Item category 2: Newmarket - Trending Reads

Charlotte Sauvin has always seen the world differently. At home on 33 Place Brugmann, in the heart of Brussels, her father and her closest friends and neighbours the Raphaels from the fourth floor, and Masha from the fifth have ensured her secret is safe. But when the Nazis invade Belgium, and Ma...

Set in Iran in the decade following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, this novel is narrated by the ghost of Bahar, a thirteen-year-old girl, whose family is compelled to flee their home in Tehran for a new life in a small village, hoping in this way to preserve both their intellectual freedom and the...

Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner, washing away the remains of brutal murders and suicides in Chinatown. The bloody messes don't bother her, not when she's already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister being pushed in front of a train. Before fleeing the scene, the murderer whis...

1926. Running a theatre may appear to be all about the showbiz, but times are hard at The Empire. Following a turbulent period Jack Treadwell, erstwhile proprietor, his mother Lillian and his playwright wife Grace, know they need to get things back on track and how better than with the annual pan...

From one of America's most celebrated storytellers come three dark, interlocking tales about the residents of a rural New York town, and the shocking headlines that become their local mythologies. A husband sells property to a mysterious, temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media whe...

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...

London, 1930. The five greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal: to show they are no longer willing to be treated as second class citizens by their male counterparts in the legendary Detection Club. Led by the formidable Dorothy L. Sayers, the ...

Shane Collins, a world-weary CIA spy, is ready to come in from the cold. Stationed in Bahrain for his final tour, he's anxious to dispense with his mission - uncovering Iranian support for the insurgency. But then he meets Almaisa, an enigmatic artist, and his eyes are opened to a side of Bahrain...

Maggie Webb has lived the last decade caring for her elderly husband, Stanley, as memory loss gradually erases all the beautiful moments they created together. It's the loneliest she's ever felt in her life. When a mysterious stranger named Hassan appears at her door, he reveals a shocking truth:...

Rome, 1636. History calls her a Muse. Temptress. Fallen woman. In the scorched city of Rome, the cobbled streets hum with gossip and sin. Costanza Piccolomini is a respectable young wife until she meets Gianlorenzo Bernini, the famed sculptor and star of Roman society, whose jet-black gaze matche...

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 ...

Contemporary fiction. Eighty-one-year-old Maggie Burkhardt has left it all behind. After the death of her husband and the tragic loss of her daughter Julia, she fled her native Wisconsin and has spent the last five years ping-ponging between the world's luxury hotels. Now she has finally come to ...

As the weather cools down, business heats up at Deputy Donut Cafe for owner Emily Westhill. But is a stubborn tabby cat, a mysterious new employee, and a murder case with a baker's dozen worth of suspects too much to manage? With mouth-watering treats selling fast in October, Emily is delighted t...

Professional declutterer Ellen Curtis doesn't need to like her clients to help them sort their homes out. Aging TV personality and curmudgeon Humphrey Carter might have a chip on his shoulder the size of England about the decline of his career, but a job's a job. But when Ellen arrives the mornin...

It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of ...

Elysha Chang does everything she can to ignore her mother's death, even as unearthed family secrets become increasingly inextricable from her own. Eleanor is doing just fine. Yes, she's keeping secrets from her husband. Sure, she quit her PhD program and is now conducting unauthorized research on...

Rafaela Acuna y Daubon remembers everything that matters: her beautiful childhood in San Juan, her marriage to Peter, uprooting their children, Ruth and Benny, to the American Midwest, and losing all sense of her place in the world. So she tells no one when her memory begins to slip. Her daughter...

Sometimes friendship can be its own love story. Victor and Zoey are getting old. Well, old-er. And it's beginning to be a real problem. Best friends since college they have been through thick and thin, poor and poorer, drunk and drunker throughout their twenties in New York. Victor has built a su...

Mayfair, 1910. At the age of ninety, Florence Nightingale is frail and no longer of sound mind. After a celebrated career as a nurse, writer and statistician, she now leads a reclusive existence. One summer evening she is astonished to receive a visitor: a young man named Silas Bradley, who claim...

It's 1945, and Corporal Valentine Vere-Thissett, aged 23, is on his way home. But 'home' is Dimperley, built in the 1500s, vast and dilapidated, up to its eaves in debt and half-full of fly-blown taxidermy and dependent relatives, the latter clinging to a way of life that has gone forever. And wo...

Imagine waking up and a wall has divided your city in two. Imagine that on the other side is your new-born baby and there is now no way of getting to him... For fans of All the Light We Cannot See and Alone in Berlin, a stunning historical debut. The gripping historical debut about a family sepa...

Jasper Fforde invites you to imagine a world where your position in society depends on what bit of the colour spectrum you can see... It's the UK, but not as we know it: civilisation has rebuilt after an unspoken 'Something that Happened' five hundred years before. Society is now colour-based, th...

It's 2067 and Florida is partially underwater, but even that can't bring down the residents of Palm Meridian Retirement Resort, a utopian home for queer women who want to revel in their twilight years. Inside, Hula-Hoopers shimmy across the grass, fiercely competitive book clubs nearly come to bl...

Was she taken... or did she run? Former London police officer Rose Campbell has been estranged from her daughter, Lou, for almost a decade. But when Lou disappears from a remote Western Australian beach, and the police suspect her of kidnapping the two young children in her care, Rose is asked to...

Melbourne, 1927. The summer flowers smell like Christmas the night Zara Dickins meets Harry Holt. Zara is wearing a dress she has designed and made herself: white organdie over a short black slip, with black embroidery and a crimson taffeta sash. It's party season and the university crowd are cel...

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...

Welcome to the secret life of the Colebrook twins: unnoticed old maids to most, but unseen champions to those in need - society be damned. Lady Augusta Colebrook, 'Gus', is determinedly unmarried, bored by society life, and tired of being dismissed at the age of forty-two. She and her twin sister...

A kaleidoscopic portrait of one family's displacement across four countries, Kantika-'song' in Ladino-follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. When the Cohens lose their wealth and are forced to move to Barcelona and star...

If you haven't had the misfortune of dating a George, you know someone who has. He's a young man brimming with potential but incapable of following through; noncommittal to his long-suffering girlfriend, Jenny; distant from but still reliant on his mother; funny one minute, sullenly brooding the ...

Two sisters, Emma and Agathe, reminisce about their lives together, analyze their fraught relationship and consider reconciling when they must return together to Basque Country to empty out the home of their beloved grandmother.