1990s' Chicago: two students fall in love. Twenty years on, theirs is a suburban life of detoxes and home improvements. A warm and sardonic novel by the author of The Nix.
An awe-inspiring epic about a young Dutch microbiologist whose research takes her on a deep dive into sea and space. These journeys raise profound questions about the origin of life, our pla... read more
A man returns to Georgia after two decades in the UK and disappears; first one and then another of his sons sets off to find him, picking up clues scattered like breadcrumbs in a fairy tale.... read more
The title is the nickname of St Cuthbert, a C7th hermit. It begins there and ends in 21st century Co. Durham... An incantatory, feverish and experimental novel with prose that skips, slides ... read more
A prelapsarian tale about a haven of racially integrated citizens, based on a real island off the coast of Maine which became - for a while - an exotic utopia in the late C18th.
A woman goes missing; decades later, her children still have no answers - but the East Anglian village where they grew up begins to offer up its secrets.
Tokyo, an astonishly good cook and multiple murders. This is not a who-dunnit but a why-dunnit - and there is much to savour, both malicious and delicious.
This love story tacks between an English boarding school and the Western Front. A moving historical debut; compelling and unexpectedly funny (for the Somme).
We're in Verona Island here, not Lilliput, and the action is set in a brothel in 1954, where the eponymous Mrs and her 19-year-old business opportunity, Carita, seek to assert their agency i... read more
Drawing on the author's own experiences of WW2, the novel's protagonist rebels against the pressures of family and politics in Fascist Italy. First published in 1949. By the author of Forbid... read more
Somerset Maugham appears as one of two narrators in this atmospheric novel of love, truth, secrecy and betrayal in 1920s' colonial Penang. Eng's airy storytelling is a rare gift: he gives hi... read more
A Chicago detective thinks he's found a piece of paradise in the west of Ireland... but all that glisters is not gold. Some of it is coldly gleaming revenge.
An excellent Catalan novel from the 1970s, about flight and return, in which the Civil War still looms over the tail-end of Franco's era and modernity blooms. A marvellous evocation of Barce... read more
The story of the inimitable Maria Callas - conflicted, disappointed, ambitious and supremely gifted - and of her love affair with Aristotle Onassis - by the author of The Fortune Hunter, My ... read more
A slim, charming and witty riff on Proustian themes - the shallowness of society, the impossibility of love, the enduring power of art... Life-affirming!