Book picks similar to
Ghostkin by Ellen Mellor


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The Fault in Our Stars: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack


Hal Leonard Corporation - 2014
    All 16 songs from the soundtrack for this 2014 breakout blockbuster movie based on a novel by John Green, in arrangements for piano, voice and guitar. Includes Ed Sheeran's "All of the Stars," "Boom Clap" by Charli XCX, plus: All I Want * Let Me In * Not About Angels * Oblivion * Strange Things Will Happen * Tee Shirt * Without Words * and more. Includes four pages of color art from the film.

Snowed In at the Castle (Snowed In for Christmas #1)


Lucy McConnell - 2020
    She took a dream European vacation to push a restart button on her life, only to end up stranded in the airport. Her tour group is directed to temporary lodging in the castle--every girl's dream come true. When she meets a royal advisor with brooding eyes and broad shoulders, she's tempted to tear up her return ticket.Prince Matteo de Luca must announce his engagement at the Christmas Eve ball. There are several problems.1. The women his parents want him to marry is a troll.2. He doesn't want to get married at all.3. He's met an adorable American who makes him believe in things like love at first argument and the joy of Christmas.4. She doesn't know he's a prince.Pulled apart by centuries of tradition and loyalty to God and king, it's going to take more than a royal rebellion for these two to be together.Find out if Christmas truly is a season for miracles in this new holiday romance today!

The Tiger's Daughter


K. Arsenault Rivera - 2017
    Now, their border walls begin to crumble, and villages fall to demons swarming out of the forests.Away on the silver steppes, the remaining tribes of nomadic Qorin retreat and protect their own, having bartered a treaty with the empire, exchanging inheritance through the dynasties. It is up to two young warriors, raised together across borders since their prophesied birth, to save the world from the encroaching demons.This is the story of an infamous Qorin warrior, Barsalayaa Shefali, a spoiled divine warrior empress, O-Shizuka, and a power that can reach through time and space to save a land from a truly insidious evil.

Where There Are Monsters


Breanne Mc Ivor - 2019
    The Trinidad of her stories is utterly contemporary but also a place defined by its folk mythologies and its cultural creations, its traditions of masking and disguises. Her stories confront the increasing economic and cultural divisions between rich and poor, the alarming rise in crime, murders and an alternative economy based on drug trafficking. Their daring is that they both look within the human psyche and back in time to make sense of this reality. The figure of the loup-garou, the hyperbolically violent rhetoric of the Midnight Robber of the carnival parade – or even cannibalism taking place far off the beaten track – have become almost comic tropes of a dusty folklore. In Mc Ivor’s stories they become real and terrifying day-light presences, monsters who pass among us.Her great gift as a writer is to take us to unexpected places, both to seduce us into a kind of sympathy for her monsters of greater and lesser kinds, and sometimes to reveal a capacity for redemption amongst characters we are tempted to dismiss as shallow, unlikable human beings. The problem, in a world of masks and disguises, is how to tell the difference.

The Almost Wife


Jade Beer - 2018
    An unforgettable page-turner about love, family and life’s unexpected second chances.Jessie has always known she doesn’t belong. Only her fiancé Adam makes her feel good enough, exactly as she is. Jessie wants everything to be perfect for their lavish wedding day, but she’s already cracking under the pressure of pretending to be someone she’s not with her demanding future in-laws.Dolly works hard to keep up appearances – but what’s the point of only eating salad when her boyfriend Josh is never home to appreciate the result? Dolly is sure he’ll change once they’re married with a family; Josh did say he wanted those things… right?Emily couldn’t be happier: she’s got funny, loving parents, a loyal fiancé and a job she looks forward to. Everything’s ready for their intimate country wedding… until some shocking news sends her life spiralling out of control. Perfect strangers on the first page, Jessie, Dolly and Emily’s paths will cross in the most unexpected of ways. And as their stories collide, their lives will take a turn you’ll never predict.If you love Nancy Thayer, Karen Swan and Mary Alice Monroe, you will adore this gorgeously emotional summer read!

Surrender


Jennifer Burrows - 2014
    She came from an influential family, had a successful career as a food critic, and was about to marry the man of her dreams. Her life suddenly takes a change for the worse when she finds her fiancé in the arms of another woman. Her dream wedding now cancelled, she tries to find herself in Italy, on a trip she was supposed to be taking with her new husband. Massimo "Tony" Bertalucci has had his life destroyed by a cartel known to be trafficking black market olive oil out of Italy and around the world. While the cartel thought the entire Bertalucci family was dead and buried, Tony remains very much alive and determined to find a way to get his life back. When Tony and Katherine’s worlds collide, she becomes Tony’s only hope of escaping Italy alive. What Katherine doesn’t realize is that this charming, unassuming Italian man is using her to save his own life. Will she be able to get back to the states safely, or will she be subjected to the same fate as Tony's family? Will Tony find a way to stop running? Or will he have to surrender his life to the cartel?

The Line


Olga Grushin - 2010
    Now she returns with that rarity: a second novel even more dazzling than her first. The line: the universal symbol of scarcity and bureaucracy that exists wherever petty officials are let loose to abuse their powers. The line begins to form on the whispered rumor that a famous exiled composer is returning to Moscow to conduct his last symphony. Tickets will be limited. Nameless faces join the line, jostling for preferred position. But as time passes and the seasons change and the ticket kiosk remains shuttered, these anonymous souls take on individual shape. Unlikely friendships are forged, long-buried memories spring to life, and a year-long wait is rewarded with unexpected acts of kindness that ease the bleakness of harshly lived lives. A disparate gaggle of strangers evolves into a community of friends united in their desire to experience music they have never been allowed to hear. "The Line" is a transformative novel that speaks to the endurance of the human spirit even as it explores the ways in which we love-and what we do for love."

Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love


Huma Qureshi - 2021
    It exposes the silences in families and the parts of ourselves we rarely reveal. A daughter asks her mother to shut up, only to shut her up for good; an exhausted wife walks away from the husband who doesn’t understand her; on holiday, lovers no longer understand each other away from home. The underlying themes of loneliness, secrets, family and displacement and also the desire to belong to someone, to some place; a yearning for love, intertwine these stories. The collection includes The Jam Maker, which has just been awarded the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize 2020.

The Skin I'm In


Jenny Wood - 2018
    Gage Conner: Police officer, 6'3, 235lbs, green eyes, black hair, and an organ donor. He comes through my line, with his charming smile and massive chest and asks to cash his check. I'm just a bank teller, Briyana Smith- formerly Brian Ashley. With too many loans, no family to speak of, and a massive crush on our local boy in blue; he'd never give me the time of day if he knew ALL there was to know about me. Cosmetically, and socially, I'm Briyana Smith, but, biologically and medically, I'm still Brian Ashley. He doesn't give up, and I just cannot tell.... so, where do we go from there? A liquor store robbery, the death of a parent, and a big ol' dirty secret, just waiting to come out. What could possibly go wrong?. What if it could possibly, go right? I guess you'll have to wait and see.....

Sorrow


Tiffanie DeBartolo - 2020
    A once-promising guitar prodigy, he’s been living without direction since abandoning his musical dreams. Now into his thirties, having retreated from every opportunity he’s had to level up, he has lost his family, his best friend, and his own self-respect.But Joe finds an unlikely path to redemption when he starts working as a carpenter for the bohemian conceptual artist October Danko. The job returns him to his hometown, loaded with bittersweet reminders of his former life, in the shadows of his beloved redwood trees. As Joe’s relationship with October develops, he yearns to take a daring step toward a bold future, but struggles to escape the craven decisions of his past.Sorrow is a stunning, moving novel that explores masculinity and suspended adolescence, all the while begging the questions: Can courage be learned? And is it ever too late to follow your heart?

Mammoth


Jill Baguchinsky - 2018
    Natalie, who’s also a plus-size fashion blogger, depends on the retro style she developed to shield herself from her former bullies, but vintage dresses and perfect lipstick aren’t compatible with prospecting for fossils in the Texas heat. But nothing is going to dampen Natalie’s spirit — she’s exactly where she wants to be, and she gets to work with her hero, a rock-star paleontologist who hosts the most popular paleo podcast in the world. And then there’s Chase the intern, who’s seriously cute, and Cody, a local boy who’d be even cuter if he were less of a grouch.It’s a summer that promises to be about more than just mammoths.Until it isn’t.When Natalie’s hero turns out to be anything but, and steals the credit for one of her accomplishments, Nat has to unearth the confidence she needs to stand out in a field dominated by dudes. To do this, she’ll have to let her true self shine, even if that means defying all the rules for the sake of a major discovery.

Jessamine


Shani Struthers - 2014
    As a way of coping with her grief, she keeps him 'alive' in her imagination - talking to him every day, laughing with him, remembering the good times they had together. She thinks she will 'hear' him better if she goes somewhere quieter, away from the hustle and bustle of her hometown, Brighton. Her destination is Glenelk in the Highlands of Scotland, a region her grandfather hailed from and the subject of a much-loved painting from her childhood. Arriving in the village late at night, it is a bleak and forbidding place. However, the house she is renting - Skye Croft - is warm and welcoming. Quickly she meets the locals. Her landlord, Fionnlagh Maccaillin, is an ex-army man with obvious and not so obvious injuries. Maggie, who runs the village shop, is also an enigma, startling her with her strange 'insights'. But it is Stan she instantly connects with. Maccaillin's grandfather and a frail, old man, he is grief-stricken from the recent loss of his beloved Beth. All four are caught in the past. All four are unable to let go. Their lives entwining in mysterious ways, can they help each other to move on or will they always belong to the ghosts that haunt them? From the author of the bestselling The Haunting of Highdown Hall.

Family Happiness


Laurie Colwin - 1982
    Polly is a happy wife and mother from a remarkable strong and attractive family -- until one day she finds herself entagled in a completely unexpected, sweet, yet painful, love affair with a painter named Lincoln Bennett.  All of Polly's beliefs about herself explode, uprooting what had seemed to be a settled -- and everlasting -- idea of family happiness.

Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics


Rebecca Goldstein - 2000
    . . achingly beautiful, moving, and intriguing on every page” (Charles Johnson). This mesmerizing tale of consuming love and murderous professional envy carries the reader into the very heart of a physics problem so huge and perplexing it thwarted even Einstein: the nature of light. Caught in the entanglements of erotic and intellectual passion, three physicists grapple with mysteries of science as well as mysteries of the heart with consequences not even their finely honed intellects can predict. “Luminous, incendiary . . . Properties of Light is a novel of cool grace and dark lyricism, lit by the imaginative fire of physics and its improbable cosmologies” (New York Times Book Review).

The Shoestring Club


Sarah Webb - 2012
    This title comes from the bestselling author of "The Loving Kind". Julia's best friend has always been Ed - they've grown up together. Ed is now engaged to the sophisticated, grown-up Louise. Julia should be happy for them - but she manages to make a complete fool of herself at his engagement dinner. She suddenly realises she doesn't want to lose him, and throws herself at him in front of everyone. When Louise organises a ball with her charity committee, Julia sees this as her last chance to get Ed back. When she spots the most incredible dress in Shoestring, the vintage clothes shop she runs with her sister, she knows she'll only be able to stagger through the evening if she's wrapped in its silky drapes. But the beautiful dress costs an absolute fortune...Arietty Pilgrim can't and won't attend her ghastly ten year school reunion unless she can arrive wearing exactly that same dress 'funked up' with her favourite cropped leather jacket. But looking after elephants in Dublin Zoo does not a millionaire make. After a chance meeting in the shop, Julia and Arietty set up The Shoestring Club to timeshare the dress - and start a life-altering friendship. There's just one problem. In order to buy the dress, they need more partners...