Plump cheeks, dilated pupils, and a heightened sense of pleasure are the first signs that they have been drinking a potent new beauty tonic, Viper Wine, distilled and discreetly dispensed by the physician Lancelot Choice.Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. But now she is married and her “mid-climacteric” approaches, all that adoration has curdled to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby – alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier, and time-traveller – believes he has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but he so loves his wife that he will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it. From the whispering court at Whitehall, to the charlatan physicians of Eastcheap, here is a marriage in crisis, and a country on the brink of civil war. The novel takes us backstage at a glittering Inigo Jones court masque, inside a dour Puritan community, and into the Countess of Arundel's snail closet. We see a lost Rubens altarpiece and peer into Venetia’s black-wet obsidian scrying mirror. Based on real events, Viper Wine is 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.

    Spanning several generations and transporting us to exotic locations in Europe, Asia, and America, this wise and exquisite story collection marks the debut of a gifted new voice in literature.

    She joins an on-line matchmaking site that puts couples together based on the books that they love, in this case the BDSM erotica that lines her bookshelves. Two Dominant best friends and business partners, Carlos Romano and Morgan Kane, are matched with Violet. They both want to date her and rather than fight about it they decide to keep the fact that they know each other away from her and let her pick who she wants to be with. A good idea in theory but something that become impossible as they both fall in love with Violet and wish to make her their own. Carlos and Morgan work on building up Violet’s almost non-existent self-esteem and help her find an inner strength she never knew she had, along with an almost bottomless craving for their dominant touch. When Violet discovers they have been lying to her, the men realize that they have made her strong enough to leave them, and they have to find a way to win their perfect woman back, no matter what.

    However when a family emergency leaves him desperate, he goes farther than he ever expected. If Clive Davidson wants to pretend John is an untamed stallion in need of a firm hand, the pay is too much to pass up. Clive Davidson has enjoyed the company of any number of submissives, but he’s never found one that can fight and still crave control. It’s intoxicating to find someone whose kinks line up so well. But just as Clive begins to hope that he has found love or at the very least sexually compatible lust, his enemies try to take it all away. Clive must give up something he holds dear or lose the man he hopes to tame to his saddle.

    English society was broken apart, its systems turned on their head. What is little known is that a fractured network of guerrilla fighters took up arms against the French occupiers.       In The Wake, a postapocalyptic novel set a thousand years in the past, Paul Kingsnorth brings this dire scenario back to us through the eyes of the unforgettable Buccmaster, a proud landowner bearing witness to the end of his world. Accompanied by a band of like-minded men, Buccmaster is determined to seek revenge on the invaders. But as the men travel across the scorched English landscape, Buccmaster becomes increasingly unhinged by the immensity of his loss, and their path forward becomes increasingly unclear.      Written in what the author describes as “a shadow tongue”—a version of Old English updated so as to be understandable to the modern reader—The Wake renders the inner life of an Anglo-Saxon man with an accuracy and immediacy rare in historical fiction. To enter Buccmaster’s world is to feel powerfully the sheer strangeness of the past. A tale of lost gods and haunted visions, The Wake is both a sensational, gripping story and a major literary achievement.

    For almost all of those years she has been the clandestine lover to Paul Sheringham, young heir of a neighboring house. The two now meet on an unseasonably warm March day—Mothering Sunday—a day that will change Jane's life forever. As the narrative moves back and forth from 1924 to the end of the century, what we know and understand about Jane—about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, remembers—expands with every vividly captured moment. Her story is one of profound self-discovery, and through her, Graham Swift has created an emotionally soaring, deeply affecting work of fiction.

    But he wants her for just one night.Aurora Willis has loved Nathan since she was a teenager. But he barely noticed her. Now twenty-two and still a virgin, Aurora is desperate to ditch her hopeless feelings for him and finally find true love of her own.Billionaire Nathaniel Travers is riding high on fame, glory, and more female attention than he wants. He left Aurora behind in his past years ago. But when an accident leaves him helpless, she’s the only person he can turn to.Just when Aurora is about to leap into a new love, Nathan comes crashing back into her life, stoking all the fire buried inside her. And he’s been keeping a secret of his own, but it has nothing to do with love.Is Aurora ready to sacrifice her heart, her future, everything to be his for just one night?STANDALONE Contemporary Romance | London Billionaires Book 1

    Now, Edward Rutherfurd, weaves its history and legends into compelling fiction. From the mysterious killing of King William Rufus, treachery and witchcraft, smuggling and poaching run through this epic tale of well-born ladies, lowly woodsmen, sailors, merchants and Cistercian monks. The feuds, wars, loyalties and passions of generations reach their climax in a crime that shatters the decorous society of Jane Austen's Bath, and whose ramifications continue through the age of the Victorian railway builders to the ecologists of the present day.

    The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar's grandfather Babar: Qara Koz, 'Lady Black Eyes', a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive first by an Uzbek warlord, then by the Shah of Persia, and finally becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, commander of the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerized by her presence, and much trouble ensues. The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man's world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other - the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia's boyhood friend "il Machia" - Niccolo' Machiavelli - is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both. But is Mogor's story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess? And if he's a liar, must he die?

    In The Harder She Comes, we meet girls salivating at the sight of well-filled and packed jeans and bois dreaming of having a beautiful girl’s red lipstick smeared across their mouths. D. L. King has curated a singular set of stories filled with sexy sirens luring unsuspecting butches to their demise on the rocky shores of love and hot, confident women in silk and lace during the day who will do anything to serve their daddies' needs at night. The Harder She Comes is great writing with characters that will stay with the reader for a long, long time — sometimes sweet, always sexy, often romantic, and more than a little dangerous.

    He, escaping the spectacular failure of his last case, is having trouble finding his way into this tight-knit community wary of new faces. But professional rivalry aside, both detectives are about to receive some terrible news: 11-year-old Danny Latimer has been found murdered on the beach.For Ellie it's a personal blow; Danny was her older son's best friend. She can't believe anyone in Broadchurch would ever have harmed him. But Alec considers everyone, even Danny's parents, suspect in his death. It's a living nightmare for everyone involved…even before the press arrive and start stirring up the secrets every town member keeps hidden behind closed doors.An intimate portrait of a town and the ordinary grievances that have slowly simmered for years before boiling over in an unthinkable crime, this remarkable adaptation of the hit television show Broadchurch tells the story of a shattered family, a reeling town, and the two imperfect detectives trying to bring them answers.

    Gifts that doomed those like Wren to a life of slavery with no hope of escape or turned a man like Jere into an unwilling master. When a fiery tragedy brings Jere into Wren's life it becomes clear that this new master is like nobody else Wren has ever known. How does a slave protect himself from someone unpredictable? Can love really exist between master and slave, or will it destroy them both? (M/M - For content labels and excerpt, see details on publisher's site.)

    Duran Price isn’t really the Dark Knight, but both the mild mannered CPA and the Dominatrix who keeps her true identity hidden behind a Catwoman mask desires more than his submission. Fitting a relationship into a double life is a full time job and with a super villainess riding shotgun, the power is up for grabs.

    But then as he traverses a landscape by turns eerie and comical – and always strangely malleable, as a dream might be - he comes steadily to realise he is facing the most crucial performance of his life.Ishiguro's extraordinary and original study of a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control was met on publication by consternation, vilification – and the highest praise.

    . .1859. A man joins a whaling ship bound for the Arctic Circle. Having left the British Army with his reputation in tatters, Patrick Sumner has little option but to accept the position of ship's surgeon on this ill-fated voyage. But when, deep into the journey, a cabin boy is discovered brutally killed, Sumner finds himself forced to act. Soon he will face an evil even greater than he had encountered at the siege of Delhi, in the shape of Henry Drax: harpooner, murderer, monster . . . 'A tour de force' Hilary Mantel'Riveting and darkly brilliant' Colm Tóibín