Trespasses

Louise Kennedy

Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion. Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast. By day she teaches at a parochial school; at night she fills in at her family's pub. There she meets Michael Agnew, a barrister who's made a name for himself defending IRA members. Against her better judgment - Michael is not only Protestant but older, and married - Cushla lets herself get drawn in by him and his sophisticated world, and an affair ignites. Then the father of a student is savagely beaten, setting in motion a chain reaction that will threaten everything, and everyone, Cushla most wants to protect. As tender as it is unflinching, Trespasses is a heart-pounding, heart-rending drama of thwarted love and irreconcilable loyalties, in a place what you come from seems to count more than what you do, or whom you cherish.

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Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is. Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.

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Heap Earth Upon It

Chloe Michelle Howarth

A creeping story of sapphic obsession with Gothic undertones and a delicious mid-century feel, from the author of the Polari Prize-shortlisted Sunburn. January 1965. The orphaned O'Leary siblings - Tom, Jack, Anna and Peggy - arrive in the village of Ballycrea, tight-lipped about their troubled past and desperate for a fresh start. After being met with suspicion from most of the locals, the family are thrilled when they're taken under the wing of their well-respected neighbours, Bill and Betty Nevan, who offer them work, companionship and an opportunity to fit in. But for one of the O'Learys, this new friendship sparks an intense attachment that makes the dynamic dangerous for all. It's difficult to bury secrets, but almost impossible to bury feelings... Crackling with suspense, Heap Earth Upon It revisits the rural Ireland of Howarth's critically acclaimed debut and delves into claustrophobic relationships and tangled identities, leaving you wondering who to trust until the very last page. It combines the emotional intensity and slow-burn sapphic obsession of Julia Armfield's Our Wives Under the Sea and K. Patrick's Mrs S. with the unsettling gothic undertones of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and Shirley Jackson's fiction. 'A tense and claustrophobic novel with gothic atmosphere which seeps into your bones like fog... A brutal exploration of the corrosive impact of shame and secrecy. Howarth knows her sapphic yearning!' RACHEL DAWSON, author of Neon Roses 'Dark, passionate and poised. A remarkable story of the way rural Ireland haunts and is haunted. Intense and thrilling' SOULA EMMANUEL, author of Wild Geese ** READERS LOVE SUNBURN ** ‘Achingly beautiful, almost lyrical… This was both sweet and heartbreaking – I couldn’t put it down’ 5-star Reader Review ‘An addictive, honey-dipped queer love story’ 5-star Reader Review ‘Ever since I read this, I simply CANNOT stop thinking about it’ 5-star Reader Review ‘Completely heart-wrenching, devastating, all-consuming… Spectacular’ 5-star Reader Review

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The Secret History

Donna Tartt

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

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Frankenstein

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

When the scientist Victor Frankenstein attempts to create life in his laboratory, he sets in motion tragic forces beyond his control and faces losing everything he loves. No reader in the grip of Mary Shelley’s novel, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the countless adaptations, imitations, and homages which have followed in its ample wake. In her first novel, written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818 (and revised in 1831), the teenaged Shelley managed to produce English Romanticism’s finest prose fiction. This edition reproduces her original 1818 text.

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Bunny

Mona Awad

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision. The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

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