re likely to get wet?
If you’re taken aback, you should, strictly speaking, be a sailing ship?
If you’re galvanized into action, you’re behaving like Frankenstein’s monster?
From blue-blooded (an invention of aristocratic Spaniards) to limelight (a way of lighting Victorian theatres), passing an exam with flying colours (another image from sailing ships) to winning hands down (from horse racing), Humble Pie and Cold Turkey will answer questions you may never have thought to ask. Including why turkeys need to be cold and how pies came to be humble.
So that’s all for this week.
Happy Reading!
Jill's Book Cafe 
Fab to see Nicky Pellegrino’s book here Jill, I love her books! xx
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Me too 😊 xx
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