Item category 2: Newmarket - Trending Reads

From the twice Booker-nominated author of The Year of the Runaways and China Room, The Spoiled Heart is a magnificent novel of love, community and politics, set at the edge of the Peak District, and with a deeply moving family mystery at its heart Nayan Olak keeps seeing Helen Fletcher around to...

When Edith and a select group of employees at Winked advertising agency are sent to Consequi, an elite three-day work retreat in the remote mountains, she sees an opportunity to impress her bosses and dodge an inevitable restructure. But this is no ordinary corporate retreat. Trapped together in ...

Japanese-occupied Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara's children are in terrible danger. Her eldest child Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day. Jasmin, the youngest, lives confined in a basement for her own safety. And her son, Abel, has di...

Howard and Elsie Manning were born on the same day, met at kindergarten, and have been married for 59 years. They have lived sensible, productive lives, and raised two self-sufficient daughters. Now, at 78, they are bored with the predictability of life, fed up with contemporary society, have ach...

It's summer and a young man walks through the gates of a luxurious mansion in the South of France. At the dinner table, the Blake siblings await him - Lily, his carefree friend from university; Dot, the rebellious younger sister; and Felix, handsome, charismatic and guarded. Between sun-drenched ...

As one of only a handful of female medical graduates working at the Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, Clara Heywood refuses to be denied the chance to become a surgeon because of her sex. As her male colleagues, including her unofficial fiance Edward, head off to war, Clara grapples with a sense ...

Up above there are wildfires, smog alerts, epic droughts, paper jams, teachers' strikes, insurrections, revolutions, record-breaking summers of unendurable heat, but down below, at the pool, it is always a comfortable eighty-one degrees... Alice is one of a group of obsessed recreational swimmers...

Growing older doesn't just mean growing wiser. But it does mean a lot of fun... When 63-year-old Sylvia finds her husband in bed with another woman, she's shocked and furious . . . at first. But by the time her head stops spinning, Sylvia realises she hates the retirement community she's living i...

What are we given, and what do we have to take for ourselves? It is the 1990s. Growing up in Zanzibar, three very different young people -- Karim, Fauzia and Badar -- are coming of age, and dreaming of great possibilities in their young nation. But for Badar, an uneducated servant boy who has nev...

It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students-and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her wor...

This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers, and three remarkable lives – all connected by a single drop of water. In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, there lies hidden in the sand fragments of a long-forgotten poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Victorian London, an e...

Hair stylist Kit Cooper is at the top of her game. She does the shows in Milan and Paris, tends to pop stars and celebrities, and has styled enough campaigns and magazine covers to last a lifetime. But Kit is ambitious. Restless. She can't help asking: what's next? One day, frustrated she can't f...

2039, the Skeleton Coast of Namibia. 160,000 kilometres-square of ocean-crashed desert, littered with bones, shipwrecks and shattered dreams. Cat Brosnan, a young scientist, has just arrived, aiming to track down a much-needed water source believed to lie hidden within this vast landscape. Six ye...

Aging Larry Cook announces his intention to turn over his 1,000-acre farm - one of the largest in Zebulon County, Iowa - to his three daughters, Caroline, Ginny, and Rose. A man of harsh sensibilities, he carves Caroline out of the deal because she has the nerve to be less than enthusiastic about...

It's the day before her daughter's wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines. First thing, she loses her job - or quits, depending who you ask. Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door expecting to stay for the festivities. He doesn't even have a suit. Instead, he's brought memori...

In March of 1989, Emmerson Kerr is alone. One morning listening to her Walkman, a newsreader's words stop her dead. 'A warning to our listeners that this story is graphic in nature. The body of an 84-year-old woman has been found in the foyer of her apartment building on Sydney's lower North Shor...

Driving with a donkey stuffed in the back seat; jackdaws pecking brains out through the roof of a confessional box; cat piss and astronauts. This is not the world as you see it, but as it is, twisted from the maverick mind of Blindboy Boatclub. These are stories of the strange unsettlings in the ...

A trial is rather like a play. We wear our costumes. We perform to the audience. And on a good day no-one gets murdered. Six nights a week the cast of the smash-hit play The Washington Murders gathers in the chapel of All Souls Cemetery to perform to a sold-out audience, with thousands more watch...

"True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history final, and have doctors, politicians, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the dea...

For Ava, heading to university in Sydney is her escape from a poverty-stricken upbringing. Her mother is long gone, her father able to provide love but little else. On the other side of the world, Laurie tolerates university only at the insistence of her father, a Marxist professor. Her mother di...

Sitting alone, overlooking the still and blue lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach surveys the men of the hotel bar. She is happily married and has no reason to escape the world she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels here to the island where her mother is buried, and...

When fledgling writer Zoe arrives at the Sicilian holiday home of famed novelist Don Travers, she feels that she has made it. And yet as the week unfolds it is not Don but his children and unknowable wife, Lydia, who come to intrigue Zoe most. On the fringes, Don's youngest, Nemony, watches as he...

When the snow falls, she will be free... The invitations always arrive the same way -- without warning, appearing around the city on the first snowfall of the year, simply inscribed with 'Tonight'. When struggling artist, Forster, finds an invitation, he's bewitched by the magic of the evening, s...

1758, Saint-Malo, Brittany: To Lucinde Leon, the youngest daughter of a wealthy French shipowner, the high walls of Saint-Malo are more hindrance than haven. While her sisters are busy trying to secure advantageous marriages, Luce spends her days secretly being taught to sail by Samuel, her best ...

The Vaster Wilds is the story of a young girl who is servant to a minister and his young mistress, and in charge of their young daughter Bess. On an epic voyage across the Atlantic, ship-wrecked, far from home and fighting for survival, the protagonist must endure but also find meaning in the jou...

After ten blood-filled years, the war is over. Troy lies in smoking ruins as the victorious Greeks fill their ships with the spoils of battle. Alongside the treasures looted are the many Trojan women captured by the Greeks, among them the legendary prophetess Cassandra, and her watchful maid, Rit...

Mairad works all hours in a run-down West End theatre's wardrobe department, her whole existence made up of threads and needles, running errands to mend shoes, fixing broken zips and handwashing underwear. She must also do her best to avoid groping hands backstage and the terrible bullying of the...

The first thing Vanessa Carvin does when she arrives on the island is change her name. To the locals, she is Willow Hale, a solitary outsider escaping Dublin to live a hermetic existence in a small cottage, not a notorious woman on the run from her past. But scandals follow like hunting dogs. And...

Deep in Essex and her own thoughts, Sophie had a feeling something was going to happen and then it did. Chris has entered the pub and re-entered her life after Sophie had finally stopped thinking about him and regretting what she'd done. Sophie has a chance at creating a new ending and paying off...

Yeongju did everything she was supposed to, go to university, marry a decent man, get a respectable job. Then it all fell apart. Burned out, Yeongju abandons her old life, quits her high-flying career, divorces her husband, and follows her dream. She opens a bookshop. In a quaint neighbourhood in...