The Christmas Appeal follows Christmas in Lower Lockwood, where the Fairway Players are busy rehearsing their festive pantomime, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, to raise money for the church roof appeal. But despite the season, goodwill is distinctly lacking amongst the amateur dramatics enthusiasts. Sarah-Jane is fending off threats to her new position as Chair, the fibreglass beanstalk might be full of asbestos, and a someone is intent on ruining the panto even before the curtain goes up. Of course, there’s also the matter of the dead body. Who could possibly have had the victim on their naughty list? Lawyers Femi and Charlotte read the round robins, examine the emails and pore over the police transcripts. Will the show go on?

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.
 
Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.
 

The Book of Beginnings follows the story of Jo Sorsby. Jo knows she is hiding from her past when she agrees to look after her uncle’s stationery shop. Spending her days glimpsing the lives of her customers as they experiment with what’s on offer is a welcome distraction from the life she has left behind. Yet far from home, Jo feels adrift… But when she meets Ruth, a vicar running from a secret, and Malcolm, a septuagenarian struggling to write his first book, she realises that she isn’t alone. It’s the beginning of a friendship that can transform Jo’s life… if only she can let them in.

Stuart Turton meets The Magpie Murders in Gareth Rubin’s The Turnglass – an immersive and unique story for fans of clever crime fiction. It's a tête-bêche novel, beloved of nineteenth-century bookmakers. It's a book that is two books: two intertwined stories printed back-to-back. As you open the book, the first novella begins, only to end at the middle of the book. When you flip the book over, head to tail, you can read the second story in the opposite direction.

Kate Wareing is astonished when she secures a place in a dance competition in which beginners are paired with professionals to compete for a huge cash prize. Initially, she’s matched with gorgeous French dancer Merle, who seems just as keen to work on their chemistry as their routine. But when the competition is rocked by a scandal, she’s forced to switch to a new partner, Aleksis, who is just as devastatingly attractive as Merle – but seems to hate her.
 
With the odds stacked against them, Kate and Aleksis agree to embark on a showmance to try to win over the public. But what happens when Kate’s feelings for her fake boyfriend become all too real? And how far will Merle go to sabotage her chances – both in the competition and in love?

Heralded as the most important Brazilian novel of the century and winner of three literary awards, Crooked Plow is a unique blend of magical and social realism. Deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed; momentarily mystified by its power, they decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.
 
A new masterpiece, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in the Brazil’s poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery in that country, is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath and political struggle.

A captivating, darkly compelling debut adult novel from the Carnegie and Branford Boase prize nominated author, One Puzzling Afternoon is an irresistible small-town mystery for fans of Elizabeth is Missing, Joanna Cannon and Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers.
 
It is 1951, and at number six Sycamore Street fifteen-year-old Edie Green is lonely. Living alone with her eccentric mother - who conducts seances for the local Ludthorpe community - she is desperate for something to shake her from her dull, isolated life. When the popular, pretty Lucy Theddle befriends Edie, she thinks all her troubles are over. But Lucy has a secret, one Edie is not certain she should keep . . .Then Lucy goes missing.
 
In 2018 Edie is eighty-four and still living in Ludthorpe. When one day she glimpses Lucy Theddle, still looking the same as she did at fifteen, her family write it off as one of her many mix ups. There's a lot Edie gets confused about these days. A lot she finds difficult to remember. But what she does know is this: she must find out what happened to Lucy, all those years ago

 
Dark, moving, and wry, The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu is both an illuminating depiction of a 'left behind' society – and proof that it's never too late to change your life. An Yu's Braised Pork meets Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary in this unforgettable, tragi-comic tale of one woman's mid-life re-awakening in contemporary rural China.
 
The Funeral Cryer long ago accepted the mundane realities of her life: avoided by fellow villagers because of the stigma attached to her job as a professional mourner and under-appreciated by The Husband, whose fecklessness has pushed the couple close to the brink of break-up. But just when things couldn't be bleaker, The Funeral Cryer takes a leap of faith – and in so doing things start to take a surprising turn for the better…

The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe is a modern, feminist reimagining of the myth of Hades and Persephone that asks what a powerful woman looks like. It is a heartbreaking and compelling story of the binds of tradition, the damage they can cause, and the courage it takes to break the silence. Exploring themes of sisterhood, the cultural stigma around sexual assault, baby factories and female independence, Unigwe challenges the usual balance of power between women and their abusers and offers a version where the victim is empowered to break free by the women around her. 
 

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff is a sharply observed tragicomedy set in a small village in India revolving around an isolated woman falsely accused of killing her vanished husband, who becomes sought after to help other aspiring widows. Geeta hasn’t wasted too much time trying to correct the record, because as a single woman her new reputation has been the one thing keeping her safe all these years. Still, she's paid a price. She's an outcast in her town, estranged from her childhood best friend, Saloni, and from the rest of the women in her microloan group. But that all changes when another member of the group approaches Geeta with a problem of her own. Farah's husband, Samir, is an abusive drunk and she's ready to be rid of him, so she asks Geeta for help, appealing to her expertise. Not wanting to reveal the truth, Geeta reluctantly agrees, but this one small murderous favour sets in motion a chain of events that will change everything - and not just for Geeta, but for Saloni, and Farah, and all the women in their village.

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler is a fantastic story about the creatures in the water of Con Dao. When pioneering marine biologist Dr Ha Nguyen is offered the chance to travel to the remote Con Dao Archipelago to investigate a highly intelligent, dangerous octopus species, she doesn’t pause long enough to look at the fine print. DIANIMA – a transnational tech corporation best known for its ground-breaking work in acritical intelligence – has purchased the islands, evacuated their population and sealed the archipelago off from the world so that Nguyen can focus on her research

The Things That We Lost by Jyoti Patel is a moving coming-of-age story exploring what it means to be a person of colour in Britain today, discussing themes of identity and the stories that we tell ourselves to manage trauma. Nik yearns to know more about his father, who died before he was born. His mother, Avani, held hostage by her guilt surrounding his death, refuses to share any information with her son. Nik is forced to create a fragmented image of his father, pulled together from hushed whispers at family gatherings and photos stolen from his mother’s bedroom. When his grandfather dies, secrets are revealed, and everything Nik thinks he knows about his father is turned on its head. Nik makes it his mission to discover the truth about his father and the circumstances of his death, uncovering painful truths in the process. The Things That We Lost is the winner of the 2021 Merky Books New Writers Prize

The Christmas Murder Game by Alexandra Benedict is a mysterious novel which tells the story of a family tradition: the annual treasure hunt. All you have to do is follow the clues, find the fortune and solve the mystery. As the family are drawn deeper into the game, the clues seem to point not to the deeds to the manor house, but to the key to a twenty-year-old mystery: what happened to Lily’s mother? As a storm cuts them off from the village, it becomes apparent that the game has turned deadly and that Lily is fighting for more than just an inheritance, she is now fighting for her life. 12 clues, 12 keys and 12 days of Christmas for the heirs of Endgame House to find their inheritance, but how many will die before Twelfth Night?

Limberlost is a beautiful and often brutal coming-of-age story about the cost of dreams, war and human violence on the natural world. The novel tells the story of Ned West, who dreams of sailing across the river on a boat of his very own. To Ned, a boat means freedom. His two older brothers are away fighting in a ruthless and distant war, becoming men on the battlefield while Ned, too young to enlist, roams the land in search of rabbits to shoot, selling their pelts to fund his secret boat ambitions. Ned falls for Callie and together they learn the lessons of love, loss, and hardship. When a storm decimates the Limberlost crop and shakes the orchard’s future, Ned must decide what to protect: his childhood dreams, or the people and the land that surround him…

Euphoria by Elin Cullhed is a luminous portrayal of a brilliant mind at battle with herself and with the constraints that society has placed on her, told through the prism of Sylvia Plath’s last year. Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes unravels through the heady days of their first summer in Devon together. Sylvia turns increasingly to writing to express her pain and loss, yet it is also her resilience and power. She has decided to die, but the art she creates in her final weeks will set her name, and the world, ablaze.

I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava is a sensual book about the absurdities of our bodies and the impossibilities of our families. Margot’s on her way to Montana, with blood on her face and a jewelled cigarette case full of pills. She’s fresh from a bad break-up and fleeing the cold comforts of her famous family – legendary punk parents (long since parted in acrimony) and an overbearing matriarch and show business scion of a grandmother. For the first time in Margot’s life the eyes of the world are wholly elsewhere. But a graveyard encounter with a disgraced doctor and the discovery of a dozen old film reels leads to a troubling new subjecthood, as her congenital inability to feel pain puts her centre stage for one man’s desire and ambition

The Mermaid’s Tale by the late Taiwanese author Lee Wei-Jing tells the story of Summer, whose only passion is dancing, though she knows she has left it too late to be competition worthy. As she comes under the tutelage of Donny, a legendary dancer, Summer goes on a journey of self-discovery that sees her reckon with past trauma and search for the perfect partner.

The Yellow Kitchen is the debut novel from Margaux Vialleron, telling the story of an East London kitchen which stands as a metaphor for the lifelong connection between three women: baker Claude, ambitious Sophie and political Giulia. Their friendship seems perfect until a trip to Lisbon unearths previously unrecognised desires between Claude and Sophie, which marks the beginning of something new for the group

Bitter Orange Tree, by International Man Booker Prize winner Jokha Alharthi, follows Omani student Zuhur as she reflects on her relationship with her late grandmother, who passed away shortly after her granddaughter went to Britain for university. It emerges that Zuhur’s grandmother is not a relation by blood, but instead by a stronger, emotional bond, as the story of Bint Amir’s challenging life entwines with Zuhur’s lonely present in an exploration of social status, desire and female agency.

Black Butterflies, the debut novel by Priscilla Morris, is published to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Siege of Sarajevo, transporting readers to the streets of the city, where nationalists erect barricades by night, splitting the residents into ethnic enclaves which they have to push aside by day. When violence spills over, Zora sends her husband and elderly mother to safety in England with her daughter, but stays behind herself, reluctant to leave her work and confident that hostilities will not last long. As the home they love falls apart, Zora and her friends must rebuild themselves, over and over again.

The Return of Faraz Ali takes readers back to 1960s Pakistan, where Inspector Faraz Ali returns to his birthplace of Lahore as riots break out on the streets. Years after his influential father plucked him from his childhood home, Faraz is ordered back to investigate the murder of a young girl, but he finds it hard to obey orders and resist searching for the mother and sister he left behind.

Sell Us The Rope by Stephen May follows young poet, bank robber and spy Josef Stalin, who is in London for the 5^th Congress of the Russian Communist Party. As he builds his powerbase, Stalin manipulates alliances with Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, but risks everything as he is drawn into a dangerous relationship with fiery Finnish activist Elli Vuokko.

Black Cake, the debut novel by Charmaine Wilkerson, spans sixty years in the life of one family, telling the story of how an inheritance of betrayals, secrets, memories and names can shape a family for generations. Eleanor Bennett won’t let her death get in the way of the truth, so when her estranged children reunite for her funeral, they discover a puzzling inheritance – a voice recording detailing their family history and a traditional Caribbean black cake based on a family recipe with a long history that may heal the wounds of the past.

Little Wing by Freya North is a compelling story of family secrets, courage and resilience, which moves between the story of a pregnant teenager sent to a remote part of the UK in the 1960s, and Nell and Dougie, whose lives collide in the early millennium as secrets surface and answers are sought, all against the backdrop of The Isle of Harris.

Still Life by Sarah Winman is the story of Ulysses Temper, a young British soldier, and Evelyn Skinner, a sixty-year-old art historian and possible spy. Trapped together in a Tuscan wine cellar in 1944 as war approaches, the pair share their stories, setting Ulysses on a path that will shape his life for the next forty years.

Still Life was voted by readers as the Fiction Award winner at the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2021, making it the first title to be chosen twice for the Indie Book of the Month campaign.

Learwife is the feminist retelling of the story of King Lear’s queen, whose absence has long been a mystery to Shakespeare’s audiences. Reimagined as an exile sent away to a nunnery, the novel follows the former queen as she hears of the death of her estranged husband and three daughters, forcing her to reckon with her past and consider what will become of her now.

Case Study by Booker shortlisted novelist Graeme Macrae Burnet takes readers to London in 1956, where a young woman believes a charismatic psychotherapist has driven her sister to suicide. In order to confirm her suspicions, she adopts a false identity and pretends to be a client, only to be drawn into a world where she can no longer be certain of anything.

The Cat Who Saved Books, by award-winning Japanese novelist Sosuke Natsukawa, is the story of student Rintaro and talking cat Tiger, who join together on a mission to save books that have been imprisoned, destroyed and unloved. On their travels, the pair meet those who treat books poorly in an enthralling tale of love, fantasy, and friendship.

The Willows have been through a lot. Louise has devoted her life to caring for her disabled youngest daughter. Pete works abroad, almost never seeing his loved ones. And their eldest, Eliza, is burdened by all the secrets she's trying to keep from her overloaded family. Meanwhile, Patience observes the world while trapped in her own body. She laughs, she cries, she has opinions and knows what she wants. But those who love her most – and make every decision about her life – will never know. Or will they? When the Willows are offered the opportunity for Patience to take part in a new gene therapy trial to cure her Rett syndrome, they face an impossible dilemma. Are the very real risks worth the chance of the reward, no matter how small?

The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade opens on thirty-three-year-old Amadeo Padilla, who is preparing to play Jesus in his New Mexico town’s Good Friday procession when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel turns up on his doorstep pregnant. The book follows the baby’s first year as the Padilla family come together, bringing to life the struggles of characters to parent children they may not be equipped to save

1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier, Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and relive memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view. Evelyn’s talk of truth and beauty plants a seed in Ulysses’ mind that will shape the trajectory of his life – and of those who love him – for the next four decades. Moving from the Tuscan Hills and piazzas of Florence, to the smog of London’s East End, Still Life is a sweeping, joyful novel about beauty, love, family and fate.

Mehar, a young bride in rural 1929 Punjab, is trying to discover the identity of her new husband. She and her sisters-in-law, married to three brothers in a single ceremony, spend their days hard at work in the family's 'china room', sequestered from contact with the men. When Mehar develops a theory as to which of them is hers, a passion is ignited that will put more than one life at risk. Spiralling around Mehar's story is that of a young man who in 1999 travels from England to the now-deserted farm, its 'china room' locked and barred. In enforced flight from the traumas of his adolescence - his experiences of addiction, racism, and estrangement from the culture of his birth - he spends a summer in painful contemplation and recovery, finally gathering the strength to return home.

Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary.
Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word 'bondmaid' flutter to the floor unclaimed. Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women's experiences often go unrecorded. She begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Like every woman, Celeste Morton holds a map of the future in her skin, every mole and freckle a clue to unlocking what will come to pass. With puberty comes the changeling period - when her final marks will appear and her future is decided. The possibilities are tantalising enough for Celeste's excitement to outweigh her fear. Changelings are sought after commodities and abduction is rife as men seek to possess these futures for themselves.Celeste's marks have always been closely entwined with her brother, Miles. Her skin holds a future only he, as a gifted interpreter, can read and he has always considered his sister his practice ground. But when Celeste's marks change she learns a devastating secret about her brother's future that she must keep to herself - and Miles is keeping a secret of his own. When the lies of brother and sister collide, Celeste determines to create a future that is truly her own.

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.

Judith Potts is seventy-seven years old and blissfully happy. She lives on her own in a faded mansion just outside Marlow, there's no man in her life to tell her what to do or how much whisky to drink, and to keep herself busy she sets crosswords for The Times newspaper. One evening, while out swimming in the Thames, Judith witnesses a brutal murder. The local police don't believe her story, so she decides to investigate for herself, and is soon joined in her quest by Suzie, a salt-of-the-earth dog-walker, and Becks, the prim and proper wife of the local Vicar. Together, they are the Marlow Murder Club. When another body turns up, they realise they have a real-life serial killer on their hands. And the puzzle they set out to solve has become a trap from which they might never escape...

A murder on the high seas. A detective duo. A demon who may or may not exist. It's 1634 and Samuel Pipps, the world's greatest detective, is being transported to Amsterdam to be executed for a crime he may, or may not, have committed. Travelling with him is his loyal bodyguard, Arent Hayes, who is determined to prove his friend innocent. But no sooner are they out to sea than devilry begins to blight the voyage. A twice-dead leper stalks the decks.  Strange symbols appear on the sails. Livestock is slaughtered. And then three passengers are marked for death, including Samuel. Could a demon be responsible for their misfortunes? With Pipps imprisoned, only Arent can solve a mystery that connects every passenger onboard.

It is 1973 and Jude – known to her friends as Toto – has just graduated from art school and moves into a house in a run-down part of Leeds. Jude is a chaotic wild child who flirts with the wrong kind of people, drinks too much and gets stoned too often. Never happy to stay in one place for very long, her restlessness takes her on hitchhiking jaunts up and down the country. Her best friend, Nel, is the only steady influence Jude has but Nel’s life isn’t as perfect as it seems.

When the manuscript of a debut crime novel arrives at a Parisian publishing house, everyone in the readers’ room is convinced it’s something special. And the committee for France’s highest literary honour, the Prix Goncourt, agrees. But when the shortlist is announced, there’s a problem for editor Violaine Lepage: she has no idea of the author’s identity. As the police begin to investigate a series of murders strangely reminiscent of those recounted in the book, Violaine is not the only one looking for answers. And, suffering memory blanks following an aeroplane accident, she’s beginning to wonder what role she might play in the story …

Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy works from home but devotes her life to the children, to their finely tuned routine, and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband, he wants her to know. The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but in a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage, she will hurt him three times. Jake will not know when the hurt is coming, nor what form it will take. As the couple submit to a delicate game of crime and punishment, Lucy herself begins to change, surrendering to a transformation of both mind and body from which there is no return.

Vincent is the beautiful bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, a hooded figure scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: ‘Why don’t you swallow broken glass.’ Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later, just after a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship.

Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting and trading – and forgetting. But when a young soldier comes to the mountains in search of a legendary creature, Ren is inexorably drawn into an impossible mission. As their lives entwine, unravel and erupt – as myth merges with reality – both Ren and the soldier are forced to confront what they regret, what they love, and what they fear.

With the Blitz over and London reeling from war, jazz musician Lawrie Matthews has answered England’s call for help. Fresh off the Empire Windrush, he’s taken a tiny room in south London lodgings, and has fallen in love with the girl next door. Touring Soho’s music halls by night, pacing the streets as a postman by day, Lawrie has poured his heart into his new home – and it’s alive with possibility. Until, one morning, he makes a terrible discovery. As the local community rallies, fingers of blame are pointed at those who had recently been welcomed with open arms. And, before long, the newest arrivals become the prime suspects in a tragedy which threatens to tear the city apart.