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Quercus/MacLehose Press
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Baby is twelve years old. Her mother died not long after she was born and she lives in a string of seedy flats in Montreal's red light district with her father Jules, who takes better care of his heroin addiction than he does of his daughter. Jules is an intermittent presence and a constant source of chaos in Baby's life — the turmoil he brings with him and the wreckage he leaves in his wake. Baby finds herself constantly re-adjusting to new situations, new foster homes, new places, new people, all the while longing for stability and a 'normal' life. But Baby has a gift — the ability to find the good in people, a genius for spinning stories and for cherishing the small crumbs of happiness that fall into her lap. She is bright, smart, funny and observant about life on the dirty streets of a city and wise enough to realise salvation rests in her own hands. |
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Pack life is about order, but Bryn is about to push all the limits, with hair-raising results. At the age of four, Bryn watched a rabid werewolf brutally murder her parents. Alone in the world, she was rescued and taken in by Callum, the alpha of his pack. Now fifteen, Bryn's been living as a human among the werewolves, adhering to pack rule. Little fazes her. But the pack's been keeping a secret, and when Bryn goes exploring against Callum's orders she finds Chase, a newly turned teen Were locked in a cage. |
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Tabitha Tumbly, Charlie Vapour, Rusty Chains and friends can't understand why the still-alives in their house are so mean. When Pamela Fraidy gets locked in the attic by a still-alive, the ghosties are determined to make the still-alives like them. But the more friendly they are — hiding under beds and rushing out to read them a bed-time story, rushing down the chimney to say hello, the meaner the still-alives become; they even go so far as to run out of rooms shrieking! When the family start putting nasty garlic around the house and then call in a priest, the ghostie gloves are off: Tabitha and Charlie decide to call in The Ghoul to sort out the still-alives once and for all: But could the terrifying ghoul prove much more than even the ghosties bargained for? The cast of classic characters, brilliant one-liners and a clever plot will delight children and their parents. |
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It's winter and what better than a ghostly holler-day by the sea? But how are Tabitha Tumbly, Charlie Vapour, Humphrey Bump and the other ghosties to decide between Frighten-on-Sea and Scare-borough? A postcard from their friend Headless Leslie decides for them: Headless is in Frighten and cannot remember how to get home. He wrote the address on the postcard, then he forgot what the address was. 'I'd lose my head if it wasn't screwed on — which it isn't.' So the friends descend on Frighten and set off on an exciting ghostie caper, involving a haunted Frighten pier, a mysterious phantom magician, a fun fair and an extremely infuriating Headless Leslie. |
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Pittsburgh was too small for Beryl Wexler. Barely out of high school, she changed her name to Buzz and set off for the bright lights of London. She never looked back. Now she's at the top of her game in the music PR business, looking after the coolest groups on the planet. And for a woman who was forty-two last birthday she certainly keeps up the pace. But her life is about to change. Some twenty-year-old has been given the new Japanese girl band predicted to go stellar, and Buzz is being sidelined. Instead, Buzz gets to tour with the Gorni Grannies, Bulgarian singers of a certain age. These ladies may not be the tantrum-throwing celebs Buzz is used to, but they present other challenges. How to stop Lubka straining yogurt through her knee highs? How to dissuade Kichka from stealing everything not nailed to the floor? Fuelled by copious shots of home-brewed plum rakia, Buzz and Lubka address life's ups and down, until the world tilts and a different future beckons. |
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Kate McKinnon is thirty-six and mother to five-year-old Toby. She has a small but thriving business catering for private clients. Her life is on an even keel. That is, until she gets a job cooking lunch at the Foreign Office and has her first fateful meeting with Oliver Stapler, Secretary of State. He's powerful and charismatic, but also married and a father and totally out of bounds, yet she falls for him. When a journalist spots them together, he alerts the gutter press. Who cares whether Kate's affair with Oliver is true or not? It's a great story and will shift a ton of newspapers — and destroy several lives in the process. |
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Glasgow, 1953: the war may be over but the battle for the streets is just beginning. Three crime bosses control the murky streets, but a small-scale con is trying to invade their territory. The balance is shifting. Lennox, a hard man in a hard city at a hard time, finds himself caught in the middle — a dangerous place to be. One night, a body is discovered on the road, his head mashed to pulp, and Lennox is in the frame for murder. The only way of proving his innocence is to solve the crime — but he'll have to dodge men more deadly than Glasgow's crime bosses before he gets any answers. The first in a unique and memorable crime series, Lennox is gritty, fast-paced, mordantly funny and totally compelling. |
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Oskar and Eli. In very different ways, they were both victims. Which is why, against the odds, they became friends. And how they came to depend on one another, for life itself. Oskar is a 12 year old boy living with his mother on a dreary housing estate at the city's edge. He dreams about his absentee father, gets bullied at school, and wets himself when he's frightened. Eli is the young girl who moves in next door. She doesn't go to school and never leaves the flat by day. She is a 200 year old vampire, forever frozen in childhood, and condemned to live on a diet of fresh blood. John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel is a unique and brilliant fusion of social novel and vampire legend, a deeply moving fable about rejection, friendship and loyalty. |
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The newspaper was founded in Rome in the 1950s, a product of passion and a multi-millionaire's fancy. Over fifty years, its eccentricities earned a place in readers' hearts around the globe. But now, circulation is down, the paper lacks a website, and the future looks bleak. Still, those involved in the publication seem to barely notice. The obituary writer is too busy avoiding work. The editor-in-chief is pondering sleeping with an old flame. The obsessive reader is intent on finishing every old edition, leaving her trapped in the past. And the publisher seems less interested in his struggling newspaper than in his magnificent basset hound, Schopenhauer. The Imperfectionists interweaves the stories of eleven unusual and endearing characters who depend on the paper. Funny and moving, the novel is about endings — the end of life, the end of sexual desire, the end of the era of newspapers — and about what might rise afterward. |
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Is the young man simply drunk or does his staggering walk suggest something more sinister? When he collapses in front of the two sisters on that dark, wet night, the women guess rightly that he's been poisoned. So begins this gripping tale set in the town of Banff, Scotland in the 1620s. The body of the victim, the apothecary's apprentice, is found in the house of Alexander Seaton — a fallen minister, the discovery of whose clandestine love affair has left him disgraced and deprived him of his vocation. Why was the body moved to Seaton's house? What is the significance of the unusual poison used to kill him? And why would anyone want to murder this likeable young man? Seaton sets out to find answers to these and many other questions, embarking on a journey where he encounters the witch hunt, extreme religious prejudice, cruelty and the darkness in men's souls. It is also a personal quest that leads Alexander to the rediscovery of his faith in God and his belief in himself. Among her many strengths, Shona MacLean is brilliant at evoking period and place. You feel you are in those cold, dark, northern rooms, eavesdropping on her characters. You are totally involved in the rich, convincing world she has re-created. |
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