Authors & Books

Available to option

The day her children leave home, Eva climbs into bed and stays there. She's had enough - of her kids' carelessness, her husband's thoughtlessness and of the world's general indifference. Brian can't believe his wife is doing this. Who is going to make dinner? Taking it badly, he rings Eva's mother - but she's busy having her hair done. So he rings his mother - she isn't surprised. Eva, she says, is probably drunk. Let her sleep it off. But Eva won't budge. She makes new friends - Mark the window cleaner and Alexander, a very sexy handyman. She discovers Brian's been having an affair. And Eva realizes to her horror that everyone has been taking her for granted - including herself. Though Eva's refusal to behave like a dutiful wife and mother soon upsets everyone from medical authorities to her neighbours she insists on staying in bed. And from this odd but comforting place she begins to see both the world and herself very, very differently. . . The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year is a funny and touching novel about what happens when someone refuses to be the person everyone expects them to be. Sue Townsend, Britain's funniest writer for over three decades, has written a brilliant novel that hilariously deconstructs modern family life.

Publication date: 1st March 2012 by Penguin

Available to option

Stonemouth. Home to Stewart Gilmour. Or at least it used to be. Until he was forced into exile after an incident with the town’s biggest crime family. Now, after five years away and an agreed truce with the Murstons, it’s time for a homecoming. But it’s soon clear that only Stewart is taking this promise of peace seriously. Before long a quick drop into the cold grey stoun begins to look like the soft option, and as he steps back into the minefield of his past to confront his guilt and all that it has lost him, Stewart uncovers ever darker stories, and his homecoming takes a more lethal turn than even he had anticipated. Tough, funny, fast-paced and touching, Stonemouth cracks open adolescence, love, brotherhood and vengeance in a rite-of-passage novel like no other.

Publication date: 5th April 2012 by Little, Brown

Available to option

'Bea treads carefully on the thick carpet, quite deliberately like a servant. Her elder sister, Clemmie, tells her that it is "not done" to worry about being heard but Bea enjoys this oh-so-silent rebellion against convention. She teases back, "This is the twentieth century, Clem, things are about to change."'

London, 1914. Two young women dream of breaking free from tradition and obligation; they know that suffragettes are on the march and that war looms, but at 35 Park Lane, Lady Masters, head of a dying industrial dynasty, insists that life is about service and duty.

Below stairs, housemaid Grace Campbell is struggling. Her family in Carlisle believes she is a high-earning secretary, but she has barely managed to get work in service - something she keeps even from her adored brother. Asked to send home more money than she earns, Grace is in trouble.

As third housemaid she waits on Miss Beatrice, the youngest daughter of the house, who, fatigued with the social season, is increasingly drawn into the Mrs Pankhurst's captivating underground world of militant suffragettes.  Soon Bea is playing a dangerous game that will throw her in the path of a man her mother wouldn't let through the front door.

When war comes, Bea and Grace find their secrets on a collision course that will change their lives for good.  

Brilliantly capturing a deeply fascinating period of British life in which the normal boundaries of behaviour were overturned and the social hierarchy could no longer be taken for granted, Park Lane is as gripping and intense as Frances Osborne's number one bestselling The Bolter.

Publication date: 7th June 2012 by Virago

Available to option

Calum MacLean is a young hit man with a few jobs under his belt and a rising reputation with the people who matter. He is determined to maintain his freelance status rather than signing with any one firm. When local bosses Young and Jamieson sign him up for a hit, he makes his terms of business clear. Once the job is accomplished, however, Calum finds himself drawn into the start of a vicious turf war, which puts at risk not only his cherished freedoms but also his very life. With a terrific cast of secondary characters, the novel charts in acute detail the business of organized crime and the complex relations between those on both sides of the law: this is a world of tough choices and harder knocks.  The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter is a fast-paced, psychologically sharp, beautifully observed debut novel, which depicts a world in which there are no second chances.

Publication date: Jan/Feb 2013 by Macmillan

Optioned by Origin Pictures

The year is 1803, and Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years. There are now two handsome and healthy sons in the Pemberley nursery, Elizabeth’s beloved sister Jane and her husband, Bingley, live within seventeen miles, the ordered and secure life of Pemberley seems unassailable, and Elizabeth’s happiness in her marriage is complete. But their peace is threatened and old sins and misunderstandings are rekindled on the eve of the annual autumn ball. The Darcys and their guests are preparing to retire for the night when a chaise appears, rocking down the path from Pemberley’s wild woodland, and as it pulls up, Lydia Wickham, an uninvited guest, tumbles out, screaming that her husband has been murdered.

Publication date: 3rd November 2011 by Faber and Faber

Available to option

When young Elliot gets a labourer's job at Mr Evans's after being sacked from a pig farm for liberating six of its sows, he thinks he'll have even more opportunities to lean on gates or stare at fields. But his best mate Spike keeps getting him into trouble, first by showing him what is being grown in a tucked-away polytunnel, and then turning up at his caravan's door with a van full of weed. As Elliot tries to help his friend get rid of the hot merchandise, they find themselves at the receiving end of a cruel cat-and-mouse game.

A tale of adventure with as many twists and turns as the enchanting Somerset landscape that forms its backdrop, Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke is, above all, a celebration of the English countryside - full of magic, history and superstition - where smoke is in the air, and where not all is what it seems.

Available to option

On 9 April 1953 an attractive twenty-one-year-old woman went missing from her family home in Rome. Thirty-six hours later her body was found washed up on a neglected beach at Torvaianica, forty kilometres from the Italian capital. Some said it was suicide; others, a tragic accident. But as the police tried to close the case, darker rumours bubbled to the surface. Could it be that the mysterious death of this quiet, conservative girl was linked to a drug-fuelled orgy, involving some of the richest and most powerful men in Italy? It was a crime that the newspapers, the public and one particularly determined detective wanted to get to the heart of. The short life and tragic death of Wilma Montesi was played out against a fascinating backdrop. By the 1950s Italy, in the wake of Mussolini's brutal Fascist government, was in the process of reinventing itself. And with the help of Hollywood stars such as Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, it seemed to be succeeding. Suddenly Italy, and Rome in particular, was the most glamorous place on earth. But the murder of Wilma Montesi exposed a darker side of Roman life - a life of corruption, cover-ups and carnal pleasures. In Death and the Dolce Vita the distinguished cultural historian Stephen Gundle uses the gripping and tragic story of Wilma Montesi to explore the fascinating contradictions of this most complex country.

Available to option

When she was only two years old, Sabriye Tenberken was diagnosed with a retinal disease that, her parents were told, would cause her to go blind by the age of twelve. Determined to live a normal life, she made the decision never to allow herself to be thought of as an invalid. While studying Chinese and Asian civilizations in college, she learned that in Tibet blind children lived in appalling conditions, rejected by society, abandoned, and left to their own devices. It was then that young Sabriye knew her life's mission would take her to Tibet to help the blind.

In 1997, defying everyone's advice, and armed only with her rudimentary Chinese and Tibetan, Sabriye travelled to Tibet, where for long, arduous months she battled both Chinese and Tibetan bureaucracies and insurmountable red tape. Refusing to accept defeat, she obsessively pursued her mission to found a school for the blind. With two Tibetan friends, she set out-on horseback-to explore the countryside, tracking down the blind, abandoned children in remote villages. Returning with a mere handful at first, she opened her school in Lhasa. For the first time in the history of Tibet, and thanks to the braille alphabet she herself had devised, blind children were able to get a basic general education and look upon their future with a newfound dignity.

Part of Sabriye's ambitious long-term project was also to create a vocational school where her students would learn a profession and become self-sufficient. Word quickly spread, and more and more students appeared. From its modest start, her school has grown today into a full-fledged institution for not only blind children but blind adults as well.

Through her persistence and courage, Sabriye Tenberken single-handedly has brought light to the blind population of Tibet.

Available to option

Malcolm Fox and his team from Internal Affairs are back. They’ve been sent to Fife to investigate whether fellow cops covered up for a corrupt colleague, DC Paul Carter. Carter has been found guilty of misconduct with his own uncle, also in the force, having proved to be his nephew’s nemesis. But what should be a simple job is soon complicated by intimations of conspiracy and cover-up – and a brutal murder, a murder committed with a weapon that should not even exist.

The spiraling investigation takes Fox back to 1985, a year of turmoil in British political life. Terrorists intent on a split between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom were becoming more brazen and ruthless, sending letter-bombs and anthrax spores to government offices, plotting kidnaps and murder, and trying to stay one step ahead of the spies sent to flush them out.

Fox has a duty to get at the truth while the body count rises, the clock starts ticking, and he fights not just for his professional life but his very survival.

Publication date: October 2011 by Orion

Available to option

In 1812 the British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated, the only time this has ever happened in British history. It was an era of massive upheaval and danger: Britain was at war with France and with her former colonies, the new United States. The ban on the slave trade together with the industrial revolution and massive changes in the farming economy was creating widespread social unrest at home. Perceval’s assassin was quickly written off as a mad man, and swiftly tried and executed, but Andro Linklater’s forensic examination of the circumstances surrounding the killing of the prime minister reveals a wealth of plots and intrigues as vested interests and international politics combined to try and thwart a politician whose liberal vision and authoritarian rule were seen as more threatening to the status quo than the massed armies of Napoleon.

U.S. & U.K. Publication date: 2012 by Bloomsbury

Available to option

A heartbreaking novel about wartime secrets every bit as powerful as the worldwide bestseller, Sophie's Choice.  At the end of the Second World War, Silvana and eight-year-old Aurek board the ship that will take them from Poland to England. After living wild in the forests for years, carrying a terrible secret, all Silvana knows is that she and Aurek are survivors. Everything else is lost. Waiting in Ipswich is Silvana’s husband Janusz, who has not seen his wife and son for six years. He has found his family a house and works hard planting a proper English garden to welcome them. But the six years apart have changed them all. To make a real home, Silvana and Janusz will have to come to terms with what happened during the war, accept that each is different and allow their beloved but wild son Aurek to be who he truly is.

U.S. & U.K. Publication date: May 2011

Available to option

In 1923, English sisters Evangeline and Lizzie head to the ancient city of Kashgar to help establish a Christian mission.  Whilst Lizzie has left thanks to her ardor for both God and their strangely serene leader Millicent, Eva has less clear reasons for taking off…yet she is ready for the adventure her Roadster bicycle and commission to write A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar will take her on.

Frieda, a present day Londoner, finds refugee Tayeb outside her door.  In the morning she discovers the bedding she gave him neatly folded and a gift of beautiful Arabic drawings.  The two become friends and, when Frieda inherits the flat of an unknown woman, the two set off on an unpredictable adventure together.

Eva and Frieda’s stories are beautifully interwoven in this novel that explores the links between the two women, their societies’ restrictions, and the meeting of differing traditions in an increasingly globalised world.

Publication date: July 2012

Optioned by Ryan Murphy

The Monarchy has been dismantled… When a Republican party wins the General Election, their first act in power is to strip the royal family of their assets and titles and send them to live on a housing estate in the Midlands. Exchanging Buckingham Palace for a two-bedroomed semi in Hell Close (as the locals dub it), caviar for boiled eggs, servants for a social worker named Trish, the Queen and her family learn what it means to be poor among the great unwashed. But is their breeding sufficient to allow them to rise above their changed circumstance or deep down are they really just like everyone else?

Available to option

An age-old tale of love, temptation, confusion, commitment and coming to terms with the choices we've made, that – in a wry, humorous, wise but loving voice – tells the story of one young man's pre-wedding panic as he grapples with the conflicts between responsibility and passion, security and freedom, tradition and independence. In a triumphant and beautifully executed recasting of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Francesca Segal opens up a whole world to us with assurance and grace, as we peer into the close knit community of Jewish north-west London and watch these universal human dramas being played out.

" The Innocents is an exuberant, sensitive, witty novel, elegantly-written, partly a study of universal dramas of love, marriage and fear, partly a very modern, sassy London story, partly a Jewish novel.  I found it irresistible."   - Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: the Biography

Available to option

“But for the floors, and the sofa, and the porn, and the dead and missing, the flat was restored to order.”
A book about how a tiny oversight can trip off a disastrous and farcical (fatal, even) chain of consequences. It's about the relationship between two men who don't know each other very well. It's about alienation and being alone in a foreign city. It's about the quest for perfection and the struggle against entropy. And it is, a little, about how to take care of wooden floors.
Oskar is a Mittel-European minimalist composer best known for a piece called Variations on Tram Timetables. He is married to a Californian art dealer named Laura and he lives with two cats, named after Russian composers, in an Eastern European city. Having said all that, CARE OF WOODEN FLOORS isn't particularly about Oskar. Oskar is in Los Angeles, having his marriage to Laura dismantled by lawyers, and he has entrusted an old college friend with the task of looking after his cats, and taking care of his perfect, beautiful apartment. Despite the fact that Oskar has left dozens of surreally detailed notes covering every aspect of looking after the flat, things do not go well...

Publication date: February 2012

Available to option

A hypnotic detective adventure story set in the mysterious Arctic. Nothing on the tundra rotted...The whole history of human settlement lay exposed there, under that big northern sky. On Craig Island, a vast landscape of ice north of the Arctic Circle, three travelers are hunting duck. Among them is expert Inuit hunter and guide, Edie Kiglatuk; a woman born of this harsh, beautiful terrain. The two men are tourists, experiencing Arctic life in the raw, but when one of the men is shot dead in mysterious circumstances, the local Council of Elders in the tiny settlement of Autisaq is keen to dismiss it as an accident. Then two adventurers arrive in Autisaq hoping to search for the remains of the legendary Victorian explorer Sir James Fairfax. The men hire Edie along with Edie's stepson Joe, and two parties set off in different directions. Four days later, Joe returns to Autisaq frostbitten, hypothermic and disoriented, to report his man missing. And when things take an even darker turn, Edie finds herself heartbroken, and facing the greatest challenge of her life...

Aviailable to option

Winner of the Orange Prize ‘Remarkable’ – Sunday Times; ‘Enthralling’ – Daily Mail; ‘Superb’ – Independent

Identical twins Georgia and Bessi live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue. It is a place of beanbags, nectarines and secrets, and visitors must always knock before entering. Down below, there is not much harmony. Their Nigerian mother puts cayenne pepper on her Yorkshire pudding and has mysterious ways of dealing with homesickness; their father angrily roams the streets of Neasden, prey to the demons of his Derbyshire upbringing. Forced to create their own identities, the Hunter children build a separate universe. Older sister Bel discovers sex, high heels and organic hairdressing, the twins prepare for a flapjack empire, and baby sister Kemy learns to moonwalk for Michael Jackson. It is when reality comes knocking that the fantasies of childhood start to give way. How will Georgia and Bessi cope in a world of separateness and solitude, and which of them will be stronger?

Rights Reverted - Available to option

From her lookout on the first floor of the crumbling mansion that was once their idyllic family home, seventy year old Ginny watches for her younger sister Vivien, who has not set foot in the house since she left forty-seven years ago. Ginny the reclusive moth expert, has rarely ventured outside it…with Vivian’s arrival, the secrets that have separated the sisters are about to disturb much more than her precise routines. With hints of ‘Grey Gardens’ and ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’ and with a preserved moth collection in the attic, amassed over several generations, this creepy and disturbing debut novel proved Poppy Adams to be a new and emphatic voice. 'Adams succeeds in carefully building up an atmosphere of penumbral suspense, creeping towards a tense climax.' LITERARY REVIEW

Rights Reverted - Available to option

Having pursued a conventional enough path through school and university, Jason Webster was all set to enter the world of academia. But when his aloof Florentine girlfriend of some years dumped him unceremoniously, he found himself at a crossroads. Abandoning the world of libraries and the future he had always imagined for himself, he headed off instead for Span in search of Duende, the intense emotional state – part ecstacy, part desperation – that lies at the heart of flamenco……