Home Fiction

There is a heatwave across Europe, and Goose and his three sisters gather at the family's house by Lake Orta in Piedmont, Italy. Their father, a famous artist, recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped to Italy to finish his masterpiece. Now he is dead. And there is no sign of his new wife and or his final painting. Though the siblings have always been close, the things they learn that summer - about themselves, their father and their new stepmother - will drive them apart before they can come to any kind of understanding of what their father's legacy truly is.

Someone has broken into Zoe’s flat. A man she thought she’d never have to see again. They call him the Hand of God. He knows about her job in the cafe, her life in Dublin, her ex-girlfriend, even the knife she’s hidden under the mattress. She thought she’d left him far behind, along with the cult of the Children and their isolated compound Home – but now he’s found her, and she knows she must go back to rescue the sister who helped her escape all those years before.

A thousand unwanted children live in The Homes, a village of orphans in the Scottish Lowlands on the outskirts of Glasgow. Lesley was six before she learned that most children live with their parents. Now Lesley is 12, and she and her best friend Jonesy live in Cottage 5; Jonesy the irrepressible spirit to Lesley's quiet thoughtfulness. Life is often cruel at The Homes, and suddenly it becomes much crueller.

One night, Jess, a struggling actress, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment. After a violent, bloody encounter with the boy's father, she and the boy find themselves running for their lives. As they attempt to evade the boy's increasingly desperate father, horrifying incidents of butchery follow them. At first Jess thinks she understands what they're up against, but she's about to learn there's more to these surreal and grisly events than she could've ever imagined. And that when the wolf finally comes home, none will be spared.

Born in Colombo, Judith Dunbar spends her teenage years at boarding school while her beloved mother and younger sister live abroad with her father. When her new friend, Loveday Carey-Lewis, invites Judith home for the weekend to Nancherrow, the Carey-Lewises' beautiful estate on the Cornish coast, it is love at first sight.

To say Sheriff Natalie Strand is shocked that Sarah Eastman, the girl who kissed her at a high school party, is back in town would be a huge understatement. Between Sarah’s return and a stray dog that gets the best of her, Natalie’s world is suddenly turned upside down. They say you can’t go home again, but that’s exactly what Sarah does when she returns to Oregon to live with her aunt and uncle after her divorce. All she wants is peace and to ensure her daughter, Harley, has stability. Seeing Natalie again after 17 years ignites a passion that she hasn’t felt in a long time.

1940, Great Paxford, Cheshire. When a spitfire crashes in the village, the lives of an extraordinary community of women will change forever: Frances Barden's greatest challenge is only just beginning; Pat Simms received a respite when her abusive husband went to war, but now he's home Pat doesn't know who to turn to; and for newlyweds Teresa and Nick, the plane crash on their wedding day may just be the start of their troubles.

Sean's brother Anthony is a hard man. When they were kids their ma did her best to keep him out of trouble but you can't say anything to Anto. Sean was supposed to be different. He was supposed to leave and never come back. But Sean does come back. Arriving home after university, he finds Anthony's drinking is worse than ever. Meanwhile the jobs in Belfast have vanished, Sean's degree isn't worth the paper it's written on and no one will give him the time of day. One night he loses control and assaults a stranger at a party, and everything is tipped into chaos.

Twenty-seven-year-old Amish woman Joanna Kurtz has been a bridesmaid plenty of times, but never a bride. And despite having a secret romance with responsible young Amishman Eben Troyer, their relationship can only go so far, because the two are always kept apart. Will Joanna ever know the joys of marriage?

As kids, outcasts Rebecca, Bobby, Spencer, and Ernie were inseparable friends in the idyllic town of Maple Grove. Three left to pursue lofty dreams—and achieved them. Only Ernie never left. When he falls into a coma, his three amigos feel an urgent need to return home. Don’t they remember people lapsing into comas back then? And those people always awoke…didn’t they?

Shortly after 9.30 in the morning, a young man walks into Surf City, Bondi’s newest shopping complex. He’s wearing a dark grey hoodie - and a bomb around his neck. Just a few minutes later, he is locked in a shop on the upper floor. And trapped with him are four innocent bystanders. For police chaplain Paul Doherty, called to the scene by Senior Sergeant Boehm, it’s a story that will end as tragically as it began. For this is clearly no ordinary siege. The boy, known as Ali Khan, seems as frightened as his hostages and has yet to utter a single word.

Following the death of her husband, Ffion moves back to her family hotel in Wales seeking home comfort. In the village of Cariad Cove, she reconnects with her family, and starts to find hope as she takes up running and meets Joe. For Joe, the second his dog crashes into the beautiful woman on the beach, it's love at first sight. But recognising a hurting soul, he offers Ffion his friendship and soon the two are organising a charity run for the local animal sanctuary.

When Kerra left the quiet Cornish town of Penvennan Cove for the bright lights of London, she didn't look back. But after the death of her mother, she's decided it's time to face her past and return to the place she called home. Her father needs her, and perhaps she needs him more than she's willing to admit? Tackling town gossip, home renovations and a flame from her past, it's not quite smooth sailing for Kerra. Ross is the bad boy she was meant to forget, not a man who still sets her heart aflutter.

It is a Tuesday evening in June when Ruth receives the phone call that all parents dread. Her daughter Daisy has been hit by a car during a deadly storm in Puerto Rico. How Ruth wishes she could tell Daisy she loves her. That she is sorry her own muddy feelings about Daisy's move to San Juan caused them to fight. What a waste of precious breath. Instinctively, it's her mother, Rafaela, Ruth wants to turn to. Rafaela whose own memories of growing up in Puerto Rico are becoming ever more vivid, as have her sudden flashes of forgetfulness.

Carol is a divorced teacher living in a small town in Ireland, her only son now grown. A second chance at love brings her unexpected connection and belonging. The new relationship sparks local speculation: what does a woman like her see in a man like that? What happened to his wife who abandoned them all those years ago? But the gossip only serves to bring the couple closer.

Zero is just one of 20,000 people aboard a spaceship bound for a new planet set to be colonized. The journey is over a century long but luckily, everyone is in stasis, so they’ll be safe and sound asleep during the trip. Everyone that is, except for Zero, whose pod has malfunctioned, waking him up a hundred years early. His initial excitement in roaming the ship alone quickly turns to a heart-stopping interstellar adventure when a family of space pirates show up, trying to hijack the ship and take the colonizers hostage.

Ben Aaronovitch has stormed the best-seller list with his superb London crime series - a unique blend of police procedural; loving detail about the greatest character of all, London; and a dash of the supernatural. A mutilated body in Crawley. Another killer on the loose. The prime suspect is one Robert Weil: an associate of the twisted magician known as the Faceless Man? Or just a common or garden serial killer? Before PC Peter Grant can get his head round the case, a town planner going under a tube train and a stolen grimoire are adding to his caseload.

Lexi is a survivor; she has spent her whole life moving from one abusive foster home to the next, until she decided to take charge of her own life. Living in abandoned buildings, couch surfing, and working at a strip clubs were a huge improvement on what she had before. All she needs is enough money to feed herself, finish high school, and hopefully go to college. She has a plan. That is until she is caught and sent to live with a strange foster family upstate.

Resonant, raw, and vibrant, Home is a lyrical map to navigating heartbreak. Tracing the stages of healing - from the despair that comes with the end of a relationship to the eventual light and liberation that comes with time - the poems in Home provide comfort and solace, while revitalizing your soul - and helping you make peace with your bees.

In the early '60s, in a seemingly more "innocent" time, a group of teenagers were lured into a supposedly haunted house. The place on Sycamore Lane has a morbid history, but that's just hearsay and rumor, isn't it?