Rufus Purdy

Meet Frankie Marks: the last person you would expect to work in fashion.

Frankie is desperate for a job. Any job. So when she lands a role at the prestigious GGC agency, she’s thrilled. She’ll be assisting on the publicity for luxury, super-expensive fashion brands and big high street names. Frankie doesn’t know the first thing about designers or dress sizes, but how hard can it be?

Her family, friends and long-suffering boyfriend don’t think Frankie will last five minutes and she’s determined to prove them wrong, no matter what it takes.

But first, she needs to learn the difference between velour and velvet . . .

A brilliantly witty and laugh-out-loud look behind the scenes of the glitz and glamour of the fashion world, written by a true industry insider. Fans of The Devil Wears Prada and Crazy Rich Asians will be hooked from the very first page.

WHO BETTER TO SOLVE A MURDER THAN A DEAD DETECTIVE?

When Detective Inspector Joe Lazarus storms a Lincolnshire farmhouse, he expects to bring down a notorious drug gang; instead, he discovers his own dead body and a spirit guide called Daisy-May.

She’s there to enlist him to the Dying Squad, a spectral police force made up of the recently deceased. Joe soon realises there are fates far worse than death. To escape being stuck in purgatory, he must solve his own murder.

Reluctantly partnering with Daisy-May, Joe faces dangers from both the living and the dead in the quest to find his killer – before they kill again.

Eighteen years ago, teenage Amy fled England, pregnant and heartbroken, to start over in New Zealand with her parents. Now Chris, the love she left behind, has walked into her beloved café by the beach and thrown her life into turmoil.

As far as Amy’s concerned, Chris chose to ignore the child she was carrying when they last met. She brought up their daughter alone and created a happy home for them both on the other side of the world. But with Chris suddenly back in her life, she can no longer ignore the past and begins to wonder what really happened all those years ago.

Old secrets and new revelations cast Amy’s world into doubt. What if this is her last chance at something truly meaningful? Can there really be a happy ending for everyone?

Over the course of a thirteen-album and multi-award-winning career with Squeeze, it was clear from the very beginning that Chris Difford has few peers when it comes to smart, pithy lyricism. In Some Fantastic Place, he charts his life from his childhood in south London to becoming a member of one of Britain’s greatest bands and beyond. Along the way Chris reveals the inspiration and stories behind Squeeze’s best-known songs, and his greatest highs and lows from over four decades of making music.

The Allies have landed, the liberation of Europe has begun.
In the Pas de Calais, Nathalie Mercier, a young British Special Operations Executive secret agent working with the French Resistance, disappears.

In London, her husband Owen Quinn, an officer with Royal Navy Intelligence, discovers the truth about her role in the Allies’ sophisticated deception at the heart of D-Day.

Appalled but determined, Quinn sets off on a perilous hunt through France in search of his wife. Aided by the Resistance in his search, he makes good progress. But, caught up by the bitterness of the war and its insatiable appetite for revenge, he risks total destruction.

Based on real events of the Second World War, this is a thrilling tale of international intrigue, love, deception and espionage, perfect for fans of Robert Harris, John le Carr and Len Deighton.

A six-year-old girl sneaks out of bed to capture a mermaid but instead discovers a dead body. Terrified and unable to make sense of what she sees, she locks the vision deep inside her mind.

Ten years later, Lily is introduced to the charismatic Flo and they become best friends. But Lily is guilt-ridden – she is hiding a terrible secret which has the power to destroy both their lives.

When Flo’s father is accused of killing a schoolgirl, the horrors of Lily’s past come bubbling to the surface. Lily knows that, whatever the consequences, she has to make things right. She must go back to the events of her childhood and face what happened at the boat house all those years ago.

Can Lily and Flo discover what is hiding in the murky waters of the lake before the killer strikes again?

James Lee Burke’s Robicheaux mysteries meet Tender is the Flesh in a chewy, chilling Louisiana-set horror-thriller about cannibalism in the bayou from a Hollywood actor/screenwriter and psychiatrist writing duo

The Louisiana parish of St. Landry thought they had seen the end of cannibalistic killings in 2008 with the death of the Cajun Cannibal, a flesh-eating serial killer who consumed eight victims before taking his own life.

Ten years later, a forensic psychiatrist’s case study into the cannibal’s murders twists itself into a terrifying reckoning with monsters both figurative and literal when he discovers the two share the same cursed blood.

When identical killings start happening again, questions about what really happened back then resurface, leading the psychiatrist into terrifying and dangerous levels of obsession. Told through the pages of the psychiatrist’s case study, the story is part psychological horror, part serial-killer thriller.

Grace lives alone in Ballybrady, a little village on the sublimely beautiful east coast of Northern Ireland. She fills her days with swimming, fishing, quilting, and baiting the tourists who arrive from the city with more money than sense. She hasn’t left the village since a traumatic stay in London as a young woman at the end of the 1980s.

One of the tourists is Evan, taking an enforced holiday from his family and work in Belfast after breaking down after the death of his daughter in infancy. He has come to try to process his grief and make himself desirable again as a husband, a father and a business partner.

But he hasn’t been there a week until he gets trapped by lockdown. When Grace saves his life in a kayaking accident – if it was an accident – and Evan’s troubled son arrives to stay, all three are drawn together in a way that forces a reckoning with their personal traumas and draws them back into society.

This is a moving and funny debut novel set in a quirky coastal community you will be desperate to visit after reading. It will appeal to readers of Elizabeth Strout, Maggie O’Farrell and Alice Munro.