A tragic yet humorous coming-of-age story, The Negligents plots the flailing friendship between Polina and Grace and their troubled families. The fascinating intricacies of their lives are seen from multiple viewpoints as an interwoven series of scenes unfold, but who is telling the truth, and who has secrets yet to reveal? Author Kate Smith uses the framework of a legal negligence claim to explore the nature of friendship, of family loyalty, and how a simple act of carelessness can have deeply toxic consequences.

It is the winter of 1985. Hope Farm sticks out of the ragged landscape like a decaying tooth, its weatherboard walls sagging into the undergrowth. Silver's mother, Ishtar, has fallen for the charismatic Miller, and the three of them have moved to the rural hippie commune to make a new start. But here, at just 13, she is thrust into an unrelenting adult world, and the walls begin to come tumbling down, with deadly consequences.

When Monica is offered a three-month placement in LA, she knows that for the sake of her career she must accept it - even though it means leaving behind nine-year-old Ruby, toddler Luca and her husband, Daniel. She hires Ursula as a housekeeper and nanny during her absence, although the older woman is oddly reluctant to agree to a childcare position. What is the dark secret in Ursula's past which has left her so closed off and reserved? Will her growing attachment to Ruby bring it to the surface?

Nina Todd keeps her head down and tries to live a quiet life: dull job, dependable boyfriend, no disruptions. If there are questions about Nina that remain unanswered, they are questions that even those closest to her don't dare to ask.

Ben is the sole survivor of a crime that claims his mother and countless others. He’s just six years old, and already he must find a new place for himself in the world. Lucy, the doctor who tends to Ben, is grappling with a personal upheaval of her own. She feels a profound connection to the little boy who has lived through the unthinkable. Will recovering his memory heal him or damage him further? 

On her thirty-third birthday, Claire decides that it's time to grow up. Her mother was thirty-three when she drowned. She’d had everything to live for, but Claire's life is a mess. All her relationships have fizzled out. Nothing in her life works. If it wasn’t for the once-very-famous Ray Devine, she wouldn't even have a place to live. She gives herself twelve months to sort out her life…

For 13 years Pen and Cara have had a tumultuous relationship crammed with bickering and intimacy, recrimination and desire. When Cara dies in a car crash, Pen is left to cope with a secret widowhood. Along with that burden comes a hidden story of painful and pleasurable memories. With humour and poignancy, Hood follows Pen through the week of Cara’s death; through the paralysis of grief and the ecstasy of nostalgia to a point where mourning and making a new life melt into one.

The last time Dodie sees her mother alive, Stella is unusually busy and wearing an old red velvet dress. Soon after this, Dodie’s brother Seth goes missing: the only trace of him through postcards signed ‘Yours in the Lord’ addressed from New York State. When Stella hangs herself, Dodie must leave her baby Jake at home and cross the Atlantic to bring Seth back from the mysterious Soul Life Centre. And when baby Jake unexpectedly arrives at Soul Life events take a shocking turn for Dodie.

Peg always felt a little blurred, a little lacking in definition. Her mother died when she was six, her father simply disappeared, and she was brought up by her grandparents and her obese, bedridden aunt. But, despite all this, she never developed the habit of asking questions. At least, not until she met Loz, her straight-talking, psychotherapeutically literate girlfriend, who urges her to confront her demons. But Peg starts to wonder whether her youthful lack of curiousity might not have been a good thing. A very good thing indeed....

Six-year-old Helen and Ellie are identical twins, but Helen is smarter, more popular, and their mother's favorite. Ellie, on the other hand, requires special instruction at school, is friendless, and is punished at every turn. Until they decide to swap places - just for fun, and just for one day - and Ellie refuses to switch back. Everything of Helen's, from her toys to her friends to her identity, now belongs to her sister.

“The dead can't speak to us,” Professor Madoc had said. But that was a lie. Sometimes, only an outsider can get to the truth. Patrick had been on the outside all his life. Thoughtful, but different, infuriating even to his own mother, his life changes when he follows an obsession with death to study anatomy at university. When he uncovers a crime that everybody else was too close to see, he proves finally that he has been right all along: Nothing is exactly as it seems. And there have been many more lies closer to home....

After the horrors of the past, Louisa Williams is desperate to make a clean start. Her husband, Sam, is dead. Her children, too, are gone, victims of the car accident in which he died. Sam said that she would never get away from him. That he would hound her to death if she tried to leave. Louisa never thought that he would want to harm their children, though. But then she never thought that he would betray her with a woman like Sophie. And now Sophie is determined to take all that Louisa has left.

It starts with a holiday. A three-year-old boy on a beach, and the hero who saves his life.But nothing is ever that simple.Tessa and Marcus know they owe Dave Jepsom more than they can ever repay.Yet even as he is walking from the sea with their son in his arms, there is something about him that makes them uneasy. He is not like other people that they know. Being with him makes them confront truths about themselves they would rather not see. The shock of that moment will change everything. And it's not how things start that matter. But how they end....

Janice Galloway redefined contemporary Scottish fiction with the extraordinary The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, first published in 1989, going on to become a towering presence in British literature, winning the McVitie's Prize, the EM Forster Award, the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award and the SMIT Non-fiction Book of the Year. She is a novelist, short story writer, memoiriere, librettist, essayist and poet.

The simple fact of the matter is that Iris loves life. Maybe she’s forgotten that. Sometimes that happens, doesn’t it? To the best of us? All I have to do is remind her of that one simple fact. Monday morning starts like any other – until Terry discovers her best friend Iris has gone missing. Finding her takes Terry, Iris and Terry’s confused father Eugene, into an extraordinary journey – one that will change all of their lives.