Showing titles in City Life

Twenty-one-year-old Beth is in prison. The thing she did is so bad she doesn't deserve to ever feel good again. But her counsellor, Erika, won't give up on her. She asks Beth to make a list of all the good things in her life. So Beth starts to write down her story, from sharing silences with Foster Dad No. 1 to flirting in the Odeon on Orange Wednesdays to the very first time she sniffed her baby's head. But at the end of her story, Beth must confront the bad thing. What is the truth hiding behind her crime?

Dora Fairweather wasn’t cut out to be a wife and mother, and as soon as she’s able, she turns her back on her young daughter Lissie. With no parents to protect her, Lissie has no option but the dangerous streets of soot-sodden Bradford or the workhouse orphanage. Life in the orphanage is bleak and Lissie longs for the warm embrace of her beloved father. As the years pass, Lissie learns to enjoy the camaraderie of the other girls in the workhouse, and when she’s taken under the wing of matron Connie Briggs, things begin to look up..

Yeongju did everything she was supposed to, go to university, marry a decent man, get a respectable job. Then it all fell apart. Burned out, Yeongju abandons her old life, quits her high-flying career, divorces her husband, and follows her dream. She opens a bookshop. In a quaint neighbourhood in Seoul, surrounded by books, Yeongju and her customers take refuge. From the lonely barista to the unhappily married housewife, and the writer who sees something special in Yeongju - they all have disappointments in their past.

Kailyn Flowers was always calm, rational, and controlled—until she ended up sprawled all over Daxton Hughes, the former actor she totally crushed on as a teenager. Then she did the unthinkable: She became a mortifying fangirl in five seconds flat, which may or may not have included professing her undying love. And oddly, he didn't run away. In fact, their meet cute led to a friendship she never saw coming. Of course, she never saw his betrayal coming, either....

Adrift in her early thirties, Mary sets out to change her life, one ill-advised decision at a time. First, she books a spontaneous flight to Ibiza where she meets Tom, a brilliant young chemist working on an experimental drug called Eudaxa that claims to cure the anxieties of modern life. As their connection deepens, Mary thinks she might finally be falling in love. Then Mary lands a job at Openr, an innovative dating app with no limits. Its founder, Mary’s ex girlfriend Lara, will do everything it takes to make it a global phenomenon.

Zadie Smith's deeply funny, subversive and splendidly entertaining The Autograph Man is a whirlwind tour of celebrity and our fame-obsessed times. Following one Alex-Li Tandem - a 20-something, Chinese Jewish autograph dealer turned on by sex, drugs and organised religion - it takes in London and New York, love and death, fathers and sons, as Alex tries to discover how a piece of paper can bring him closer to his heart's desire. Exposing our misconceptions about our idols - about ourselves - Zadie Smith delivers a brilliant, unforgettable tale about who we are and what we really want to be.

With the Blitz over and London reeling from war, jazz musician Lawrie Matthews has answered England’s call for help. Fresh off the Empire Windrush, he’s taken a tiny room in south London lodgings, and has fallen in love with the girl next door. Touring Soho’s music halls by night, pacing the streets as a postman by day, Lawrie has poured his heart into his new home - and it’s alive with possibility. Until, one morning, he makes a terrible discovery.

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 now. Vicky Tress is a young policewoman on the rise who becomes involved in a corruption imbroglio with CID. Hannah Strode is an ambitious young reporter with a speciality for skewering the rich and powerful.

The trip of a lifetime! Rosie Lewis has her life together. A swanky job as a Michelin-starred sous chef, a loving husband and future children scheduled for exactly January 2021. That’s until she comes home one day to find her husband’s prepacked bag and a confession that he's had an affair. Heartbroken and devastated, Rosie drowns her sorrows in a glass (or three) of wine, only to discover the following morning that she has spontaneously invested in a bright pink campervan to facilitate her grand plans to travel the country.

Cybersecurity expert Ted McCord has been fired. He risked everything in a game far beyond his control. It's the last straw for Charlotte McCord, who's never understood her husband's addiction to the trappings of corporate life-the titles, the money, and the promise of visible success that he prefers over his family's ranch. Six months earlier, Ted did something unthinkable to gain a promotion and hid his actions from his wife.

When all seems lost, hope remains...Val Murray has mislaid her most precious mementoes of the people she’s loved and lost. Can her family, the wonders of technology and a little divine intervention somehow mend her shattered heart? Sophie Smith had to take a rain check on a marriage proposal. Will her bid to turn back the clock lead her to her greatest love or yet another heartbreak?

Sophy Stevens is moving to Australia. Turning thirty has found her unexpectedly out of a job, out of a relationship, and just in need of Something Different - and Australia, where she can finally meet her grandparents and surprise them on their wedding anniversary, looks like the perfect answer...if she can save up the money for the plane ticket. So when her feckless, absent dad Johnno offers her a job at his vintage clothes shop in Primrose Hill, she can't turn it down.

Thirteen-year-old Alice Truelove can’t take another day of her father’s cruelty. Better a life on the streets than being constantly blamed for her mother’s sad death, or that’s what Alice thinks as she packs up her meagre possessions. But fending for herself in the Black Country town of Wednesbury is not as easy as she expected, and it soon hits her that without help she will quickly be hungry and cold.

Two middle-aged men meet on an internet date. Each has been scarred by a previous relationship; each has his own compelling reasons for giving up on the idea of finding love. But still they both turn up for the dinner, feel the spark and the possibility of something more. Feel the fear of failing again, of being hurt and humiliated and further annihilated by love. How can they take the risk of falling in love again. How can they not?

It's the most anticipated event of the decade – Big Lou and Fat Bob's wedding and everyone is invited! After a wonderful day, Big Lou crashes back down to earth and finds that she is a victim of her own success. The lure of those famous bacon rolls is preventing her from leaving hungry customers without their daily dose of deliciousness – even to go for a long-awaited honeymoon. Will Big Lou find the happiness she so richly deserves? Everyone in Scotland Street hopes so, but, as Burns warned, the best laid plans.

When Margaret Hale is forced to leave her home in the tranquil rural South of England for the industrial Northern town of Milton, she finds herself in a very different country run by men, like mill owner John Thornton, with very different beliefs to her own. Margaret is sickened by the working conditions she witnesses and, sympathetic to the poor workers, clashes with their boss, Thornton.

Recently dumped and stuck with the mortgage, artist Esther Ray wants to burn the world, but instead, she reluctantly accepts a scrapbooking job from the deliriously wealthy Naomi Duncan. The scrapbooks, a secret birthday gift for Naomi's husband Bryce, trace the Duncan's twenty-five-year marriage. As Esther binges true-crime podcasts and works through the near-two hundred-boxes of Duncan detritus, she finds herself infatuated with the gilded family - until, mid-project, Naomi dies suspiciously.

1812. In Bath and London, Jane Austen's characters are attending balls, and the Bridgerton family are making waves in Regency high society. But these are the grimy streets of Liverpool: a city where the extreme wealth of international commerce meets brothels and brawls, smugglers and secrecy; where both high and low society operate amidst revolutionary rumblings from France and the shadow of the recently abolished slave trade.

Glasgow for Bertie is the promised land. The city of pies and Irn Bru, far from his controlling mother, Irene, – his place of escape. But how will he respond to the news of the proposed merging of Edinburgh and Glasgow? A new member of Bertie’s class at school is causing ripples in his social circle. She is called Galactica MacFee and is going to be a match for Olive and her lieutenant, Pansy. And an incredible new discovery: a Pictish stone that is said to have the first-know written poem carved into it is the talk of the town.

Set against an eventful decade that included the soap opera of five Prime Ministers plus Brexit and Covid, Consider Yourself Kissed puts the subjects of love and family on a grand stage, showing how the intimate dramas in our homes inescapably compete for energy and attention with the shared public dramas of our times. Told over ten years of one woman’s life, Consider Yourself Kissed is an unforgettable literary love story which effortlessly balances sweetness with bite, the public with the personal, and humour with heart.