We hope you had a great summer and got lots of reading in! We are looking forward to lots of new releases to share with you in the coming months. In the meantime, here’s what our booksellers read in August. We hope to inspire you!
Prague, 1588.
A COURT IN TURMOIL
The Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, wants to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, and his court is a haven for scientists, astrologers and alchemists. His abiding passion is the feverish search for the philosopher’s stone and thus immortality. The Catholic Church fears he has pushed too far, into the forbidden realm of heresy – and the greatest powers in Christendom are concerned about the imperial line of succession.
A MURDERED ALCHEMIST
Giordano Bruno is sent to his court by Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s spymaster. His task: to contact the famous English alchemist and mystic John Dee, another of Walsingham’s spies. But Bruno’s arrival in Prague coincides with the brutal murder of a rival alchemist – and John Dee himself has disappeared.
AN UNFORGIVING ENEMY
Ordered by the emperor to find the killer, Bruno’s investigations bring him face to face with an old enemy from the Inquisition. But could the real danger lie elsewhere? Amidst the jostling factions at court and the religious tensions brewing in the city, Bruno has to track down a murderer as elusive as the elixir of life itself.
Nightbloom by Peace Adzo Medie
Growing up in the same Ghanaian town, Selasi and Akorfa are more than just cousins – they’re best friends. The girls share everything: whispered late-night conversations, dreams for the future, secrets.
But as they enter their teens, Selasi begins to change, construction a wall around herself designed to keep everyone away. Soon, Akorfa no longer recognises her sullen, withdrawn cousin.
It will take many years for their paths to cross again. Their lives may have drifted in different directions, but Selasi and Akorfa haven’t forgotten the closeness they once shared. Akorfa now works in international development as she navigates the challenges of life as a Black woman and mother in the US; Selasi is a successful restaurateur running the hottest spot in Accra. And when an incident at her restaurant puts Selasi in danger, the women must overcome their differences and face the truth of what happened all those years ago, even if others would prefer them to remain silent.
Nightbloom is an irresistible story about female friendship, about the relationships that shape us and the people we never quite leave behind.
here’s no place like Home . . .
The Home Group is a collection of ultra-exclusive private members’ clubs and a global phenomenon, and the opening of its most ambitious project yet – Island Home, a forgotten island transformed into the height of luxury – is billed as the celebrity event of the decade.
But as the first guests arrive, the weekend soon proves deadly.
It turns out that even the most beautiful people can keep the ugliest secrets and, in a world where reputation is everything…
They’ll do anything to keep it.
If your name’s on the list, you’re not getting out . . .
Talking To Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
The routine traffic stop that ends in tragedy.
The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon.
The false conviction of Amanda Knox.
Why do we so often get other people wrong?
Why is it so hard to detect a lie, read a face or judge a stranger’s motives?
Using stories of deceit and fatal errors to cast doubt on our strategies for dealing with the unknown.
Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual adventure into the darker side of human nature, where strangers are never simple and misreading them can have disastrous consequences.
From the author of When God was a Rabbit and Tin Man, Still Life is a big-hearted story of people brought together by love, war, art and the ghost of E.M. Forster.
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.
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
panning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water follows a family in southern India that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning – and in Kerala, water is everywhere.
At the turn of the century a twelve-year-old girl, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this poignant beginning, the young girl and future matriarch – known as Big Ammachi – will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life, full of the joys and trials of love and the struggles of hardship. A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today.
Imbued with humour, deep emotion and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.
Death of a Book Seller by Alice Slater
A BOOKSHOP. A TRUE CRIME CASE. A DEADLY FRIENDSHIP.
THE UNMISSABLE DEBUT THRILLER.
Roach – bookseller, loner and true crime obsessive – is not interested in making friends. She has all the company she needs in her serial killer books, murder podcasts and her pet snail, Bleep.
That is, until Laura joins the bookshop.
Smelling of roses, with her cute literary tote bags and beautiful poetry, she’s everyone’s new favourite bookseller. But beneath the shiny veneer, Roach senses a darkness within Laura, the same darkness Roach possesses.
As Roach’s curiosity blooms into morbid obsession, it becomes clear that she is prepared to infiltrate Laura’s life at any cost.
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
When her city falls to the Greeks, Briseis’s old life is shattered. She is transformed from queen to captive, from free woman to slave, awarded to the god-like warrior Achilles as a prize of war.
And she’s not alone.
On the same day, and on many others in the course of a long and bitter war, innumerable women have been wrested from their homes and flung to the fighters.
The Trojan War is known as a man’s story: a quarrel between men over a woman, stolen from her home and spirited across the sea.
But what of the other women in this story, silenced by history? What words did they speak when alone with each other, in the laundry, at the loom, when laying out the dead?
Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Welcome to Chain-Gang All-Stars, the popular and highly controversial programme inside America’s private prison system.
In packed arenas, live-streamed by millions, prisoners compete as gladiators for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
Fan favourites Loretta Thurwar and Hamara ‘Hurricane Staxxx’ Stacker are teammates and lovers.
Thurwar is nearing the end of her time on the circuit, free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer.
As she prepares for her final encounters, as protestors gather at the gates, and as the programme’s corporate owners stack the odds against her – will the price be simply too high?