From the Sunday Times bestselling author, for anyone who's ever been ghosted – and wondered why… 'Beth is a really clever, funny writer' Nina Stibbe'Isabella's NOT dead.' Every time someone asks Gwen about her best friend – you know, the one who ghosted them all fifteen years ago – this is what Gwen tells them. But where is Isabella? Why did she leave, just when Gwen needed her the most? Setting out to solve the mystery, in an adventure that takes Gwen across the country then across Europe; that tests her friendships and strains her marriage, Gwen searches for Isabella. But Isabella's not the only one who's lost. Is Gwen also searching for… herself?

The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. It contains Didion's famous essay, "Goodbye to All That".

Art, ambition and desire collide when a struggling academic becomes entangled in the life and marriage of her literary idol, from the author of Stargazer. By day, Dr Ruth Morgan lectures on ' the new frontier of storytelling' at East Toronto University. By night, she toils away at a collection of short stories, fantasising about a literary career to rival that of the iconic Shelby Rayburn, internationally renowned and widely hailed as the voice of Ruth's generation of women. When Shelby and her husband, Oscar, make an appearance at an annual faculty party, Ruth can't believe her luck. The trio immediately hit it off, and an intoxicating intimacy develops between them, underwritten by a simmering sexual tension. Everything changes when Shelby makes Ruth an offer she can't refuse - one that she can't tell anyone about, including Oscar. As boundaries blur and secret alliances form, the dynamic becomes riddled with distrust and threatens to implode. Ruth and Shelby need each other, but each has their own agenda when it comes to friendship, love and literary stardom. Deepening her exploration of female friendships, art and fame, award-winning author Laurie Petrou returns with a suspenseful campus novel examining what it means to be a creator in an age where notions of authorship, relationships and notoriety have become dangerously undefinable. Perfect for readers who enjoyed The Rachel Incident, Luster or Conversations with Friends, as well as fans of Jodi Picoult.

Long-awaited rediscovery of visionary Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig and her mythic, modernist classic, QueenBirgitta Trotzig’s 1964 novella is the story of a girl named Judit who is stubborn and singular, distant and unyielding. She has a love of lilies. She is called Queen. Her entire world exists within Bäck, a village in the south of Sweden so named because a brook bends through it. At the age of nine, Judit’s mother falls ill during childbirth and passes Judit the strong little body of her brother Viktor. A sharp gleam springs forth from Viktor’s pale-blue infant eyes, and the two are bonded for life. Together with their wordless brother Albert (one who prefers the warm silence of animals), Viktor, Albert, and Judit form a precarious family. In dark and mystical waves of language, Judit’s inner life is awakened to the reader. She has her secrets. The Queen prizes her alias like a precious gemstone; she dreams one day that the master gardener at Trolle Ljungby Castle will select her very own flower bulbs for planting; and she holds suspicions like hot stones to her heart. When Viktor decides to emigrate to the United States, the ground beneath Judit's feet forever shifts.The English-language discovery of Birgitta Trotzig, one of the greatest Swedish writers of all time, is long overdue. Her dark, spiritual writings construct a truth and vision all her own. Trotzig's characters are ordinary and troubled, their lives barren and merciless, but an otherworldly light sweeps across them, making them stand with spectacular clarity.

Long-awaited rediscovery of visionary Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig and her mythic, modernist classic, QueenBirgitta Trotzig’s 1964 novella is the story of a girl named Judit who is stubborn and singular, distant and unyielding. She has a love of lilies. She is called Queen. Her entire world exists within Bäck, a village in the south of Sweden so named because a brook bends through it. At the age of nine, Judit’s mother falls ill during childbirth and passes Judit the strong little body of her brother Viktor. A sharp gleam springs forth from Viktor’s pale-blue infant eyes, and the two are bonded for life. Together with their wordless brother Albert (one who prefers the warm silence of animals), Viktor, Albert, and Judit form a precarious family. In dark and mystical waves of language, Judit’s inner life is awakened to the reader. She has her secrets. The Queen prizes her alias like a precious gemstone; she dreams one day that the master gardener at Trolle Ljungby Castle will select her very own flower bulbs for planting; and she holds suspicions like hot stones to her heart. When Viktor decides to emigrate to the United States, the ground beneath Judit's feet forever shifts.The English-language discovery of Birgitta Trotzig, one of the greatest Swedish writers of all time, is long overdue. Her dark, spiritual writings construct a truth and vision all her own. Trotzig's characters are ordinary and troubled, their lives barren and merciless, but an otherworldly light sweeps across them, making them stand with spectacular clarity.

The lonely, rockbound island of Tsunojima is notorious as the site of a series of bloody unsolved murders. Some even say it’s haunted. One thing’s for sure: it’s the perfect destination for the K-University Mystery Club’s annual trip. But when the first club member turns up dead, the remaining amateur sleuths realise they will need all of their murder-mystery expertise to get off the island alive. As the party are picked off one by one, the survivors grow desperate and paranoid, turning on each other. Will anyone be able to untangle the murderer’s fiendish plan before it’s too late?

With her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Brontë reached the height of her artistic power. First published in 1853, Villette is Brontë's most accomplished and deeply felt work, eclipsing even Jane Eyre in critical acclaim. Her narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquette. The first pain brings others, and with them comes the heartache Lucy has tried so long to escape. Yet in spite of adversity and disappointment, Lucy Snowe survives to recount the unstinting vision of a turbulent life's journey - a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman's consciousness in English literature.

What does it mean to lose yourself – and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention. On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella and finds herself catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession – not just with this endlessly attractive spectre, but also with the feverish karaoke trips from which she draws the ultimate solace. With astonishing existential acuity, Polly Barton's formidable debut novel renders the paradoxes of modern life in all its complexity, in deliriously self-conscious prose that is at once propulsive, titillating and bitingly funny. Echoing with the sounds of Whitney Houston and The Cure, reaching for the sublime in dark, sweaty boxes, What Am I, A Deer? is an exhilarating exploration of authenticity, fantasy, romance and intoxication. 

A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time.It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly. When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as “Paradise,” Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest. At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever complicated as the men in her Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world, and announces Sophie Kemp as a wholly original, transformative, and brilliant new voice in fiction.

An up-close and striking look at modern beauty culture―from Botox and Instagram filters to lip flips and editing apps―and the realities of coming of age online We live in a new age of beauty. With advancements in cosmetic surgery, walk-in treatments, augmented-reality face filters, photo-editing apps, and exposure to more images than ever, we have the ability to craft the image we want everyone to see. We pinch, pull, squeeze, tweeze, smooth, and slice ourselves beyond recognition. But is modern beauty culture truly empowering? Are we really in control? In Pixel Flesh, Ellen Atlanta holds a mirror up to our modern beauty ideal and the pressure to present a perfect image, to live in an age of constant comparison and curated feeds. She weaves in her personal story with others’ to reconfigure our obsession with the cult of beauty and to explore the reality of living in a world of paradoxes: We know our standards are unhealthy, but following them helps us succeed. We resent social media but continue to scroll. We know digital beauty is artificial, yet we strive for it. From Love Island to lip filler, "blackfishing" to the "beauty tax," Pixel Flesh exposes what young women face under a dominant industry. Nuanced, unflinching, and razor sharp, it unmasks the absurdities of the standards we suddenly find ourselves upholding and acts as a rallying cry and a refusal to suffer in silence.

Why is a generation of women only now discovering they have ADHD? A journalist recounts her own experience living for decades with undiagnosed ADHD and explores the transformative power of finally coming to understand your own brain.When freelance journalist Carla Ciccone became a mother, she realized she might need to finally see a therapist. Sure, she had struggled to hold down a job and manage her intense emotions for most of her adult life, but she’d always made it work. But “making it work“ wasn’t going to cut it now that she had another human being to raise.Months into therapy, at age thirty-nine, Carla was officially diagnosed with ADHD, and she learned that she was far from the number of women Carla’s age who were being diagnosed with ADHD had more than doubled in recent years. Forty-one million prescriptions for the psychostimulant Adderall were filled in the United States in 2021, a 10% increase from the year before—and, for the first time, a substantial number of these new prescriptions were being written for women.In Nowhere Girl, Carla weaves her personal story with a broader investigation into the rise of ADHD diagnoses. She looks back at the classrooms of the 1990s, where ADHD was diagnosed mostly to little boys who were unable to sit still, shifts her gaze to the hormonal upheavals of adolescence and their unique effects on the neurochemistry of girls, and then examines her own chaotic entrance into motherhood and her desire to do right by her own daughter. Throughout, she examines the science and cultural history of ADHD, and considers how the hundreds of thousands of women now being diagnosed with ADHD can revisit their own personal histories and navigate their way towards a steadier, happier adulthood.