The Briar Club
A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.
Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; police officer’s daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has ended along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.
Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?
You Killed Me First
Three women. Three smouldering secrets. Who will make it out alive?
It’s 5 November, and a woman awakens to a nightmare. Bound and gagged, she lies trapped in the heart of a towering bonfire. As the smoke thickens, panic sets in – she’s moments away from being engulfed in flames. How did it come to this?
Rewind eleven months: Margot, a faded TV star, and her long-suffering friend Anna watch as glamorous Liv and her flawless family move into their street. The three women soon fabricate the perfect pretence of friendship, but each harbours her own deadly secret – and newcomer Liv senses something is terribly wrong beneath the polished exteriors.
As cracks widen in the veneer of perfection and lies escalate out of control, tension ignites. Bonfire Night is approaching and someone is set to burn…But who will it be?
The Woman in the Cabin
The brand-new thriller from the bestselling author of The Girl Beyond the Gate!
Deep in the woods, you can hide more than secrets...
Every day, in a remote cabin hidden deep in the woods in the Scottish Highlands, Mary wakes up before dawn to make breakfast from scratch. She tends the garden and feeds the animals. Every night, Mary makes sure she has dinner on the table for when her husband Cal gets home from work.
She puts on his favorite lipstick and greets him with a smile. 'I've missed you.' It's not true and he knows it. But he likes to hear it all the same.
Mary is the perfect wife and like any good wife she knows her job is to keep her husband happy.
But lately as she notices her first wrinkles appear, she can sense Cal change. A scowl at dinner not being ready on time, a too tight grip as he leads her to the bedroom tells her he's noticed too. And old memories are coming back too, of her life before the cabin...
Then she finds a stack of letters hidden under the floorboards detailing a life eerily similar to her own. They're addressed to her: 'To the next woman.'
If she's not the first to play the role of Cal's perfect wife, what happened to the woman in the cabin before her? And how long does she have until she is next?
Things Left Unsaid
A dazzling, electrifying, and thought-provoking novel for readers of Maame and Honey Girl, Things Left Unsaid is a mesmerizing and deeply-felt exploration of discovering your place in the world and the lasting power of love.
When twenty-six year old Shirin Bayat bumps into Kian at a house party in London, she is taken aback by the immediate feelings that resurface. It’s been a decade since they were close friends at school, before painful events pulled them apart, suddenly and seemingly forever. Ever since, Shirin has lived with the aching weight of things left unsaid between them.
Now they're back in each other's lives, at a time when Shirin needs someone she can trust the most. Feeling stuck in a sea of slippery friendships and deeply burned out by her publishing job, Kian is a bright light amongst a sea of gray. There’s nothing worse than losing the person you trust most with your deepest secrets and desires, and Shirin and Kian are determined to hold tightly to each other.
But of course, life often has other plans. Will it be different this time around, or are Shirin and Kian destined to fall apart once more?
The Coven Tendency
Zoe Hana Mikuta delivers a bloody and unrelenting fantasy about young witches dangling on the edge of love and obsession, of magic and madness, of life and death (and death and death and death). . .
Just like her mother and her mother’s mother, 18-year-old Vanity Adams is destined to lead a lavish life under the patronship of the Museum, someday taking her place as its premiere necromantic Spectacle and the centerpiece of their weekly soirees thrown for the City’s elite.
But until that day, Vanity (and the other young witches of the Museum) is isolated from the outside world and purged of her magic—magic being particularly unstable for teenagers and often leading to antisocial conduct, mood swings, bloodlust, delusions, and, most concerning, a habitual, violent obsession with one another.
To all of this, Vanity thinks: Well, whatever. Better than being confined to the Sanatorium with the less fortunate witches, imprisoned in a chemically induced coma as her blood is harvested to make World, the City’s favorite designer drug. At least she’ll be dead someday, there’s always that. And at least the Museum has Arrogance, Vanity’s twin sister, who just might remember how to do magic, and who just might be where our story begins. . . .
All the Noise at Once
All Aiden ever wanted to do was play football just like his star quarterback brother, Brandon. Unfortunately, due to Aiden’s autism, summer football tryouts did not go well when Aiden finds himself at the bottom of a pile-up resulting in an over-stimulation meltdown. But when the school year starts, a spot on the team opens urgently needing to be filled. Aiden finally gets his chance to play the game he loves most.
However, not every team member is happy about Aiden’s position on the team, wary of how his autism will present itself on game day. Tensions rise. A fight breaks out. Cops are called.
When Brandon tries to interfere on behalf of his brother, he is arrested by the very same cops who, just hours earlier, were chanting his name from the bleachers. When trumped up charges appear for felony assault on an officer, everything Brandon has worked for starts to slip away and the brothers’ relationship is tested. With Brandon’s trial inching closer, Aiden is desperate to find a way to clear his brother’s name while also trying to answer the one looming question plaguing his brain: what does it mean to be Black and autistic?
