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The Paying Guests

Nail-biting story of illicit love and murder. Pre-order now!

The Paying Guests is a novel full of surprising twists and turns and nail-biting suspense. Revealing details of the story would ruin it for you so I won’t say much. What I can say is that it includes a steaming love story with a twist and a brutal murder against the backdrop of post-World War I London. The Paying Guests is a completely gripping book, the kind of novel you read while walking around and that keeps you awake into the night. Few contemporary authors can beat Sarah Waters in reconstructing the feel and atmosphere of a period in history. In The Paying Guests, she skilfully does it again.

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The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair

Hyped candyfloss for the brain. Is this the Damien Hirst of literature?

I first heard about this book at the Frankfurt Book Fair two years ago. It was one of those classic book fair stories where everyone is dying for some gossip; something extraordinary to tell the next person they meet. In October 2012, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair was exactly that book. It had a great story to match, a 28 year old, good-looking author (incidentally, not unlike the author in the book), an old publisher about to retire, stumbling over a goldmine. The novel was sold to 32 territories for extraordinary sums and has since gone on to sell more than two million copies. So far, so good…

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The Impossible Knife of Memory

Teen/Young Adult

Powerful teenage novel about fitting in...or not?

I loved Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson, the first in the Seeds of America series, gripping historical fiction for young adults set in the American Revolutionary War. The Impossible Knife of Memory couldn’t be more different to Chains, on the surface.

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Rooftoppers

8-11 years

A children’s novel of breathtaking adventure and huge heart

Winner of the Blue Peter Book Awards 2014, this is a fantastic adventure story with a speedy plot, keeping children hooked till the very last page. It’s full of life-affirming messages: ‘Never ignore a possible’ is young Sophie’s war cry as she battles to find her real mother – we have to fight for our dreams, she shows us.

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Things to look forward to…

Coming soon… Murakami, Waters, Mitchell and McEwan.

My top picks from the list of upcoming releases. Pre-order now and be amongst the first to read them!

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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

If you read one book this year, let this be it

British author David Mitchell is one of my absolute favourite contemporary writers and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a superb novel. The writing is exquisite, the setting and historical background fascinating and the story riveting.  A must read. The story is set at the end of the 18th century on Dejima, a sandbank in the bay of Nagasaki, Japan. A Dutch trading post and for two hundred years Japan’s only point of contact with the outside world. Clerk Jacob de Zoet is sent to Dejima by the Dutch East Indies Company to address a serious case of corruption.

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Look Who’s Back

Repetitive Hitler satire disappoints

It’s 2011 and Hitler wakes up from a 66-year long coma in a park in Berlin. He befriends a newsagent who assumes he is a look-alike. Astounded by his resemblance and brilliant ‘acting’, the newsagent puts him in touch with the producer of a comedy talk show. Soon, Hitler is their most popular guest, generating an ever-increasing following. Look Who’s Back takes a stab at tackling one of Germany’s greatest taboos, but is also a satire on our obsession with the cult of celebrities.

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The Infatuations

Cerebral murder mystery from Spain's literary heavy weight

Javier Marías is one of Spain’s most prominent writers. Regularly tipped as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, he is also a respected translator of important English language literature, a journalist and a publisher. A literary heavy weight, in other words. His latest book, The Infatuations is the first philosophical murder mystery I’ve come across. There are no nail-biting chases through dark forests, no mutilated bodies floating in the sea, the action is almost exclusively cerebral. Or, as Boyd Tonkin of The Independent newspaper called it: ‘A thinking person’s murder mystery.’

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A Death in the Family

To Knausgaard or not to Knausgaard?

I have been holding off writing about the Norwegian publishing phenomenon Karl Ove Knausgaard until the other day, when I picked up the first volume in English translation and realised how well it travels. The press are awash with, mostly raving, reviews of his autobiographical novels and interviews with the author. Zadie Smith has said she needed them ‘like crack’.  Should you read them?

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Stoner

Magnificently written 'word-of-mouth' bestseller

Stoner has become somewhat of a publishing sensation over the past eighteen months, topping bestseller list in Holland, France, Italy, Spain, Israel and, more recently, in the UK. Written by American John Williams in 1965, Stoner barely made a mark at the time. A few favourable reviews and 2000 copies sold was all there was to it. Somehow, miraculously, nearly 50 years later, the novel has been given a second lease of life, and is now a shining example of a ‘word-of-mouth’ bestseller.

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