Book picks similar to
Jack and Jill (Quick Reads) by Lucy Cavendish
quick-reads
fiction
lucy-cavendish
short-stories
Hidden
Barbara Taylor Bradford - 1998
She has a rewarding career in fashion and a talented concert pianist daughter. Her loving husband is one of the country’s most trusted diplomats. She thinks she’s hidden her secret from her best friends, but they know her too well. Can her friends get her out of harm’s way and protect her from a man who is as ruthless as he is charming and powerful? And along the way, can Claire learn to stop protecting the wrong people?
Red for Revenge
Fanny Blake - 2015
Her 25-year-old marriage to Phil has lost its sparkle.Carla is widowed. She understands life is short so she lives it to the full. But is her new romance all that it seems?When the two women meet in the beauty salon, they soon find they have more in common than the colour of their nails. The discovery that they are sharing the same man is shocking. How will Phil be taught a lesson or two he won't forget?
The Little One
Lynda La Plante - 2012
Desperate for a scoop, she finds instead a terrified woman living alone in a creepy manor house. Little by little, actress Margaret's haunting story of broken promises is revealed, and Barbara is left with a chilling discovery.
One False Move (Quick Reads 2017)
Dreda Say Mitchell - 2017
Perfect for fans of Mandasue Heller and Kimberley Chambers.
'Dreda Say Mitchell is right up there at the forefront of British crime fiction' Simon Kernick
Hayley swore when she got out of prison that she would turn her life around. But living on the Devil's Estate doesn't make that easy. She spends her days looking after her daughter, and her nights collecting cash from people who can't get loans any other way. But someone has just robbed her. And she has twenty-four hours to get the money back, or her boss will come for her. Her criminal ex-boyfriend says he can help. Hayley wants nothing to do with him. But time is running out, and she has to choose - save herself, or save her soul?If she makes one false move, her life will be over...
Quantum of Tweed: The Man with the Nissan Micra
Conn Iggulden - 2012
This brilliant comic thriller will have you on the edge of your seat.Albert Rossi has many qualities. He’s a man who can spot polyester at a hundred paces. He’s the person you’d have on speed dial were you to find yourself at the centre of a tailoring emergency. He has an excellent working knowledge of Bonnie Tyler’s back catalogue. These skills are essential to a Gentleman’s Outfitter from Eastcote. They are not necessarily on the job description for recruiting an assassin.When Albert hits an unsuspecting pedestrian whilst listening to ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ in his Nissan Micra he is amazed to escape the inevitable knock on the door from the police. Instead he receives a mysterious phone call from a man who sounds surprisingly like Stephen Hawking telling him that his money will be left in the ‘usual’ place. At that very moment, Albert Rossi decides to change careers.Albert Rossi’s life is about to get a whole lot more interesting…
Paris for One
Jojo Moyes - 2015
She has never even been on a weekend away with her boyfriend. Everyone knows she is just not the adventurous type.But, when her boyfriend doesn't turn up for their romantic mini-break, Nell has the chance to prove everyone wrong.Alone in Paris, Nell meets the mysterious moped-riding Fabien and his group of carefree friends. Could this turn out to be the most adventurous weekend of her life?
Follow Me
Sheila O'Flanagan - 2011
The only thing that the high-flying career girl is missing is love. When she spots a gorgeous man who seems to be following her everywhere she goes, she wonders if fate is trying to throw them together. But with her job on the line can she afford to make time for this handsome, mysterious stranger?
The Other Side of You
Amanda Craig - 2017
He's seen a murder, and the gang on his estate are after him.Hurt, hungry and afraid, he comes to an abandoned house in a different part of the city. Behind its high fences is a place of safety. Here, he can hide like a wounded beast. He can find food, and healing - and learn how to do more than survive.But when Will meets Padma, he must choose between his good side and his bad one. For the gang he left behind is still there. How can he live without becoming a killer? How can he love without being a thief?Exciting, fast-paced and different, this is a story that keeps you reading until the last line.
Rape: A Love Story
Joyce Carol Oates - 2003
Not after midnight, not through Rocky Point Park. Not the way she was dressed in a tank top, denim cutoffs, and high-heeled sandals. Not with her twelve-year-old daughter Bethie. Not with packs of local guys running loose on hormones, rage, and alcohol. A victim of gang rape, left for dead in the park boathouse, the once vivacious Teena can now only regret that she has survived. At a relentlessly compelling pace punctuated by lonely cries in the night and the whisper of terror in the afternoon, Joyce Carol Oates unfolds the story of Teena and Bethie, their assailants, and their unexpected, silent champion, a man who knows the meaning of justice. And love.
A Sea Change
Veronica Henry - 2013
She doesn't mind the name one bit. After all, it's a happy name, and there are far worse jobs than selling ice creams on Everdene beach. Craig spends as much time as he can at the beach hut in Everdene he rents with a few of his mates. As a policeman, it is a restful change from his daily life, and he's surfing mad. One weekend he's down there on his own when he notices a girl on the beach. He's young, free and single and she catches his eye. But on this particular summer weekend, both Jenna and Craig's lives are about to change . . .
The Skylight
Louise Candlish - 2021
She likes to stand at her bathroom window and spy on the couple downstairs through their kitchen skylight. She knows what they eat for breakfast and who they’ve got over for dinner. She knows what mood they’re in before they even step out the door. There’s nothing wrong with looking, is there?Until one day Simone sees something through the skylight she is not expecting. Something that upsets her so much she begins to plot a terrible crime…From the author of Our House, the British Book Awards Crime & Thriller of the Year
A Dream Come True
Maureen Lee - 2007
She desperately wanted children, but John refused to talk about it. So Maggie continued with her part-time job and tried not to think about that gaping hole in her life. Then she met someone who turned her whole world upside down.
Dept. of Speculation
Jenny Offill - 2014
of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art. With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.