His deep brown eyes were a thing of beauty–enough to make you want to bare your soul to him and a whole lot more. When his father was sent to prison, Taylor's life spiralled out of control. Everything he thought he knew was a lie, and his passion for the game to a backseat to everything else in his life. Wasted, and angry at the world, Taylor could see no way out. He was soon forced to realise that not everything in life was easy. But fighting your fears and taking back control was the easy part. Learning to hold on to that control would be Taylor's biggest challenge yet. Lola Henderson - After the accident that ripped her world out from underneath her feet, Lola struggled to find her place in the world again. Living through an endless nightmare, so scared and unsure of herself, and with fear playing a continuous loop, she was fighting a losing battle. Winslow Falls was meant to be the fresh start she needed to find herself again, but when she locked eyes with the star striker on the college football team, she knew she was done for. Would Lola continue to avoid the boy who made her feel things she knew was wrong? Or would fate throw them together, forcing them on to an unlikely path of friendship? Maybe Taylor was exactly who she needed in her life to overcome the fear that plagued her every day. "Two wrongs didn't make a right. But in our case they did."

    Only Matthew came home safely. Ten years later, Matthew tells us, he has found a way to bring his brother back... Unafraid to look at the shadows of our hearts, Nathan Filer's rare and brilliant debut shows us the strength that is rooted in resilience and love. Editor's Note Feb 10, 2014: St Martin's Press have just announced that Where The Moon Isn't will be republished under the UK title, The Shock of the Fall this week in digital format and later this fall in paperback. They said that the title change was necessary "because otherwise there's a lot of confusion" - The Shock of the Fall recently won the Costa Book of the Year award, which is UK based but has international renown.

    In MUSIC OF THE SWAMP, he focuses his magic and imagination on a single theme--a boy's utterly helpless love for his utterly hopeless father.

    Neither has a final destination in mind, and so they find themselves drifting aimlessly through middle America; driving, smoking, sharing confidences, looking out for each other, and stopping as and when the mood takes them.

    She wonders what living with Dad will be like, even though she's always felt closer to her father. But is it right to love one parent more than another?There are other adjustments Nell has to make...like sharing a room with five-year-old Hugo...and having hamburgers and tuna fish a lot. And what if Dad marries the woman he's been dating? Nell can't imagine what it would be like to have helpless Arden for a stepmother.

    

    But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. And she knows there will be a price to pay with her father.Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle. She forms a plan to go north, to pack up the secrets she's holding about her life in the South and hang them on the line for all to see in Ohio.As the two girls are drawn deeper into a dangerous world of bootleggers and moral corruption, they must come to terms with the complexities of their tenuous bond and a hidden past that links them in ways that could cost them their lives.

    For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly--happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life. Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as every great love story does...in loss. After Cam's death, Lilly takes a lone road trip to her and Cam's favorite spot on the remote coast of Maine, the place where they fell in love over and over again, where their ghosts still dance. There, she looks hard to her past--to a first love that ended in tragedy; to falling in love with Cam; to a marriage filled with exuberance, sheer life, and safety-- to try to figure out her future.It is a journey begun with tender memories and culminating in a revelation that will make Lilly re-evaluate everything she thought was true about her husband and her marriage.

    She is a lifeguard at the pool at the Dunes hotel in Las Vegas, caught off guard by the new attention from men and boys, not quite sure of her own footing in the world. Her mother, Kathy, suddenly finds herself in a place equally uncertain: her children getting older, her stable marriage perhaps too stable, the slow days of summer leaving her adrift. When Kathy meets Helen’s boss, the manager at the pool, her life is on the brink of a different sort of change.Following Helen and Kathy through three summers, this novel is an intimate picture of two sexual awakenings under one roof and their aftershocks on a family. The Perfect Age is set in workaday Las Vegas, where people are married at drive-through chapels, and escort services are advertised alongside 99-cent shrimp cocktail. The novel takes the reader beyond the glitz of showgirls and Elvis impersonators and reveals the everyday life in homes and schools, and among the lukewarm waters of Lake Mead and the semi-cool of the surrounding mountains. In The Perfect Age, Heather Skyler explores the nature of beauty, sex, and class divisions in a society where things are at once normal and bizarre, showing us that the validity of life’s deepest experiences—love, betrayal, acceptance—is never compromised by age.

    But before she can arrest him, a mistake sends the case careering off the rails.And then the pandemic hits.Six world-changing months later, and Christine Harvey has been widowed by the disease. She decides to build a new life for her children on the Dorset coast, buying a stunning clifftop property.But no one tells her the house is right next door to where the murdered girl lived. And nobody warns her that the girl’s father – who still lives there – was very much a suspect in the case before it collapsed.Christine tries to commit to her fresh start. But the increasingly unsettling behaviour of her new neighbour leads her to speculate on what really happened on that dark, winter night.She soon realises her own children are in terrible danger, but with nowhere else to go, and the case officially closed, the only person who can help is the detective who blew up so spectacularly in the first place.Together they must unmask a calculating and merciless killer, before he strikes again.And if they fail, Christine’s daughter will be the next child lying dead in the cove.

    She has a fulfilling job helping small businesses in the local community, she is within a few minutes' walk of all the people she loves best, and most importantly, she has finally got together with her childhood sweetheart, Ross.It's not all plain sailing, though, because they have to keep their relationship a secret. The feud between their families still rages on, and Kerra doesn't want to pour fuel on its flame and risk losing everything.But Kerra should know better than anyone that secrets don't stay hidden for long in a community like Penvennan Cove...An uplifting and feel-good romance novel for fans of Lucy Coleman, Jessica Redland and Lisa Hobman.Book 2 in the series. Book 1: Coming Home to Penvennan Cove.

    At the age of fourteen, Hattie learns that her mother, Addie, is dead, and her father, Hubbard, stands accused of Addie's murder, along with countless other shocking betrayals. Overnight, Hattie becomes mother to her three siblings while still very much a child herself. The life she had dreamt of now seems impossible to achieve. How will Hattie break away from the father who prevents her from living the life she desperately wants? Will her heart ever be able to heal in the height of The Great Depression?

    Set in Pyke County, Mississippi, Eden is a raw, heartbreaking, and enlightening novel that marks the emergence of a stunning and original talent. Narrated by fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield, Eden opens in the moments after Maddy has impulsively drawn a naked woman on the pages of Genesis in bright red lipstick during Sunday service. The community is scandalized, and her devout, long-suffering mother’s response to her transgression is to force her to spend weekends nursing her dying Aunt Pip, an outcast who lives on the edge of town.From then on, Maddy must negotiate her two worlds: at the house where she lives with her hard-working, Bible-reading mother, Faye, and her father, Chevrolet—a one-armed drunk, gambler and womanizer—she is both a reluctant participant in and astute observer of the strange and confounding dynamics of her sometimes violent, sometimes tender family. (Years before, Maddy’s grandmother—her mother’s mother—chopped of Chevrolet’s arm and fed it to the pigs after he and Pip were found together in the back room as Faye entertained friends from the church—and ever since, he has been am emasculated, desperate man—drinking and gambling his wife’s money away, leaving her to clean up his mess time and again.) And then out on Commitment Road, she is caretaker to her Aunt Pip, whose only friend is her eccentric neighbor, Fat. Maddy’s time with Pip and Fat opens her eyes to the exhilaration of speaking your own mind, living your life on your own terms and without apology, and also to the cost extracted by both. She learns that there are strengths that belong to women alone, and also that there is a kind of ravaging vulnerability that is terrifying and inescapable, and uniquely female.The world Maddy inherits is one of injustice and hypocrisy, one that requires black people work for the whites for little to no pay; that sent her Uncle Sugar to jail for raping a white woman—no questions asked—when Maddy was just a baby; that preaches Christian love and forgiveness even as its actions reflect the very opposite. But Maddy soon learns that there is something that can work to oppose those truths, and that is knowledge; having the will and the ability to look beneath the surface, to question what others take as a given. By the end of the novel, newly acquainted with mortality and her own fierce strength, Maddy comes to bear both the burden and the blessing of that knowledge.In lush, vivid brushstrokes, Olympia Vernon conjures a world that is both intoxicating and cruel, and illuminates the bittersweet transformation of the young girl who must bear the burden and blessing of its secrets too soon. Eden is a haunting, memorable novel propelled by the poetry and power of a voice that is complex, lyrical, and utterly true.

    The son of a fortune teller, bookish, and an easy target for bullies, Alex hasn't had the easiest childhood.But when he meets curmudgeonly widower Mr. Peterson, he finds an unlikely friend. Someone who teaches him that you only get one shot at life. That you have to make it count.So when, aged seventeen, Alex is stopped at customs with 113 grams of marijuana, an urn full of ashes on the front seat, and an entire nation in uproar, he's fairly sure he's done the right thing ...Introducing a bright young voice destined to charm the world, The Universe Versus Alex Woods is a celebration of curious incidents, astronomy and astrology, the works of Kurt Vonnegut and the unexpected connections that form our world.

    She knows this winding country road like the back of her hand, dodges the potholes with ease. But then she hears a crunch. A thud. She slams on the brakes.Since Katie’s dad left it’s just been the two of us, but we’re a team – singing in the kitchen at cheesy pop songs, tackling her homework. My teenage daughter is everything to me.But one night, as we’re curled up in front of the TV, the messages start. I keep my phone away from Katie so she can’t see the terrifying words: I know what you did. Now you’re going to do something for me…I have no choice but to obey. Because if I go to the police, come clean about what I did to protect my girl, all the questions and prying eyes would soon discover Katie’s secret too. And that would tear her life apart.So I drive where they tell me, do what they say, send the photo evidence they want. I feel sick when they ask me to cause someone harm, and it’s clear they know everything about our lives. I thought I was keeping a secret to keep my girl safe. But have I actually put her in even more danger?An absolutely addictive thriller about how far a mother would go for her child, with a twist that will leave you gasping. Fans of Shari Lapena, Lisa Jewell and The Girl on the Train won’t be able to put this down.