Showing titles in City Life

She’s no damsel in distress, and he’s certainly not wearing shining armour. But one knight can change everything… Daisy Hastings has always thought she was born in the wrong era. So when she bags a summer job at the Tower of London helping to run their Knight school, it feels like a...

Shanghai, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Alva has always longed for more. Raised by her American expat mother, she's never known her Chinese father, and is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement to their wealthy Chinese landlord, Lu Fang, Alva's hopes are dashed, and so she plots for the next best thing: the American School in Shanghai. Upon admission, though, Alva is surprised to discover an institution run by an exclusive community of expats and the ever-wilder thrills of a city where foreigners can ostensibly act as they please.

Brought to you by Penguin. The last thing Jack Baxi expected when a detective rang his doorbell in the middle of the night was that he'd be tortured and left for dead, with a young woman he's never met before. Now, running for their lives, Jack and Aisha frantically try to discover why the...

Who is Vernon Subutex? An urban legend. A fall from grace. The mirror who reflects us all. Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous music shop in Bastille. His legend spread throughout Paris. But by the 2000s his shop is struggling. With his savings gone, his unemployment benefit cut and the friend who had been covering his rent suddenly dead, Vernon Subutex finds himself down and out on the Paris streets. He has one final card up his sleeve. 

It’s always the husband, isn’t it? When his wife Brie vanishes from their home one night, never to be seen again, people assume Andy got away with murder. The police can’t build a case against him, but still his friends and neighbours abandon him. Six years later, Andy’s life is back on track, and he’s settled with a new girlfriend. And when he hears his old house has been bulldozed and rebuilt, he’s not bothered. Things are good. But then one day, a woman who looks like Brie shows up at their old address.

Maria, a trans woman in her thirties, is going nowhere. She spends her aimless days working in a New York bookstore, trying to remain true to a punk ethos while drinking herself into a stupor and having a variety of listless and confusing sexual encounters. After her girlfriend cheats on her...

Anthony Trollope was one of Victorian England’s most popular and prolific authors. He worked for the Post Office while establishing himself as a writer, and is credited with introducing the pillar box to Britain. Best known for his ‘Barsetshire’ and ‘Palliser’ novels, he wrote over 50 works in total, including short stories, travel books, biographies and a posthumously published autobiography. Collected here are a selection of superb adaptations of his much-loved novels, as well as a fascinating documentary and an original radio play by Patricia Cumper.

Get your copy of Sarah Morgan’s new Christmas novel Snowed in for Christmas now! Praise for Sarah Morgan: ‘Christmas isn't Christmas without a Sarah Morgan novel to inhale, and she’s knocked it out of the heart-warming, uplifting park again’ Laura Jane Williams ‘Comfort reading at its...

Libby Cooper hasn’t celebrated Christmas since the night her parents died in a terrible accident. She wants to forget that the season of goodwill even exists; but her grandmother has other ideas. It’s time for Libby to start living her life just as her parents would have wanted her to do. First stop New York! What better way to immerse herself in the celebrations, than working in her great aunt’s Christmas shop, just a few blocks from Central Park? Making new friends in the Big Apple is the easy bit, but leaving the past behind proves much harder than Libby imagined.

This is a satellite-dish-free zone of tall houses, standing shoulder to shoulder with big front doors, five floors apiece. You could almost be in Kensington. This is where the actors, writers and media types live, where small children wearing smart uniforms and shoes in the shape of lightbulbs get ferried every day to schools that are not local. Some people are luckier than others; fortune smiles on some and gobs on the rest. Jo Metcalf smokes and spies on the smug Cunninghams down the street as they play their bile-inducing game of happy families.

Mistake #1: One scorching night with Jacob Walker, Chicago Blade's notorious playboy and my brother's best friend. Mistake #2: Agreeing to be his fake fiancé to save his career. Mistake #3: Falling for the man who doesn't know he's about to become our baby's daddy. Jacob has a body forged in steel and a smile that can melt the ice… he's every woman's fantasy. I'm the team's new strait-laced PR executive tasked with cleaning up his image... while hiding my growing secret. Whenever he holds me close for the cameras, it feels less like pretend.

The Brightonians focuses upon the bitter rivalry and social one-upmanship that fuels the lives of a group of socialites who live in this far-from-quintessential seaside town. Already vying for supremacy of their circle, the chance discovery of a 50-year-old letter belonging to a local drag queen takes their sparring to hilarious new heights. Initially leading to them back to the saucier side of Brighton in the swinging 60s–what they ultimately discover is even more shocking–connecting one of them to the past in ways that no-one could have imagined.

1979. In the vast and often unforgiving city of London, two Irish outsiders seeking refuge find one another: Milly, a teenage runaway, and Pip, a young boxer full of anger and potential who is beginning to drink it all away. Over the decades their lives follow different paths, interweaving from time to time, often in one another's sight, always on one another's mind, yet rarely together.

Raymond Jaffe feels like he doesn’t belong. Not with his mother’s new family. Not as a weekend guest with his father and his father’s wife. Not at school, where he’s an outcast. After his best friend moves away, Raymond has only two real connections: to the feral cat he’s tamed and to a blind ninety-two-year-old woman in his building who’s introduced herself with a curious question: Have you seen Luis Velez?

Brought to you by Penguin. FROM THE BOOKER-SHORTLISTED, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR 'It is a gift in this life that we do not know what awaits us' In March 2020 Lucy Barton's ex-husband William pleads with her to leave New York and escape to a coastal house he has rented in Maine. Lucy...

In late 2000, a young boy in Ahmedabad dreams of owning a business. To accommodate his friends' passion, he opens a cricket shop. However, nothing comes easily in a turbulent city. To realise their goals, they will have to face it all - religious politics, calamities, unacceptable love and, above all, their own mistakes. Will they make it? Can an individual's dreams overcome the nightmares of real life? Can we succeed despite mistakes?

London, Burning is a novel about the end of the 1970s, and the end of an era. It concerns a nation divided against itself, a government trembling on the verge of collapse, a city fearful of what is to come, and a people bitterly suspicious of one another. In other words, it is also a novel about...

It’s the final showdown for the Lambrianu family, but will bad boy Adam reclaim his birthright or will the family face their downfall once and for all? Once dismissed as the family’s spoiled playboy, Adam Lambrianu is done being underestimated. He’s ready to prove he’s no pretender. He’s the heir. The boss. The Don. But in the world of the Lambrianus, loyalty is fragile and betrayal is inevitable.

‘Another perfect page-turner’ The Times ‘A triumph from the master thriller writer’ The Sun In this twisty thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author, a man desperately tries to track down his father in witness protection before his enemies can get to him. Your dad’s not a good...

Coco is having a hell of a month. She’s lost her boyfriend and her business, been forced to uproot her daughter to move back in with her parents in Paris, and now an infuriatingly handsome stranger is yelling at her for acting like a tourist… Right underneath the Eiffel Tower. Storming away from him – and swearing off men for life – she decides she’s going to take the first job that comes her way. Then, as if fate hears her, later that day she stumbles into a little bookshop – but not any old bookshop.