But her well-ordered world is turned upside down when her only sister is killed in a car crash. Harriet has never been the maternal type, but with an orphaned nephew and niece to look after, she has no choice but to leave her old life behind. Divorced Will Hart also thinks he has the perfect life. A firm believer in living for the moment, Will has a terrific relationship with his teenage daughters and has happily swapped a career as a lawyer for that of an antiques dealer. Then a startling revelation causes his life to unravel. Both Harriet and Will have no choice but to piece together a new future for themselves.

    When a ragtag international crew of migrant workers is forced to flee the strawberry fields they have been working in, they set off across England looking for employment. Displaying the same sense of compassion, social outrage, and gift for hilarity that she showed in A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Marina Lewycka chronicles their bumpy road trip with a tender affection for her downtrodden characters and their search for a taste of the good life.

    Here, many famous names are mentioned and there is obviously a grave risk that families and friends are going to take offence... Uncle Oswald discovers the electrifying properties of the Sudanese Blister Beetle and the gorgeous Yasmin Howcomely, a girl absolutely soaked in sex, and sets about seducing all the great men of the time for his own wicked, irreverent reasons.

    But the apparently pleasant town is not all it seems. Sylvia falls in love with an older man - but it's her connection to his precocious young daughter and her neighbours' son which will change her life and put them, the library and her job under threat.How does the library alter the young children's lives and how do the children fare as a result of the books Sylvia introduces them to?

    He misses the routine of the academic year and has lost his appetite for research. His wife Winifred’s late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on his aged father who stubbornly refuses to leave the house he is patently unable to live in with safety.But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss — a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment, leading Desmond into mistakes, misunderstandings and follies. It might be comic for others, but for the deaf person himself, it is no joke. It is his deafness which inadvertently involves Desmond with a young woman whose wayward behaviour threatens to destabilize his life completely.

    Horribly wounded in an attack by a suspect, she must return to the site of her worst fears. She is asked by the police to advise them on a simple murder inquiry. A young runaway has been found killed by a canal and the chief suspect is the man who wounded Kit. But Kit refuses to accept appearances and her obsessive search for the truth draws her into an underworld of the missing and the unloved which puts her at terrible risk.

    Do you run away and hide, or start planning your revenge?THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER AND THE PERFECT READ FOR VALENTINE'S DAY . . . 'A deftly plotted, witty tale of revenge. It's a romcom with attitude' Mail on Sunday Best friend, soulmate, confidante . . . backstabber. Amy thought she knew everything there was to know about her best friend Melissa. Then again, Amy also thought she was on the verge of the wedding of her dreams to her long-distance fiancé.Until she pays a surprise trip home to London. Jack is out, but it's clear another woman has been making herself at home in their flat.There's something about her stuff that feels oddly familiar . . . and then it hits Amy. The Other Woman is Melissa.Amy has lost her home, her fiancé and her best friend in one disastrous weekend - but instead of falling apart, she's determined to get her own back.Piecing her life back together won't be half as fun as dismantling theirs, after all.'I've just finished this . . . it's FABALISS. I was SO GRIPPED' Marian Keyes'Barbed, twisty and full of deliciously dry wit, this is smart stuff to race through' Sunday Mirror'Brilliant, original, edgy and compulsively readable' Daily Mail

    It is a fiction about fiction-writing in which the invented world is as much infused with wit and genius as the theme of inventing it. It is a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction, and a wry demonstration of its limitations. This Penguin Classic contains Christopher Ricks's introductory essay, itself a classic of English literary criticism, together with a new introduction on the recent critical history and influence of Tristram Shandy by Melvyn New. The text and notes are based on the acclaimed Florida Edition, making the scholarship of the Florida editors readily available for the first time.

     This is the dark but humourous tale of Sarah Pemberton, who is not a happy woman. A down to earth, inventive soul who despises her stuck up pompous husband Neil, who believes he is much more intelligent and important than she is. When he refuses her a divorce and emotionally blackmails her into staying with him by threatening to take custody of their daughter, she's decides to make life a little more entertaining for herself, by subtly torturing him at every available opportunity. Creative and adaptable by nature, with a wicked sense of humour, she comes up with more and more ways to ridicule him, without him ever knowing she has a hand in it. ...."During 1993-1994 amongst other things, I cooked him a meat pie with pedigree chum; Stole his car more times than I can count; put chilli powder in his underpants, sent a stripagram to his work (a fat one), and subscribed him to a gay porn mag! (Our paperboy avoided him like the plague after that.)"..... Finding accomplices in the form of her Aunt May, who lives in a crumbling old former hotel which was damaged during WWII, and May's two lodgers, a shy young hippy named Darren, along with his brother Matthew a former life model, they try to get rid of her husband by either 'Plan A', which consists of 'frame him for a crime so that he gets incarcerated', or 'Plan B' drive him to a nervous breakdown. Both plans are designed to discredit Neil in case of a custody battle for their daughter. There is only one little prerequisite for every little torturous idea though, and that is, IT HAS TO MAKE THEM LAUGH! Unbeknown to Sarah at first, she isn't the only one with a vendetta against her husband, his entire workforce hate his guts and exploit any opportunity to make him look bad. When plans A & B go disastrously wrong, Sarah and co set their sights on a new target, her in-laws. Interwoven throughout the story is the tale of Aunt May, the lynch pin of her little make shift family, who harbours secrets of her own that go back to the night the bomb fell on the east wing of the hotel. This is not a tale of a submissive woman suffering at the hands of abuse; this is the tale of a strong courageous woman having one last laugh at other people's expense. Contains very occasional strong language, and scenes that should not be repeated at home. Volume One of 'The Cuckoo' series

    Pagford is not what it first seems.And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?

    Hilarious misadventures abound as Lady Bobbin's serenely beautiful daughter, Philadelphia, meets the advances of the very eligible, and equally dull, Lord Lewis and of the charming but penniless Paul Fotheringay, whose terribly serious first novel has, to his dismay, just been hailed by critics as the funniest book of the year. With signature wit and gentle mockery, not to mention her acid malice for the second-rate, Nancy Mitford romps rippingly through the wold and the life of the county set in the cozy English 1930s.

    Billed as The Lucky Chances, the sisters are the illegitimate and unacknowledged daughters of Sir Melchior Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day. At once ribald and sentimental, glittery and tender, this rambunctious family saga is Angela Carter at her bewitching best.

    It's 1959 and the school bristles with bullies and sadistic staff. Tommy, a quirky loner, obsessed with cowboys and Indians, needs all the bravery he can summon.Salvation comes when his glamorous actress sister is swept off to Hollywood by one of his heroes, TV cowboy Ray Montane. But with the Cold War looming, the sinister side of Tinseltown seeps through and Tommy and Diane soon find themselves in jeopardy. Forty years on, Tommy has to confront his boyhood ghosts when his own son finds himself charged with murder.

    Sent away to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Kent to learn the way of the patient, they find themselves in the company of army and air force officers, a car salesman, a young university graduate, a mysterious German woman, a member of the aristocracy and an American merchant seaman. They discover that a cure is tantalisingly just out of reach and only by inciting wholesale rebellion can freedom be snatched.

    When Elly Swift, an agitated passenger beside her on a train, leaves a locket in Anna’s bag before jumping onto the tracks, Anna starts asking awkward questions. But everything points to suicide and the police close the case. Anna, however, believes Elly’s fears for Toby, her young nephew, missing since being snatched from St Stephen’s church six months ago, fail to explain the true reason behind Elly’s distress. Through a series of cryptic clues Elly left behind, Anna starts asking awkward questions, embarking on a dangerous crusade to track down Toby and find Elly’s killer. But nothing is as it seems and Anna opens a can of worms that throws into question the death of her husband, five years earlier - before the threads of the mystery converge in an astonishing conclusion.