But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.... It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer." --Jeffrey Eugenides, from the introduction to My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead All proceeds from My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead will go directly to fund the free youth writing programs offered by 826 Chicago. 826 Chicago is part of the network of seven writing centers across the United States affiliated with 826 National, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.

    Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries.One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal: the bonak. Everything and nothing at once, the bonak was Gretel’s name for the thing she feared most. And now that she’s searching for her mother, she’ll have to face it.

    When he finds his belongings dumped on the drive, although he may not understand women very well, even he can see that this looks like some kind of hint… and so moves back in with his parents.Backing onto Andrew’s parents lives artist Cecilia, always ready to recount tales of her innumerable ex-lovers, whilst her daughters feel she’s like a misbehaving teenager.But now four lives are drawn together by long-buried secrets of the past, and it is time for them all to grow up, before it’s too late.A desperate decision … A lost letter … A powerful secret hidden for thirty years…Praise for Claire Calman:‘A poignant and beautifully articulated tale of love and loss, memory and forgetting, grief and guilt, new love and letting go. I was engrossed, often tearful, and finally, uplifted.’ Isobel Wolff‘Simply wonderful. I was totally enchanted, devoured it in a day, and have been raving about it ever since.’ Fiona Walker

    Enraged that she is expected to marry her childhood sweetheart rather than be educated, she joins the Suffragettes, and vows to pay the ultimate price for women's freedom.May is fifteen, and already sworn to the cause, though she and her fellow Suffragists refuse violence. When she meets Nell, a girl who's grown up in hardship, she sees a kindred spirit. Together and in love, the two girls start to dream of a world where all kinds of women have their place.But the fight for freedom will challenge Evelyn, May and Nell more than they ever could believe. As war looms, just how much are they willing to sacrifice?

    The Breakfast Club meets One Day in Floored, a unique collaborative novel by seven bestselling and award-winning YA authors: Sara Barnard, Holly Bourne, Tanya Byrne, Non Pratt, Melinda Salisbury, Lisa Williamson and Eleanor Wood.When they got in the lift, they were strangers (though didn't that guy used to be on TV?): Sasha, who is desperately trying to deliver a parcel; Hugo, who knows he's the best-looking guy in the lift and is eyeing up Velvet, who knows what that look means when you hear her name and it doesn't match the way she looks, or the way she talks; Dawson, who was on TV, but isn't as good-looking as he was a few years ago and is desperately hoping no one recognizes him; Kaitlyn, who's losing her sight but won't admit it, and who used to have a poster of Dawson on her bedroom wall, and Joe, who shouldn't be here at all, but who wants to be here the most.And one more person, who will bring them together again on the same day every year.

    The first of an exciting new series of novels.London, September 1666. The Great Fire rages through the city, consuming everything in its path. Even the impregnable cathedral of St. Paul’s is engulfed in flames and reduced to ruins. Among the crowds watching its destruction is James Marwood, son of a disgraced printer, and reluctant government informer.In the aftermath of the fire, a semi-mummified body is discovered in the ashes of St. Paul’s, in a tomb that should have been empty. The man’s body has been mutilated and his thumbs have been tied behind his back.Under orders from the government, Marwood is tasked with hunting down the killer across the devastated city. But at a time of dangerous internal dissent and the threat of foreign invasion, Marwood finds his investigation leads him into treacherous waters – and across the path of a determined, beautiful and vengeful young woman.

    Written later, and probably abandoned after her father's death, The Watsons is a tantalizing and highly delightful story whose vitality and optimism centre on the marital prospects of the Watson sisters in a small provincial town. Sanditon, Jane Austen's last fiction, is set in a seaside town and its themes concern the new speculative consumer society and foreshadow the great social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution.

    A young woman, Lena, running for her life, convicted of being a mage and sentenced to death. Her only way to survive is to trust those she has been brought up to fear - those with magic.On the other side of the locked gates is a masked lady, Constance, determined to find a way back in. She knows only too well how the people of Duke's Forest loathe magic. Years ago she escaped before her powers were discovered. But now she won't hide who she is any longer.A powerful and terrifying storm cloud unites them. It descends over the dukedom and devastates much in its wake. But this is more than a thunderstorm. This is a spell, and the truth behind why it has been cast is more sinister than anyone can imagine ... Only Lena and Constance hold the key to destroying the spell. Though neither of them realise it, they need each other. They are the blood and they have the thunder within.

    Broken bowls, belligerent cows, swanky aubergines, trembling moonrises and horrifying sunsets, the physical world depicted in these stories is unsettling yet intimately familiar and soon takes on a life of its own. Captivated by the stellar charms of seclusion but restless with desire, the woman’s relationship with her surroundings becomes boundless and increasingly bewildering. Claire-Louise Bennett’s startlingly original first collection slips effortlessly between worlds and is by turns darkly funny and deeply moving.

    They met as students and Helen fell in love, not just with Angus but with the romantic Ballintyre family and their beautiful house on the edge of a loch. But marriage to Angus has not proved happy.Now, years later and with a family, Helen and Angus have been forced to move back to live at Ballintyre with his older brother, Charlie. Helen is surprised to find that Sylla, Charlie’s wife, has disappeared and no one seems to know where she is. Helen is worried, not least because Charlie and Sylla lost their teenage daughter, Rose, only a year before. Surely someone should be looking for her . . .Sylla Ballintyre has spent her life ministering to her husband, Charlie, and coping with the presence of his overbearing mother, Josephine, until the tragedy of losing Rose drained her happiness away. When she stumbles on the path to freedom, she knows she must take it, whatever the cost.As Helen struggles with the fallout of recent events and its effect on her life, Ballintyre House becomes the setting for revelations of love, obsession and betrayal that have resonated beyond the present and into the past, affecting the lives of all those who have called it home.

    The year is 2025, and a mysterious virus has broken out in Scotland--a lethal illness that seems to affect only men. When Dr. Amanda MacLean reports this phenomenon, she is dismissed as hysterical. By the time her warning is heeded, it is too late. The virus becomes a global pandemic--and a political one. The victims are all men. The world becomes alien--a women's world.What follows is the immersive account of the women who have been left to deal with the virus's consequences, told through first-person narratives. Dr. MacLean; Catherine, a social historian determined to document the human stories behind the male plague; intelligence analyst Dawn, tasked with helping the government forge a new society; and Elizabeth, one of many scientists desperately working to develop a vaccine. Through these women and others, we see the uncountable ways the absence of men has changed society, from the personal--the loss of husbands and sons--to the political--the changes in the workforce, fertility and the meaning of family.In The End of Men, Christina Sweeney-Baird creates an unforgettable tale of loss, resilience and hope.

    But we've met before - a thousand times.It started when I was sixteen years old.A father forgetting to drive me to school. A mother setting the table for three, not four. A friend who looks at me and sees a stranger.No matter what I do, the words I say, the crimes I commit, you will never remember who I am.That makes my life difficult. It also makes me dangerous.The Sudden Appearance of Hope is the tale of a girl no one remembers, yet her story will stay with you forever.

    It's not that she hasn't tried to grow up, it's just that so far, the only commitment she's held down is Friday drinks at the village pub.Then, in the space of a morning, her world changes.Beth is now guardian to her teenage niece and toddler nephew, catapulted into an unfamiliar world of bedtime stories, parents' evenings and cuddly elephants. Having never been responsible for anyone - or anything - it's not long before she feels seriously out of her depth.What if she's simply not up to the job?With a little help from her best friend Jory (purely platonic, of course ...) and her lovely, lonely next-door neighbour, Albert, Beth is determined that this time she's not giving up. It's time to step up.This is a story about digging deep for strength you never knew you had and finding magic in things that were there all along.

    If you could get away with the perfect crime - would you? HEAVEN HAS NO RAGE, LIKE LOVE TO HATRED TURNED.NOR HELL A FURY, LIKE A WOMAN SCORNED.

    But it's time now to think on it anew. There's a journey we must go on, and no more delay..."The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years.Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in nearly a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge, and war.Included on TIME Magazine's "THE 100 BEST FANTASY BOOKS OF ALL TIME"