Chance meetings between its cast of inimitably odd individuals—Ruby, the betting-shop cashier; violently disturbed (and disturbing) Vincent; Samantha, the would-be cabaret singer; and Little Buttercup, the never-quite-made-it greyhound—result in the unlikeliest of couples. There’s always the risk that it could all be disastrous as characters try—or don’t try—to make winning combinations. But as Ruby, the story’s soft-centered heroine, observes: “Losing, that’s the whole point of the gamble.”Dazzling, gritty, and surprising, Reversed Forecast is the uniquely entertaining first novel by Nicola Barker, previously shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Hawthornden Prize and IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. “Beautifully rendered—well written, clear and revelatory.” —The Times (London) “A capital fairy tale.” —The Guardian “A strange and wonderful novel.” —The Sunday Times (London) “An imaginative lowlife tale, told with acuteness and verve.” —The Literary Review Nicola Barker’s eight previous novels include Darkmans (short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden Prize), Wide Open (winner of the 2000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and Clear (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004). She has also written two prize-winning collections of short stories, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in East London.

    But when Tony disappears into thin air, Maggie's world collapses. Struggling on her own, Maggie cannot tell who her friends are, like Inspector Matthews, to whom Maggie is increasingly drawn.

    Once on board, Tess catches the eye of two men, one a roughly-hewn but kind sailor and the other an enigmatic Chicago millionaire. But on the fourth night, disaster strikes.Amidst the chaos and desperate urging of two very different suitors, Tess is one of the last people allowed on a lifeboat. Tess’s sailor also manages to survive unharmed, witness to Lady Duff Gordon’s questionable actions during the tragedy. Others—including the gallant Midwestern tycoon—are not so lucky.On dry land, rumors about the survivors begin to circulate, and Lady Duff Gordon quickly becomes the subject of media scorn and later, the hearings on the Titanic. Set against a historical tragedy but told from a completely fresh angle, The Dressmaker is an atmospheric delight filled with all the period's glitz and glamour, all the raw feelings of a national tragedy and all the contradictory emotions of young love.

    Perfect for fans of Pedigree Mum and The Mummyfesto.It was just a squashed grape on the kitchen floor. Hardly a reason to get upset, right? But six years of motherhood has left Lisa Stratton feeling like a skivvy. Every morning before she’s opened her eyes, she starts her mental inventory of jobs to do. And just like yesterday, the day before and every day since she became a mum, she’s woken up knackered. So when her husband deliberately steps over the grape because it’s ‘her responsibility’ to run the house, it tips her over the edge. He wasn’t always like this – they used to share everything. Then the kids came along and he saw it as an excuse to sit back. But this time things are going to change. Lisa has made a decision. She’s going on strike…

    She’s spent another year dreaming of being whisked away on a sleigh-ride for two, but she’s facing festive season alone – again. And, just to give her another reason to feel anything other than candy-cane perky, a new shop across the road has opened… Not only is it selling baked goods, but the owner, with his seriously charming smile, has every girl in town swooning.But Lily isn’t about to let her business crumble — the Gingerbread Café is the heart of the community, and she’s going to fight for it! This could be the Christmas that maybe, just maybe, all her dreams – even the someone-to-decorate-the-Christmas-tree-with ones – really do come true! Chocolate Dreams at the Gingerbread CafeChocolate…the most irresistible temptation?The Gingerbread Café is all a buzz! This Easter, Lily and the rest of the town of Ashford, Connecticut are planning a truly decadent Chocolate Festival. Cooking up a storm, CeeCee and Lily are not just baking a batch of their sinfully delicious chocolate-dipped gingerbread men, but an excess of chocolate truffles, squidgy, cinnamony hot cross buns and melt in your mouth chocolate eggs. The Gingerbread Café staff have definitely enjoyed the tasting process!Add in Damon’s cute-as-a-button seven year old daughter, Charlie, up for a visit and Lily’s perfect Easter may just be around the corner. Until her ex-husband Joel turns up demanding twenty thousand dollars… Suddenly the future of the Gingerbread Café is not so clear…and Lily finds herself eating far more of The Gingerbread Café’s treats than her skinny jeans allow…Can Lily concoct a brilliant plan to save her beloved café, convince Damon she has no feelings for Joel and still throw a Chocolate Festival the town will be talking about for years? There’s only one way to find out...Christmas Wedding at the Gingerbread CaféYou are invited to the wedding of the year!Snow is falling thick and fast outside the Gingerbread Café and inside, its owner Lily is planning the wedding of the year. Her wedding! She never dreamt it would happen, but this Christmas, she’ll be marrying the man of her dreams - in a Christmas-card-perfect ceremony!The gingerbread is baking, the dress is fitted and the mistletoe’s in place – for once, everything’s going to plan. That is until her mother-in-law arrives... Suddenly, Lily’s famous cool is being tested like never before and her dream wedding is crumbling before her eyes.In the blink of a fairylight, the Gingerbread Café has been thrown into chaos! Lily thought she had this wedding wrapped up, but with so much to do before she says ‘I do’, can Lily get to the church on time – and make this Christmas sparkle after all?

    And every square inch was being devotedly restored to its original splendor—even as a relationship fell to pieces. Now Francesca Thayer, newly separated from her lawyer boyfriend Todd, is desperate. The owner of a struggling art gallery, and suddenly the sole mortgage payer on her Greenwich Village townhouse, Francesca does the math and then the unimaginable. She puts out an advertisement for boarders. Soon her house becomes a whole new world.First comes Eileen, a fresh, pretty L.A. transplant, now a New York City schoolteacher. Then there’s Chris, a young father struggling with a troubled ex-wife and the challenge of parenting a seven-year-old son who visits every other weekend. The final tenant is Marya, a celebrated cookbook author hoping to start a new chapter in her life after the death of her husband. As Francesca’s art gallery begins to find its footing and Todd moves on to another woman, she discovers that her accidental tenants have become the most important people in her life. As the roommates bond, and the house fills with the aroma of Marya’s exquisite cuisine, there are shadows as well as light. Naïve Eileen explores the precarious boundaries of online dating with a series of strangers. Chris’s custody fight for his son escalates to devastating levels. Marya faces an unexpected choice that will take her into untested waters. And Francesca herself will contemplate what had seemed impossible: opening her heart once more.Over the course of one amazing, unforgettable, ultimately life-changing year, the house at 44 Charles Street fills with laughter, heartbreak, and, always, hope. In the hands of master storyteller Danielle Steel, it’s a place those who visit will never want to leave.

    With both Sarah and her cartoon heroine undergoing fertility treatments, her fiction often reflects her reality. However, she hadn't scripted her husband's infidelity. In the wake of her shattered marriage, Sarah flees to the coastal town in Northern California where she grew up. There, she revisits her troubling past: an emotionally distant father, the loss of her mother and an unexpected connection with Will Bonner, the high school heartthrob skewered mercilessly in her comics. But he's been through some changes himself. And just as her heart is about to reawaken, Sarah makes a most startling discovery. She's pregnant. The winds of change have led Sarah to this surprising new beginning. All she can do is just close her eyes...and breathe.

    They left college with their hearts full of radiant hope, their heads full of impossible dreams. They married "perfect" men, expected to have "perfect" children, found exciting jobs and glamorous careers. Yet heartbreak lay hidden behind the illusions of perfection. Life would force them to confront the mistakes of the past and the betrayals of the present...to create powerful new visions...to meet the irresistible challenge of the way we are now.

    As the daughter of an earl, she’s grown up with every comfort money can buy. But when hard times befall the family’s Yorkshire estate in the aftermath of the Great War, Rosamund’s father sells her beloved horse, setting the stage for a series of events that would extend beyond even her wildest dreams.Though expected to marry for a title instead of love, Rosamund feels called to a different life – one of adventure outside the confines of a ladies’ parlor. She abandons all she’s known and follows in pursuit as her horse is shipped to the new owner – an American entertainer by the name of John Ringling. Once introduced to the Ringling Brothers’ circus and knowing she has much to learn, Rosamund agrees to a bareback riding apprenticeship in the shadow of the Ringlings’ winter home—Ca’D’Zan. It is at that mansion, in what would become the last days of the enigmatic Mable Ringling’s life, that Rosamund finds a deeper sense of purpose in the life she’s been given, and the awakening of faith in her heart.With a supporting cast of characters as mysterious and dazzling as the Ringlings’ big-top world, Rosamund’s journey takes her from the tradition of the English countryside to the last days of America’s Roaring ‘20s—a journey that forever changes what one life might have been.

    As a cool San Francisco socialite, she'd known exactly how to behave, but now she's a lone woman in a world of men...and there's no etiquette book in the world that can teach her how to survive. The men are rebels, determined to take on corporate America with daring and vision, and they aren't going to let her play by good girls' rules. There's Sam, the charismatic visionary, on a rocket-driven ride to glory. And Mitch, the troubled corporate genius with no time for a rich socialite, no matter how beautiful. Together, they will force Susannah into the biggest challenge of her life as she tests her courage -- and her love -- in a bold experiment that will change them all forever. Come share a glorious, heart-stopping love story, and meet the unforgettable woman called Hot Shot as she discovers a passion so rich, so tender, that she will be utterly and forever transformed.

    Now, at age fifty-five, his wife has left him, he hasn't sold a painting in two years, and his gallery wants to stop selling his work, claiming they'll have more value retrospectively...when he's dead. So, left with a large West London home and no income, he's forced to move into his artist's studio in the back garden and list his house on the popular vacation rental site, AirBed.A stranger now in his own home, with his daughter, Mia, off at art school, and any new relationships fizzling out at best, Bennett struggles to find purpose in his day-to-day. That all changes when three different guests--lonely American Alicia; tortured artist Emma; and cautiously optimistic divorcée Kirstie--unwittingly unlock the pieces of himself that have been lost to him for too long.Warm, witty, and utterly humane, Super Host offers a captivating portrait of middle age, relationships, and what it truly means to take a new chance at life.

    But he’s also wounded and angry since the tragic death of his wife, Felicity. No woman in Deep Haven dares come near. New assistant county attorney Ivy Madison simply doesn’t know any better when she bids on Darek at the charity auction. Nor does she know that when she crafted a plea bargain three years ago to keep Jensen Atwood out of jail and in Deep Haven fulfilling community service, she was releasing the man responsible for Felicity’s death. All Ivy knows is that the Christiansens feel like the family she’s always longed for. And once she gets past Darek’s tough exterior, she finds a man she could spend the rest of her life with. Which scares her almost as much as Darek learning of her involvement in his wife’s case. Caught between new love and old grudges, Darek must decide if he can set aside the past for a future with Ivy—a future more and more at risk as an approaching wildfire threatens to wipe out the Christiansen resort and Deep Haven itself.

    A witty and urbane bachelor of the Gilded Age embarks on a high-risk scheme to marry into a fortune; a young writer soon to make his mark turns himself to his craft with harrowing social consequences; an aristocratic British officer during the American Revolution carries on a courtship that leads to murder; and, in Newport's earliest days, a tragically orphaned Quaker girl imagines a way forward for herself and the slave girl she has inherited.In The Maze at Windermere Gregory Blake Smith weaves these intersecting worlds into a brilliant tapestry, charting a voyage across the ages into the maze of the human heart.

    Using a playful parallel-universe structure, The Post-Birthday World follows one woman's future as it unfolds under the influence of two drastically different men.Children's book illustrator Irina McGovern enjoys a quiet and settled life in London with her partner, fellow American expatriate Lawrence Trainer, a smart, loyal, disciplined intellectual at a prestigious think tank. To their small circle of friends, their relationship is rock solid. Until the night Irina unaccountably finds herself dying to kiss another man: their old friend from South London, the stylish, extravagant, passionate top-ranking snooker player Ramsey Acton. The decision to give in to temptation will have consequences for her career, her relationships with family and friends, and perhaps most importantly the texture of her daily life.Hinging on a single kiss, this enchanting work of fiction depicts Irina's alternating futures with two men temperamentally worlds apart yet equally honorable. With which true love Irina is better off is neither obvious nor easy to determine, but Shriver's exploration of the two destinies is memorable and gripping. Poignant and deeply honest, written with the subtlety and wit that are the hallmarks of Shriver's work, The Post-Birthday World appeals to the what-if in us all.(jacket)

    Award-winning author Jennifer Haigh follows her critically acclaimed novels Mrs. Kimble and The Condition with a captivating, vividly rendered portrait of fraying family ties, and the trials of belief and devotion, in Faith.