A conversation between strangers on a long-haul flight will change lives for ever; one night in Baden-Baden will threaten to tear a couple apart; a meeting with an ex-lover will give a divorcee a second chance; holiday lovers will struggle in the harsh reality of daily routine... As Schlinks characters navigate their lives we discover the many faces of love: the small betrayals hidden truths & abiding affections. In Schlinks trademark spare prose we come face-to-face with the desires & jealousies that define our daily lives with the fragility of happiness & with the abiding possibility of hope. Tender yet unsentimental achingly personal yet utterly universal SUMMER LIES asks what it means to love to deceive & ultimately to be human. ...

After finishing work on their sensationally successful TV series Louisa Danny & Sarah take a much-needed holiday on the French Riviera. All they want to do is party soak up the sun & have a good time. Danny the actress with her sensual beauty & impossible temper soon has the eligible men of the Riviera chasing her. Louisa the scriptwriter on the rebound from a broken love affair finds herself more & more drawn to the mysterious Jake Mallory. While Sarah the producer just wants to hang out & have fun. But they quickly discover that the sparkle of Riviera life conceals a dark presence that pulls them into a game no one can win. & when mayhem & madness begin to stalk them to their terror they find there is no way out. ...

Poor Sir Buckstone Abbott Bart! Not only does he own in Walsingford Hall one of the least attractive stately homes in the country but he has to take in paying guests to keep it upright. So when it seems a rich (if not very nice) continental princess might buy it hes overjoyed
- particularly as hes being rooked by the publisher of his sporting memoirs. His daughter Jane comes up trumps in the company of the playwright Joe
- but not before engagements are broken & fortunes lost & made. Another delightful novel form the master of the Engllish comedy Wodehoues deftly unties all the knots he had so cleverly tied around his characters in the first place.

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Revolt & upheaval in medieval Britain by a brilliant new narrative historian Summer of Blood breaks new ground in its portrayal of the personalities & politics of the bloody days of June 1381. The Peasants Revolt of 1381 is one of the most dramatic & bloody events in English history. Starting with village riots in the Essex countryside chaos rapidly spread across much of the south-east of England as tens of thousands of ordinary men & women marched in fury to London torching houses slaughtering their social superiors & terrifying the life out of those who got in their way. The burning down of Savoy Palace home to the most powerful magnate in the realm marked one of the Revolts most violent episodes. The Peasants Revolt has remained an underexplored period of history. In revisiting the bloody events of 1381 Dan Jones has brought back to glorious life the squalor drama & complex hierarchies of a society that until now seemed almost too distant to imagine. His examination of village life & the failings of government from the perspective of the Revolts key players is both intellectually stimulating & compulsively readable. Vivid atmospheric & beautifully written this is historical writing of the highest quality. ...

Evokes the master of Barcelona-set narrative Carlos Ruiz Zafon". (" Independent"). When the death of a young witness in a case of human trafficking & voodoo provokes the normally calm Inspector Salgado to beat someone up he is swiftly removed from the project. Instead he is sent to investigate a teenager's fall to his death in one of Barcelona's uptown areas. As Salgado begins to uncover the inconvenient truths behind the city's most powerful families two seemingly unsolvable cases are set to implode under the hot Barcelona sun." ...

A terrifying & dream-like new novel from one of our greatest contemporary writers. At a critical point in her career painter Angelika Rossdal suddenly moves to Kvaloya a small island deep in the Arctic Circle to dedicate herself to the solitary pursuit of her craft. With her she brings her young daughter Liv who grows up isolated & unable or unwilling to make friends her own age spending much of her time alone or with an elderly neighbour Kyrre Jonsson who beguiles her with old folk tales & stories about trolls mermaids & -- crucially for the events that unfold in the summer of her eighteenth year -- about the huldra " a wild spirit who appears in the form of an irresistibly beautiful girl to lure young men to their doom. Now twenty-eight Liv looks back on her life & particularly to that summer when two boys drowned under mysterious circumstances in the still moonlit waters off the shores of Kvaloya. Were the deaths accidental or were the boys as Kyrre believes lured to their deaths by a malevolent spirit? To begin with Liv dismisses the old mans stories as fantasy but as the summer continues & events take an even darker turn she comes to believe that something supernatural is happening on the isl&. But is it? Or is Liv a lonely girl who has spent her entire life in the shadow of her beautiful gifted mother slowly beginning to lose touch with reality? Set in the white nights of an Arctic summer the novel has the heightened hallucinogenic atmosphere of a dream but culminates in a moment of profound horror. Intensely imagined & exquisitely written A Summer of Drowning""is a play of dark & light of looking & seeing that will hold & haunt every reader. " From the Hardcover edition."" ...

A gorgeously warm funny & heartbreaking story about facing up to your past & finding out what
- & who
- you really want... Alice

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Who knows what might happen in a summer of love? Sian Bishop has left the hustle & bustle of the city behind & has thrown herself into a new life in the country. With her young son her picture-postcard garden & her small thriving business she's happy & very busy. She is not
- repeat not
- looking for love. & then one glorious summer evening Gus Beresford arrives. One-time explorer full-time heart-breaker Gus is ridiculously exciting wonderfully glamorous
- & Sian tells herself completely wrong for a romantically cautious single woman like her. But she & Gus have met before. & despite Sian's best intentions it isn't long before she's falling for him all over again...


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This is a brilliantly witty fairy tale with a mystery that is as surreal as it is sinister. One girl. One boy. One spell to be broken. Ondine de Groot is a normal fifteen-year-old who lives with her family in the European country of Brugel. She has a pet ferret called Shambles. But Shambles is no ordinary ferret... Hes Hamish Mc Phee a boy cursed by a witch. A witch who happens to be related to Ondine. When Shambles turns back into Hamish temporarily Ondine knows that she has to help him break the spell. He is the most gorgeous boy she has ever met & her one true love! He just cant remain a ferret forever. Can he? ...

In the summer of 1979 a tamed grizzly bear is tempted by the lure of freedom & the wild open sea.. . Meanwhile the sudden death of British diplomat Nicky Fleming has left his wife closed down with shock. Relocated from Cold-War-riven Germany to a remote Hebridean island Letty Fleming is haunted by the unthinkable -- was it an accident murder or suicide? & how can she ever begin to explain to her three children that their father may have betrayed his country? Struggling to find solace in a place she loves Letty begins to unravel the mystery of Nicky's death but her determination to protect the children from the truth blinds her to the demons they are already battling. As the family's secrets threaten to tear them apart it is only the strange but brilliant Jamie who manages to hold on to the one thing he knows for sure: his father has promised to return & Nicky Fleming was a man who never broke a promise.. . ...