City Life

Nell Stevens’ life is a mess. When her business goes bust and her fiancé with it, Nell’s happy ever after in California falls apart and she moves back to London to start over. But a lot has changed since she’s been gone....

Eileen is sick of being 79. Leena's tired of life in her 20s. Maybe it's time they swapped places.... 

With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential debut of recent years....

For fans of Modern Lovers and Conversations with Friends, an addictive, humorous, and poignant debut novel about the shock waves caused by one couple's impulsive marriage....

Joe is 17, a gifted artist and a brilliant older brother to 12-year-old Finn. They live with their Ma and Da in a Dublin tower block called Bojaxhiu, or 'the Jax'. It's not an easy place to be a kid....

For 30-somethings Lindy, Ailbhe and Roe, the move to the new hyper-polished, luxury housing development, Monteray Valley, feels like slow death by Netflix, neighbourhood Whatsapp groups and Saturday nights in....

Every day, Iona Iverson travels to work by train. Every day, she sees the same people, making assumptions about them, and even giving them nicknames. But they never speak. Obviously. Then one morning, Smart-But-Sexist-Surbiton chokes on a grape right in front of Iona....

Danielle Steel tells an unforgettable story about a famed hotel, where a few complications quickly escalate into a matter of life and death, changing the lives of everyone who passes through its doors....

The complete fourth and fifth series of Alexander McCall Smith’s radio dramas based on his much-loved novels about the residents of an Edinburgh tenement building....

Daddy’s girl Samantha Reynold hadn’t bargained on unexpectedly needing to step into her father’s shoes and take over the family casino business....

Sayon Hughes, a young Black man from Bristol, dreams of a world far removed from the one in which he was raised....

With the Blitz over and London reeling from war, jazz musician Lawrie Matthews has answered England’s call for help.... 

When Libby Nicholls arrives in London, broken-hearted and with her life in tatters, the first person she meets on the bus is elderly pensioner Frank. He tells her about the time in 1962 he met a girl on the number 88 bus with beautiful red hair just like her own....

To his customers and neighbours on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family.... 

Sheffield, 1939. With war declared, these brave women will step up and do their bit for their country....

Irene Pollock is shocked to learn that her small son, Bertie, harbours a highly unsuitable ambition; and Angus finds himself facing a large Glaswegian gangster bearing gifts....

If I Had Your Face plunges us into the mesmerising world of contemporary Seoul....

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats....

Eve, Justin, Susie and Ed have been friends since they were 18. Now in their 30s, the four are still as close as ever, Thursday pub quiz night is still sacred and Eve is still secretly in love with Ed....

Ivy Edwards is 31 years old, funny, shameless and a bit of a romantic. She's also currently trying not to cry in the office toilet....

This is a story of a London you won’t find in any guidebooks. This is a story about what it’s like to exist in the moment, about boys too eager to become men, growing up in the hidden war zones of big cities - and the girls trying to make it their own way....

Nell'incanto evanescente delle notti pietroburghesi tra maggio e giugno, un giovane vagabondeggia in solitudine...

The long-awaited new novel from one of America's most highly regarded contemporary writers, The Committed follows the Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris as a refugee.... 

Cabbages... The Turkish variety are prized for their enlarged leaf bud, that’s where we put the heroin...

A young woman’s body is discovered with horrifying injuries, a recent newspaper cutting pinned to her. A detective with everything to prove. This is her only chance to redeem herself. A serial killer with nothing to lose. He’s waited years, and his reign of terror has only just begun....

When your first shot of love curdles, switch to a nice Cabernet. Charlotte never imagined she’d be a single mom in her 30's. With a fulfilling job, a sweet toddler, and a supportive family, she knows she should be counting her blessings, but it feels like something is missing...her. Although he and Charlotte made a marriage pact when they were teenagers, Damon always knew he’d never get married. An architect and artist, his life is full, and there has never been room for more than casual affairs. But lately, he’s felt like something is missing.

Winter blankets Montreal, while a bookseller and her lover dream of Prague. As the narrator’s open marriage becomes the subject of a novel, reality blurs with fiction, and she tries to reconcile the need to create with the desire for love and sex. Written in stark, spare prose, Prague is an introspective and intimate account of the making of a novel from life.

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the centre of Bonds, a successful 1938 novel that all of New York seems to have read. But there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Ruth dares to dream of another life—far away from the horrors within the walls of Bethnal Green’s infamous orphanage. Luckily she has her friends, Amy and Ellen—but she can’t keep them safe, and the suffering is only getting worse. Surely there must be a way out of here? But when Ruth breaks free from the shackles of confinement and sets out into East London, hoping to make a new life for herself, she finds that, for a girl with nowhere to turn, life can be just as tough on the outside.

When the Seoul police inform Min that his girlfriend Yu-jin has taken her own life, he’s sure it can't be true. She was successful, ambitious, happy, just on the cusp of graduating from university and claiming the future she’d always dreamed of. Devastated by Yu-jin’s death, Min throws himself into finding out why she could have secretly wanted to die. Or did she? And the more he learns about her, the more he begins to doubt he ever really knew her at all.

Cammie, a dancer in her thirties, has just landed her first part in a show since coming to New York City. Yet the tug of familial obligations and the guilt of what she sacrificed to be there weigh down her dancing feet. Cammie’s lover, Tom, an older piano player, came to the city as a young man in the 1980s with a story eerily in tune with Cammie’s own. Through their triumphs and failures, both learn the fleetness of glory, the sweetness of new love, and how a dream come true isn’t cherished until it’s passed. 

Sayon Hughes, a young Black man from Bristol, dreams of a world far removed from the one in which he was raised. Far removed from the torn slips outside the bookie's, the burnt spoons and the crooked solutions his community embraces; most of all, removed from the Christianity of his uncaring parents and the prejudice of law-makers.

The Vanderhaven family of Manhattan has it all: wealth, prestige, good looks, and a thriving business empire. But their seemingly perfect world is ripped apart when their younger daughter, eight-year-old Brenna, runs off after overhearing her parents arguing. Out on the streets, she quickly realizes she’s lost. Even more frightening, Brenna soon realizes that a man is following her. Meanwhile, in a townhouse in Brooklyn, Callie Griffin is throwing a birthday party for her one-year-old son, Oliver. The joy of the day is ruined by her sister Lauren’s too short, drive-by appearance.

For 30-somethings Lindy, Ailbhe and Roe, the move to the new hyper-polished, luxury housing development, Monteray Valley, feels like slow death by Netflix, neighbourhood Whatsapp groups and Saturday nights in. Potential for exciting possibilities seem to be withering faster than you can say 'postnatal dryness' as their lives are consumed by other halves, domestic drudgery and obligations. Compiling a snag list to send to their builder sees the new friends contemplating their own personal snag lists and inspires a business idea that will change the course of all their lives.

In the smart Parisian suburb of Maisons-Larue, in the wake of the Paris 2015 terrorist attacks, an au pair is arrested after the sudden and suspicious death of her nine-year-old charge. The truth behind what happened is unravelled through six women, and all of them play a part in nine-year-old Julien's death.

After a rough year at NYU, aspiring writer Lora Ricci is thrilled to land a summer internship at ELLE magazine where she meets Cat Wolff, contributing editor and enigmatic daughter of a clean-energy mogul. Cat takes Lora under her wing, soliciting her help with side projects and encouraging her writing.

Born under different stars—Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic—they should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all. Their environment is a hyper-masculine and sectarian one, for gangs of young men and the violence they might dole out dominate the Glaswegian estate where they live. And yet against all odds Mungo and James become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. 

 The Not Wives traces the lives of three women as they navigate the Occupy Wall Street movement and each other. Stevie is a nontenured professor and recently divorced single mom; her best friend, Mel, is a bartender, torn between her long-term girlfriend and her desire to explore polyamory; and Johanna is a homeless teenager trying to find her way in the world who bears shared witness to a tragedy that interlaces her life with Stevie’s. 

Serena Mills should be at her wedding. But she’s not. Instead, she’s eating an ice cream sundae and drinking an obscenely large glass of wine in a Harvester off the M25. Everyone thinks she’s gone mad. She’s left the man everyone told her she was ‘so lucky’ to find - because Serena wants to find love. Real love. A love she deserves - not one she should just feel grateful for.

New York City, 1922. Harp Devereaux is torn. Part of her desperately wants to return to Ireland to finish what she and her family and friends started and to witness the departure of the British forces from Ireland after eight hundred long years. But the other part finds life in America during the Roaring Twenties too exciting to trade for the sleepy streets of County Cork. She and John Joe are united and determined to sample all that life after the Great War has to offer, but life Stateside is not as free and easy as Harp first imagines.