Showing titles in City Life

The residents of Garrett Island are part of a visionary experiment. Their cars have been sent to the mainland and for one month, they’ve got self-driving vehicles called Arrivals. With just a voice command, an Arrival will take you where you want to go, and as the cars are all aware of each other, road accidents should be a thing of the past. As the world’s press arrives for a glimpse of this driverless future, islander and single mom Sandra Montrose preps for the huge media event.

Rudy Sharpe is the irrepressible owner of a tiny, ramshackle record store, stacked from floor to ceiling with piles of vinyl. It’s a place with real soul, where the slogan is ‘If we don't have it – them don't mek it’. Helping out behind the counter is Tasha, Handsworth’s only Black goth girl, while Rudy’s best friend Clifton regularly drops in to talk music, women and rum.

Rue Siebert might not have it all, but she has enough: a few friends she can always count on, the financial stability she yearned for as a kid, and a successful career as a biotech engineer at Kline, one of the most promising start-ups in the field of food science. Her world is stable, pleasant, and hard-fought. Until a hostile takeover and its offensively attractive front man threatens to bring it all crumbling down. Eli Killgore and his business partners want Kline, period.

I used her body like an altar. Now she’s here for confession. I left my past behind. Then she walked into my church. Once, I was Bane Blackwolf—heir to a legacy of blood and sin. A monster in the making. Instead, I chose the cloth over the crown, buried my name, and became Father Blackwood. For years, I was in control of my darker nature. Until her. Moira. The woman with a sinner’s mouth and a body made for worship. The woman who doesn’t know it was me behind the mask that night—me who had her on her knees, begging.

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago’s thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine. For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize one another, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons.

As Mara and Tom navigate their break-up/non-break-up, Mara becomes fixated on the perfect couple living in the flat above her. While her best friend accuses her of being self-involved and her already overfamiliar boss keeps getting her drunker and drunker, the Happy Couple become a symbol for everything Mara and Tom could have been – but, crucially, are not.

It's the most anticipated event of the decade – Big Lou and Fat Bob's wedding and everyone is invited! After a wonderful day, Big Lou crashes back down to earth and finds that she is a victim of her own success. The lure of those famous bacon rolls is preventing her from leaving hungry customers without their daily dose of deliciousness – even to go for a long-awaited honeymoon. Will Big Lou find the happiness she so richly deserves? Everyone in Scotland Street hopes so, but, as Burns warned, the best laid plans.

It’s time for more confessions... As heartfelt and hilarious as the bestselling first novel, Nell discovers that there’s no such thing as having it all figured out.

When seemingly fragile Miss Ivy Cavendale takes the headmistress position in an orphanage, it is her chance to stay anonymous in society. But not all is what it seems with Miss Ivy. When an intruder breaks in one night, she’s quick to draw her weapon, and while fear—her constant companion—has mysteriously disappeared, one thing is very clear: she and her charges are the next target of The Devil’s Sons.

Beginning eight years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by Poundland, and London, where frenzied riots give way to Olympic fever, Middle England follows a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through a time of immense change.

When Another Country appeared in 1962, it caused a literary sensation. James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit.

Lydia imagines her new job running a Senior Citizen's Social Club three afternoons a week will involve drinking tea while playing gentle games of cards, listening to The Beatles and reminiscing about food rationing and The Blitz. She does not expect to find a failed actor addicted to shoplifting, a woman who's been hiding from a mysterious and very chequered past, and a prolific yarn-bomber. After a tragic accident means the council threatens to sell the community centre, the Social Club, aided by their friends in the nursery next door and a geriatric orphaned mongrel, set out to save it.

Coronation Close survives the brutal Bristol Blitz but with rationing, call up papers and new rules and regulations everyone’s lives are changed forever. Resident do-gooder PC Percy Routledge's obsession with rules being upheld finds him spying and reporting fellow neighbours on the slightest infraction whilst his poor brow-beaten wife, Margaret can only watch on in shameful silence. It’s whispered that one day he’ll get his comeuppance…

Elizabeth Gaskell was one of Victorian England's pre-eminent female novelists. Admired by Charles Dickens, who described her as his 'dear Scheherazade', she mingled storytelling and social realism to superb effect in her highly acclaimed fiction. This comprehensive collection comprises dramas and readings of her finest works and some lesser-known pieces.

When teenagers Jamal Deng and Aisha Saforo are shot dead on the edge of a notorious estate, DS Chris Ashcroft knows why he’s been assigned the case—and he doesn’t like it one bit. Refusing to write the murders off as gang violence, Ashcroft insists on digging deeper—something doesn’t add up.

One rainy afternoon in Istanbul, a woman walks into a doctor's surgery. 'I need to have an abortion', she announces. She is 19 years old and unmarried. What happens that afternoon will change her life. Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse, all the Kaznci men die in their early 40s, so it is a house of women, among them Asya's beautiful, rebellious mother Zeliha, who runs a tattoo parlour; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as clairvoyant; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster.

The first novel from the award-winning, best-selling author of Everything I Know About Love. Thirty-two-year-old Nina Dean is a successful food writer with a loyal online following but a life that is falling apart. When she uses dating apps for the first time, she becomes a victim of ghosting and by the most beguiling of men. Her beloved dad is vanishing in slow motion into dementia, and she's starting to think about ageing and the gendered double-standard of the biological clock.

Phoebe Spencer left home a long time ago, desperate to get away from her mother's emotional manipulation. She knows her life is better away from her family, but she can’t help feeling she’s simply running away from her problems… Then Phoebe hears that her younger sister Lucy has disappeared, leaving behind her four-year old daughter, Darcy. Phoebe's certain Lucy will be back soon - she'd never leave Darcy alone - and then Phoebe can get on with her life again.

Pericles Drakos has lived in the exquisite Circle Building for all of his seventy-five years. From its lofty windows, he has seen his little corner of Istanbul shift and transform. But as the area has become increasingly gentrified, Pericles has retreated into its shadowy corners. And when the pandemic hits, his isolation deepens.

From the internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies comes an exquisitely crafted work of fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri sets her gaze on the eternally beautiful city, illuminating the frailties of the human condition and dissecting lives lived on the margins.