No catches, no fine print just unadulterated book loving, with your favourite books saved to your own digital bookshelf.
New members get entered into our monthly draw to win £100 to spend in your local bookshop Plus lots lots more…
Find out moreBrowse audiobooks narrated by John Rubinstein, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
Piece of My Heart
Shuggie Bain
Burnt Sugar: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020
Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts
The Cousins
A Time to Lie
Dark Tides: The compelling new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Tidelands
The Crown: The Official History Behind Season 3: Political Scandal, Personal Struggle and the Years
The Harpy
Anything is Possible: Be Brave, Be Kind and Follow Your Dreams
From two acclaimed experts in the genre, a brand-new volume of supernatural stories showcasing the forgotten female horror writers from 1852-1923 While the nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley may be hailed as the first modern writer of horror, the success of her immortal Frankenstein undoubtedly inspired dozens of female authors who wrote their own evocative, chilling tales. Weird Women, edited by award-winning anthologists Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger, collects some of the finest tales of terror by authors as legendary as Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, alongside works of writers who were the bestsellers and critical favorites of their time-Marie Corelli, Ellen Glasgow, Charlotte Riddell-and lesser known authors who are deserving of contemporary recognition. As railroads, industry, cities, and technology flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, so did stories exploring the horrors they unleashed. This anthology includes ghost stories and tales of haunted houses, as well as mad scientists, werewolves, ancient curses, mummies, psychological terrors, demonic dimensions, and even weird westerns. Curated by Klinger and Morton with an aim to present work that has languished in the shadows, all of these exceptional supernatural stories are sure to surprise, delight, and frighten today's readers.
Show moreInto the darkness within; or else the light ... When Margaret Atwood wrote these words, she left open the possibility that even our darkest tales may harbor a glimmer of hope. In Or Else the Light, the third and final entry in the Dystopia Triptych, over a dozen of the best minds in science fiction conclude their stories with a descent into darkness, or perhaps a ray of light. Edited by John Joseph Adams, Hugh Howey, and Christie Yant, the Dystopia Triptych is a series of three anthologies of dystopian fiction. Ignorance Is Strength-before the dystopia-focuses on society during its descent into absurdity and madness. Burn the Ashes-during the dystopia-turns its attention to life during the strangest, most dire times. Or Else the Light-after the dystopia-concludes the saga with each author sharing their own vision of how we as a society might crawl back from the precipice of despair. Or Else the Light features all-new, never-before-published works by the following authors, in order of appearance: Carrie Vaughn, Tim Pratt, Rich Larson, Cadwell Turnbull, Karin Lowachee, Adam-Troy Castro, Caroline M. Yoachim, Hugh Howey, An Owomoyela, Seanan McGuire, Dominica Phetteplace, Alex Irvine, Tobias S. Buckell, Scott Sigler, Darcie Little Badger, Violet Allen, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.
Show moreBrought to you by Penguin. Richly expansive and deeply moving, an intimate novel of secret lives and painful histories from one of the finest storytellers we have 'This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it's happening. She is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book.' Meg Wolitzer Lilia Liska is 81. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press: the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Increasingly obsessed by this fragment of intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events. Gradually she undercuts Roland's charming but arrogant voice with an incisive and deeply moving commentary. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. And she returns inexorably to her daughter, Lucy, who took her own life at the age of 27. Must I Go is an unconventional epistolary novel, a gleefully one-way correspondence between the very-much-alive Lilia and the long-departed Roland. Though mortality is ever-present, this is ultimately a novel about life, in all its messy glory. Life lived, for the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on its own terms. With exquisite subtlety and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart. © Yiyun Li 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020
Show moreFood security, the availability of food and reasonable access to it, has become one of the hottest topics of the year, growing in importance with every spike in agricultural commodity prices, of which there have been many since 2007. While 2010 prices rises have not been as severe as 2007 and 2008, they are still up double-digits with grain up 33% and fruits up an absurd 62%. These increases have led to hunger, starvation, and often civil unrest. Why is this happening just when such huge progress has been made in productivity? Could it be that the very markets first established in Chicago in the 1800s to help stabilize agricultural commodity prices have become a hedge funders casino where the rich really are taking food out of the mouths of the poor?
Show moreA historical sci-fi tale of the Land of the Blue Mountains Best known for his masterpiece of horror, Dracula, Bram Stoker wrote a number of other novels and many short stories, all with supernatural themes or filled with a physical terror reminiscent of Poe. First published in 1909, The Lady of the Shroud is an engrossing concoction of an epic steampunk adventure, military tale, and science fiction romance. Old Roger Melton has died, leaving behind one of the greatest fortunes in Europe. His arrogant relative Ernest Melton expects to be the heir, but, much to the family’s surprise, Roger leaves his vast estate to his obscure young nephew, Rupert Sent Leger. But Rupert’s newfound wealth comes with strange conditions attached, one of which is that he must inhabit the old castle of Vissarion in the remote Balkan nation known as the Land of the Blue Mountains. Rupert, an intrepid adventurer, agrees and travels to Vissarion with his Aunt Janet, who possesses the occult power of Second Sight. But all is not as it seems at Vissarion. Rupert finds himself visited by a ghostly woman clothed in a burial shroud who sleeps in a tomb. Haunted by her strange beauty, he declares his love and they wed in an Orthodox ceremony conducted by candlelight. As a newly married couple, their trials and adventures continue. From sea battles with mechanical crabs and flying machines to insidious court plotters and spies, the newlyweds battle all manner of foe in their quest to free their country and become the ruling Voivodes of Vissarion, the Land of the Blue Mountains.
Show moreDuring its heyday, the Chelsea Hotel in New York City was a home and safe haven for Bohemian artists, poets, and musicians such as Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, and Dee Dee Ramone. This oral history of the famed hotel peers behind the iconic façade and delves into the mayhem, madness, and brilliance that stemmed from the hotel in the 1980s and 1990s. Providing a window into the late Bohemia of New York during that time, countless interviews, and firsthand accounts adorn this social history of one of the most celebrated and culturally significant landmarks in New York City.
Show moreThe most spine-tingling suspense stories from the colonial era—including Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and H. P. Lovecraft This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the colonial era’s stifling religion, and its dark and threatening woods. Today the best-known tale of colonial horror is Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, although Irving’s story is probably best known today from various movie versions it has inspired. Colonial horror tales of other prominent American authors—Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper among them—are overshadowed by their bestsellers, and are difficult to find in modern libraries. Many other pioneers of American horror fiction are presented afresh in this breathtaking volume for today’s public readers. Some will have heard the names of Increase and Cotton Mather in association with the Salem witch trials, but will not have sought out their contemporary accounts of what were viewed as supernatural events. By bringing these writers to the attention of the contemporary readers, this collection will help bring their names—and their work—back from the dead.
Show moreThirty stories from thirty authors, including Jane Yolen, Mike Resnick & J. J. Steinfeld. How will the world end? With aliens or angels? Or a ground hog? Bleak despair? Martial fervor? Or a belly laugh? Whatever the Apocalypse, It will be borne by people and their families and their dogs and most of all, it will challenge their notions of themselves. This anthology includes international award winning writers, poets, and thinkers that give you their version of the Apocalypse. Just remember, we’re all in this together. But there is more: the first short fiction by the wildly popular blogger, Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station; a new story by Mike Resnick; and poetry by Jane Yolen, This is an international piece of work with writers from all over the globe, seven countries: Nigeria, Greece, the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have all put there best foot forward. You will not be disappointed.
Show moreThis masterful collection of seventeen classic mystery stories, dating from 1837 to 1914, traces the earliest history of popular detective fiction. Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossus―but it was not always so. Edgar Allan Poe’s French detective Dupin, the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” preceded Holmes’s deductive reasoning by more than forty years with his “tales of ratiocination.” In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes’ adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poe―and to Émile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur Lecoq debuted in France twenty years earlier. If “Rue Morgue” was the first true detective story in English, the title of the first full-length detective novel is more hotly contested. Two books by Wilkie Collins―The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868)―are often given that honor, with the latter showing many of the features that came to identify the genre: a locked-room murder in an English country house; bungling local detectives outmatched by a brilliant amateur detective; a large cast of suspects and a plethora of red herrings; and a final twist before the truth is revealed. Others point to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1861) or Aurora Floyd (1862), and others still to The Notting Hill Mystery (1862–3) by the pseudonymous “Charles Felix.” As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages―of hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called “cozy” murders in Britain―the legacy of Sherlock Holmes, with his fierce devotion to science and logic, gave way to street smarts on the one hand and social insight on the other―but even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required the intelligence and clear-sightedness that characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured here.
Show moreBrought to you by Penguin. ONE NIGHT OF HEDONISM. FOUR COUNTS OF MURDER. A run-down mansion nestled between Beverley Hills and the San Fernando Valley is leased out for one night to house a party big enough to herald the end of days. When a limo is discovered in the grounds of the house the morning after with four dead bodies inside, a mind-bending case begins. With no link between the four people in the car, and each of the victims murdered in a different way, psychologist Alex Delaware and LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis are about to begin their grisliest and most baffling case yet. And as they struggle to make sense of the vicious mass slaying, they will be forced to confront a level of lust and evil for which their combined wisdom can provide no preparation. © Jonathan Kellerman 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020
Show morePsychologist Loche Newirth becomes hunted when he sees a painting that opens a window onto the afterlife. An ancient order of men seeking to control the art pursue him across the world, through centuries, into madness and beyond. The first part of Michael B. Koep’s the Newirth Mythology—The Invasion of Heaven is mystery, adventure, myth, betrayal, murder, and madness. Loche Newirth wonders if it was his fall: the fifty foot drop from the rocky cliff to the icy water below. Is this why he has been hallucinating? Or is it because one of his clients is dead, or his mentor has gone mad, or that his wife is leaving him? He can’t bring himself to believe what he has been seeing. Insane things like a massive, searching eye. He sees it in the water below the cliff. He sees it in mirrors, on walls: a massive, crystal blue iris and fathomless pupil there in the center of his life, looking at him. To find the answer, Loche pens the recent events of his life into a book and leaves the work behind for his mentor Doctor Marcus Rearden to interpret. As Rearden reads he plunges into the harrowing depths of Loche’s reality: his loss of a client, the discovery of an unknown past, an ancient conflict over possession of the human condition, the awesome reality of the gods walking among us, and the crimes of humanity invading the hope that lies beyond the grave. And along the way, Loche tells of unforgettable characters: the torn and manic housewife that teeters on the edge of sanity, and a depressed, swashbuckling swordsman that believes he is over six hundred years old, the stoned and prolific painter and his perilous work he must keep secret, and the beautiful business woman that abandons her life’s work for a love she never expected.
Show moreImagine paintings that hold the secrets to the meaning of life and death or scribbled words that can alter the past and reshape the present. We know art imitates life, but in Michael B. Koep’s thriller fiction trilogy, the author brings the arts to life in an action-packed tale spanning seven centuries. In the spring of 1338, young William of Leaves knows only of remedies, herbs, and his mother’s kindness. When he is forced to watch as she is dragged to a witch’s pyre by a mob led by the Bishop of London, the mysterious immortal apothecary, Albion Ravistelle, promises the boy a chance at vengeance. In the summer of 1972, Helen Storm is a stoned groupie on the sunset strip with a very special condition: she is immortal. When her life intersects with a famous guitar player, she is introduced to her future as a deadly and remorseless assassin. In present day, psychologist Loche Newith and Julia Iris must come to terms with Loche’s prophetic writings that have changed the course of history and shaped the lives of William, Helen, and countless others. As a war breaks out between the immortals on earth and Albion Ravistelle, Loche must accept the realities he has authored and cross over into death—he must enter again into Basil Fenn’s paintings to find a way to end the conflict. In part two of the Newirth Mythology, Leaves of Fire, Koep entwines these lives and lifetimes as he explores myth, memory, revenge, and the hope of forgiveness.
Show more
