Her new neighbour Trixie is eighty-four years old and a hymn-singing Salvation Army veteran. Trixie's life is one of apparent calm but beneath the surface lie not one but three different personalities. One of them is very private. And very dangerous.

    She hates it, and she hates the hooligans. And she gets pretty bored. Ok, she's old, but that doesn't mean she's satisfied with a pair of slippers and a good book. Her best friend constantly taunts her with threats of an old people's home. But Birdie's resolute – she's not going anywhere near one of those places. She keeps herself busy, it's better to wear out than rust out. And when ex-husband Jimmy Dwyer turns up out of the blue with a greyhound that needs a home, Birdie thinks things might be on the up. But he vanishes just as quickly, leaving behind him some memories of the past that Birdie would rather forget. Laugh-out-loud funny – this is classic Laurie Graham.

    At the hub of this world is the Ocean Cafe, run by tousle-haired, forty-something Magda, who makes grown men eat their greens, won't serve customers she doesn't like, and loves her children and their father with a passion. When Jessie Tate, devastated by recent tragedy, rents the flat above the cafe in an escape from the city, her dream of peace and solitude is shattered by the rock 'n' roll music that thuds through her floor. But perhaps a dose of life in an intimate, colourful and utterly self-absorbed community is just what Jessie needs to break free of her ghosts...

    As a child, her life changed forever with the death of her beloved father and since then, she has struggled to find love. That is, until she discovers the swimmer.Ben is a young illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka who has arrived in Norfolk via Moscow. Awaiting a decision from the Home Office on his asylum application, he is discovered by Ria as he takes a daily swim in the river close to her house. He is twenty years her junior and theirs is an unconventional but deeply moving romance, defying both boundaries and cultures – and the xenophobic residents of Orford. That is, until tragedy occurs.

    So when she returns there after her father's death, for the first time in twenty-five years, it means facing a past she thought she had put behind her. But even as childhood memories threaten to paralyze her, Ellie sets out to discover the dark secret at the heart of her father's life and her parents' marriage, hoping the truth will allow her to break free from the past that has haunted her life.

    A middle-aged ceilist who hides herself away in a tiny British cottage, she blames the world for its lack of love, and similarly despises it for its anger. Not until her beloved cello is stolen -- and her former lover, an American poet named George, returns -- does Eloise emerge from her shell. It is then that she and a myriad cast of schemers, cheats, and lovers descend upon a small Irish village and its inhabitants.

    Together with another patient, Poppy plots to gain freedom. But in a world where everything's upside-down, is she crazy enough to upset the system?

    The consequences will be profound, not only for Mary-Margaret but for others too-Father Diamond, the parish priest, who is in the midst of his own crisis of faith, and Stella Morrison, adrift in her marriage and aching for her ten-year old son, away at boarding school. In the same parish Alice Armitage counts the days until her soldier son comes home from Afghanistan, and Mary-Margaret's mother, Fidelma, imprisoned in a tower block, stares out over London with nothing but her thoughts for company. Remembering her early childhood by the sea in Ireland, the bleak institution she was sent to and the boy she loved, she hungers for consoling touch. In the meantime Mary-Margaret's quest grows increasingly desperate. But no one is prepared for the shocking outcome that ensues. The Translation of the Bones is a searingly powerful novel about passion and isolation, about the nature of belief, about love and motherhood and a search for truth.

    Eight-year-old Pearl tries very hard to get things right. Attuned to her mother’s brittle moods, she watches over her younger brother while carefully guarding her private passions. But a senseless act of violence at summer camp shatters Pearl’s family, and nothing may ever be right again.In a cooler, greener suburb, Sonia is learning to live alone after the death of her husband, a furniture designer who will soon be commemorated by an exhibition of his work. At the edge of the city, the young sculptor Adam Logan is hoping that his controversial new exhibit will change his fortunes. Connected by grief and longing, and united by a shared goal to create a memorial for the city’s lost children, these characters’ lives become entangled in ways that none could have foreseen.Combining the intimacy of a family’s heartache with the suspense of a thriller, Careless is a gripping, seductive novel about the ties of caring and responsibility that are both formed and broken in today’s society and about the resilience of the human psyche.

    The interactions between Jake, Joni, Angie, and Vic reveal a hellish cocktail of adolescent ad mid-life crises, the savagery of sibling rivalry, the waking nightmare of a marriage gone cold, and, naturally, the unbridgeable, infernal chasm between the generations. It's a story of everyday life.

    Under his railway arch in Loughborough Junction, Robert Sutton is handing over his dry-cleaning shop to Akeel. More than that, he teaches Akeel all he knows of his world.

    M. Jennifer M. Wilson has decided to become a voice. A professional enunciator, an announcer, a voice-over artist, she has retreated into a world of words. Behind the sound-proof double doors of the recording studio she must surely be safe from the painful inconveniences of hate and love. Until reality breaks in and Jennifer uncovers the harsh vocabulary of addiction and the addictive extremes of sex. -An alchemical romance, a Swiftian satire for our times, an impossible spiritual journey and a devastating plummet into insanity and perversion, So I Am Glad is oblique, incisive, hilarious and horrific.

    I was once a son, a husband, a father. And now I’m a storyteller.” Meet Maqil - also known as Mike, Mehmet, Mikhail and Miguel - a chancer, charmer and charlatan. A criminally clever man who tells a good tale, trading on his charm and good looks, reinventing himself with a new identity and nationality in each successive country he makes his home, abandoning wives and children and careers in the process. He's a compulsive gambler - driven to lose at least as much as he gains, in games of chance, and in life. A damaged man in search of himself.From the day he was delivered in Lahore, Pakistan, alongside his stillborn twin, he proved he was a born survivor. He has been a master of flying escapes, from Cairo to Paris, from London to Hong Kong, humbled by love, outliving his peers, and ending up old and alone in a budget hotel in Biarritz some eighty years later. His chequered history is catching up with him: his tracks have been uncovered and his latest wife, his children, his creditors and former business associates, all want to pin him down. But even at the end, Maqil just can't resist trying it on; he's still playing his game, and the game won't be over until it's been won.

    But now she sits, alone, in a hotel room in Wanting, a godforsaken town on the Chinese-Burmese border. Plucked from her wild life as a rural eel-catcher, Na Ga is then abandoned by her would-be rescuers in Rangoon. Later, as a teenager, she finds herself chasing the dream of a new life in Thailand - where further betrayals and violations await. Yet it seems that her fighting spirit will not be broken.But for how long can Na Ga belong nowhere and with no one? In the dingy hotel in Wanting she is forced to confront her compulsion to keep running, and to ask herself why, until now, she's resisted the journey home.Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011.

    It's in this quiet place of wind and trees, birds and water that Richard is to fall passionately in love - but he cannot find fulfilment, for his lover is Susannah Beddoes, the wife of the vicar of his new parish. As Richard's feelings challenge him to his core, he develops a strange relationship with another woman, the solitary and eccentric Edith Clare. Against the backdrop of immense social and industrial change, the consequences of Richard and Susannah's affair are dramatic as they - as well as Oliver Beddoes - grapple with doubt and what it means to lose faith when the great certainties are in question. And throughout it all, the crossing-keeper's daughter Alice Birley - an observer of incidents and events she does not fully understand - has her own part to play...