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The river can take you home. But the river can also drag you under... 'It's something she learned years ago - the hard way - and that she knows she will never forget: even the sweetest fruit will fall and rot into the earth, eventually. No matter how deep you bury the pain, the bones of it will rise up to haunt you ... like the echoes of a summer's night, like the river flowing relentlessly on its course.' Margot Sorrell didn't want to go home. She had spent all her adult life trying not to look behind. But a text from her sister Lucy brought her back to Somerset. 'I need you.' As Margot, Lucy and their eldest sister, Eve, reunite in the house they grew up in beside the river, the secrets th...
"A gripping immersive crime drama with a heroine you'll be rooting for from the first line. Highly recommended." Imogen Robertson, author of Instruments of Darkness 1765. London. Young Hannah Hubert may be the granddaughter of a French merchant and the daughter of a Spitalfields silk weaver, but she has come down in the world. Sent one spring day as maidservant to a disgraced aristocrat, she finds herself in a house full of mysteries - with a locked room and strange auctions being held behind closed doors. As a servant, she has little power but - unknown to her employers - she can read. And it is only when she uses her education to uncover the secrets of the house, that she realises the peri...
A sweeping and resonant novel about a British family's long-held secrets, for anyone who loved the drama of Rosamunde Pilcher's The Shell Seekers or the lush settings of Kate Morton's novels. The Tides are a family with many secrets. Haunted by the events of one tragic day a decade ago, they are each, in their own way, struggling to move forward with their lives. There is Dora, the family's youngest daughter, who lives in a ramshackle London warehouse with her artist boyfriend. She is doing a good job of skating across the surface of her life, but when she discovers she is pregnant, she finds herself staring back at the darkness of a long-held guilt. Dora's mother, Helen, is a complicated wo...
FIVE WENT INTO THE WOODS. TWO NEVER CAME BACK. Erin Sloane was sixteen when high school senior Andre Villiers was murdered by his friends. They were her friends, too, led by the intense, charismatic Ricky Hell. Five people went into West Cypress Woods the night Andre was murdered. Only three came out. Ativan, alcohol, and distance had dimmed Erin’s memories of that time. But nearly twenty years later, an aging father will bring her home. Now a journalist, she is asked to write a story about the Southport Three and the thrill-kill murder that electrified the country. Erin’s investigation propels her closer and closer to a terrifying truth. And closer and closer to danger. An unforgettable story of murder, trauma, and childhoods lost, I Shot the Devil is a taut, prize-winning debut novel from an electrifying new talent.
An empty house, a lonely shore, an enigmatic, brooding man-child waiting for her return ... a trip to the dark lands of Australian Gothic, for readers of Kate Morton and Hannah Richell. Last night I dreamt I went to Sargasso again ... As a child, Hannah lived at Sargasso, the isolated beachside home designed by her father, a brilliant architect. A lonely, introverted child, she wanted no company but that of Flint, the enigmatic boy who no one else ever saw ... and who promised he would always look after her. Hannah's idyllic childhood at Sargasso ended in tragedy, but now as an adult she is back to renovate the house, which she has inherited from her grandmother. Her boyfriend Tristan visits regularly but then, amid a series of uncanny incidents, Flint reappears ... and as his possessiveness grows, Hannah's hold on the world begins to lapse. What is real and what is imaginary, or from beyond the grave? A mesmerising Australian novel that echoes the great Gothic stories of love and hate: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and especially Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. 'So beautifully written, so skilfully plotted, such a masterpiece of tension and atmosphere ...' Australian Book Review
In New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friend...
‘Family dynamics are tested to the limit in this emotive and confronting debut.’ – Woman & Home When Things Are Alive They Hum poses profound questions about the nature of love and existence, the ways grief changes us, and how we confront the hand fate has dealt us. Marlowe and Harper share a bond deeper than most sisters, shaped by the loss of their mother in childhood. For Harper, living with what she calls the Up syndrome and gifted with an endless capacity for wonder, Marlowe and she are connected by an invisible thread, like the hum that connects all things. For Marlowe, they are bound by her fierce determination to keep Harper, born with a congenital heart disorder, alive. Now 25...
A young girl. A hidden treasure. A dark family secret. ‘Evocative and enchanting – a future classic' Veronica Henry ‘An extraordinary debut... beautiful, dark, haunting’ Edward Carey ‘A captivating coming-of-age story’ Daily Mail ‘A bewitching read' Woman & Home
The hilarious new take on country life by one of Australia's bestselling authors They say it takes 10,000 hours to master a new skill. Well 60,000 hours since Todd and Jeff's tree change, they should have nailed country life, right? Sure, they've made great wine, built stunning villas and even learnt how to look after rescued farm animals - but how does anyone plan for the fury of Mother Nature? Bushfires, drought, sick animals, failed crops, snakes, broken machinery, insurmountable debts, the unstoppable breeding of peafowl ... Just when they think they're on top of things, they find another hurdle in their way. Despite fierce determination, a willingness to evolve and irrepressible humour,...
From the internationally bestselling author of The House of Tides, a psychologically gripping novel about a group of college graduates who decide to live off the grid--and the consequences for their lives. Still grieving the death of her prematurely delivered infant, Lila finds a welcome distraction in renovating a country house she's recently inherited. Surrounded by blueprints and plaster dust, though, she finds herself drawn into the story of a group of idealistic university grads from thirty years before, who'd thrown off the shackles of bourgeois city life to claim the cottage and rely only on each other on the land. But utopia-building can be fraught with unexpected peril, and when the fate of the group is left eerily unclear, Lila turns her attention to untangling a web of secrets to uncover the shocking truth of what happened that fateful year, in order to come to terms with her own loss and build a new future for herself. Suspenseful and moving, with a deep secret at its heart, The Shadow Year is Hannah Richell's breakout book.