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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Ajay Chowdhury

A ritual killing. An ancient curse. What's myth... and what's murder? 
 
After a bruising encounter with a terrorist group, Detective Kamil Rahman has decided to hand in his resignation to the Met and set up a detective agency with his friend Anjoli. But when his boss asks him to go to India to investigate the murder of a British engineer who was found with eighteen arrows stuck in his body, Kamil agrees to take the case, as long as Anjoli can accompany him. 
 
When they arrive in Mumbai, they find someone is on a gruesome killing spree, striking down those connected to the engineer in increasingly macabre ways. Meanwhile, an old friend of Kamil’s gets in touch to beg for his help: he believes his family are cursed, and that he is going to die on his 47th birthday, just like his father and grandfather before him. 
 
As the body count rises, Kamil is torn between solving a very real murder case and protecting his friend from a grisly – if far-fetched – fate. Can he catch a killer and prevent an ancient curse before more people lose their lives?

The Shadow

Daisy Johnson

A place of myths, rumours and secrets, The Hotel looms over the dark Fens, tall and grey in its Gothic splendour. Built on cursed land, a history of violent death suffuses its very foundations –yet it has a magnetism that is impossible to ignore. 
 
On entering The Hotel, different people react in different ways. To some it is familiar, to others a stranger. Many come out refreshed, longing to return. But a few are changed forever, haunted by their time there. And almost all those affected are women... 
 
They are children and mothers, monsters, cult film-makers, thrill-seekers and workers on the night shift, all with their own tales of its strange power, of the horrors of Room 63, and of desperate but failed attempts to escape its seductive pull.

The Hotel

Karl Ove Knausgaard

'Strikingly humane, unsettling, and wholly unique' Ferdia Lennon 
 
‘Ferociously readable. . . I still can't get enough' The Times 
 
If no one ever died, what would happen then? 
 
For several days, a bright new star in the sky above Norway has blazed over the restless lives of those below. Tove, an artist, is consumed by intense creativity as she spirals towards psychosis. Line falls in love with a musician named Valdemar and is lured to a secret black metal gig in a remote forest. Geir, a policeman, is investigating a ritual murder but chances upon something more horrifying even than the bodies in the trees – the last bodies he sees, because, as undertaker Syvert is the first to realise, people have stopped dying since the star appeared. 
 
What is haunting the world – and why? 
As profound as it is thrilling, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Third Realm is a breathtaking novel about ordinary lives on the cusp of irrevocable change. 
 
PRAISE FOR THE THIRD REALM 
 
‘A visionary epic' Guardian 
 
‘One of the most genuinely suspenseful, alluring books I’ve ever read. . . This book made me afraid of the dark again.’ Brandon Taylor, Washington Post 
 
‘As accessible and creepy as anything by Stephen King and as addictive as your favourite TV drama series. There is no writer I would rather devour’ Spectator 
PRAISE FOR KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD: 
 
'Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of my literary heroes' Torrey Peters 
 
'Addictive' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Knausgaard retains the ability to lock you, as if in a tractor beam, into his storytelling' New York Times 
 
‘Casts an existential spell. . . captivating' Financial Times

The Third Realm

Susan Stokes-Chapman

A remote village, a mysterious death, a secret cult – a gripping gothic mystery from the author of number one bestseller Pandora 
 
‘A gripping, beautifully executed historical thriller, full of magic and mythology’ Rosie Andrews 
 
After a grave mistake, Henry Talbot has been forced to take a position as village doctor in remote Wales where he can't speak the language and belief in myth and magic is rife. When Henry discovers his predecessor died in mysterious circumstances, and starts to notice a cryptic symbol appearing in odd places, he sets out to find answers. 
 
The lady of the manor, Linette Tresilian, is vexingly unhelpful at first. She seems to know little about the shelves of occult books Henry notices in her family’s library. But Linette has suspicions of her own about what’s happened in the village and, together, their investigations will bind their destinies in ways neither thought possible. 
 
‘An alluring, immersive Gothic mystery’ Jennifer Saint 
 
'A haunting, transporting mystery…kept me completely enthralled' Elodie Harper 
 
‘I was gripped… the story was so dark and clever’ Stacey Thomas 
 
 
Readers love The Shadow Key 
 
'Deliciously dark, atmospheric, and brimful of folklore, magic and myth, this Gothic thriller held me spellbound from start to finish' 
 
'Devoured this book over two days' 
 
'What begins as a murder mystery turns into a gothic classic which is not to be missed. Highly recommend' 
 
'I loved the feel of this book and I was hooked from the first chapter' 
 
'A breathtaking gothic fiction with an unforgettable finale, Stokes-Chapman is quickly becoming one of my favourite authors'

The Shadow Key

Jo Nesbo

A twisted spin on the classic coming-of-age horror story from the Sunday Times No.1 bestselling author Jo Nesbo 
 
WHEN THE VOICES CALL, DON'T ANSWER... 
 
In the wake of his parents' tragic deaths fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote town of Ballantyne. 
 
Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects the new, angry boy is responsible. No one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie. 
 
No one, that is, except Karen, a beguiling fellow outsider who encourages Richard to pursue clues the police refuse to investigate. He traces the number that Tom prank called from the phone booth to an abandoned house in the woods. There he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices start . . . 
 
When another classmate disappears, Richard must find a way to prove his innocence as he grapples with the dark magic that is possessing Ballantyne. 
 
Then again, Richard may not be the most reliable narrator of his own story.

The Night House

Jeanette Winterson

Our lives are now digital, exposed and always-on. We have changed, but our ghosts have not. They’ve simply adapted and innovated. They inhabit our apps and wander the metaverse just as they haunt our homes and our memories, always seeking new ways to connect… 
 
To live amongst us. 
 
To remind us. 
 
To tempt us. 
 
To take their revenge. 
 
These stories are not ours to tell. They are the stories of the dead – of those we’ve lost, loved, forgotten…and feared. Some are fiction. But some may not be.

Night Side of the River

Susan Hill

'Heartstoppingly chilling' Daily Express 
 
Read the truly terrifying classic English ghost story behind the play. 
 
Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summoned to attend the funeral of Mrs Alice Drablow, the sole inhabitant of Eel Marsh House. The house stands at the end of a causeway, wreathed in fog and mystery, but it is not until he glimpses a wasted young woman, dressed all in black, at the funeral, that a creeping sense of unease begins to take hold, a feeling deepened by the reluctance of the locals to talk of the woman in black - and her terrible purpose. 
 
'No one chills the heart like Susan Hill' Daily Telegraph 
 
**If you love The Woman in Black, try The Various Haunts of Men, the first book in Susan Hill's Simon Serrailler series**

The Woman in Black

A terrifying ghost story by the bestselling author of The Woman in Black. 
 
The remoter parts of the English Fens are unruly, deserted and damp, even in the height of summer. In Iyot Lock stands a large, decaying house, belonging to Leonora and Edward's Aunt Kestrel. The pair are cousins, who were both sent to their aunt's creepy house for the summer when they were children. 
 
At the time, Leonora was angry and upset when she received the wrong dolly for her birthday. 
 
At the time, Edward told himself that the noises he heard around the house were in his head. 
 
But now, 40 years later, the terrifying consequences of what happened to Leonora's birthday doll are just beginning to surface...

Dolly

A Ghost Story

A terrifying ghost story by the bestselling author of The Woman in Black. 
 
A mysterious depiction of masked revellers at the Venice carnival hangs in the college rooms of Oliver's old professor in Cambridge. On this cold winter's night, its eerie secret is revealed by the ageing don. The dark art of the Venetian scene, instead of imitating life, has the power to entrap it. 
 
To stare into the painting is to play dangerously with the unseen demons it hides, and become the victim of its macabre beauty...

The Man in the Picture

A terrifying ghost story by the bestselling author of The Woman in Black. 
 
One dark and rainy night, Sir James Monmouth returns to London after years spent travelling alone. 
 
Intent on uncovering the secrets of his childhood hero, the mysterious Conrad Vane, he begins to investigate Vane’s life, but he finds himself warned off at every turn. 
 
Before long he realises he is being followed too. A pale, thin boy is haunting his every step but every time he tries to confront the boy he disappears. And what of the chilling scream and desperate sobbing only he can hear? 
 
His quest leads him eventually to the old lady of Kittiscar Hall, where he discovers something far more terrible at work than he could ever have imagined. 
 
‘Thoroughly frightening’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘Chills the blood’ The Times

The Mist in the Mirror

A terrifying ghost story by the bestselling author of The Woman in Black. 
 
Late one summer evening, antiquarian bookseller Adam Snow is returning from a client visit when he takes a wrong turn. He stumbles across a derelict Edwardian house and, compelled by curiosity, approaches the door. Standing before the entrance, he feels the unmistakable sensation of a small cold hand creeping into his own, 'as if a child had taken hold of it'. 
 
At first he is merely puzzled by the odd incident but then begins to suffer attacks of fear and panic, and is visited by nightmares. He is determined to learn more about the house. But when he does, he receives further, increasingly sinister, visits from the small hand.

The Small Hand

** CONTAINS 'THE FRONT ROOM' SOON TO BE A MAJOR A24 FILM ** 
 
A terrifying collection of ghost stories by the bestselling author of The Woman in Black. 
 
From the foggy streets of Victorian London to the eerie perfection of 1950s suburbia, the everyday is invaded by the evil otherworldly in this unforgettable collection of ghost stories from the author of The Woman in Black. 
 
In the title story, on a murky evening in a warmly lit club off St James, a bishop listens closely as a paranormal detective recounts his most memorable case, one whose horrifying denouement took place in that very building. 
 
In 'The Front Room' a mother tries to protect her children from the increasingly unnerving influence of their own grandmother. 
 
A lonely boy finds a friend in 'Boy Number 21', but years later he is forced to question the nature of that friendship and to ask whether ghosts can perish in fires. 
 
This is Susan Hill at her best - flesh-creeping tales of thwarted ambition, terrifying revenge and supernatural stirrings that will leave readers wide awake long into the night.

The Travelling Bag

Kirsty Logan

'Gripping . . . You won't put it down' Sunday Telegraph 
 
A shocking collection of dark stories, ranging from chilling contemporary fairytales to disturbing supernatural fiction. 
 
Alone in a remote house in Iceland a woman is unnerved by her isolation; another can only find respite from the clinging ghost that follows her by submerging herself in an overgrown pool. Couples wrestle with a lack of connection to their children; a schoolgirl becomes obsessed with the female anatomical models in a museum; and a cheery account of child's day out is undercut by chilling footnotes. 
 
These dark tales explore women's fears with electrifying honesty and invention and speak to one another about female bodies, domestic claustrophobia, desire and violence. 
 
'A brilliant collection of stories . . . All will burrow their way into your brain and not let go' Stylist 
 
'Shimmers with menace . . . Fans of Angela Carter and Shirley Jackson take note' i Newspaper 
 
KIRSTY LOGAN WAS SELECTED AS ONE OF BRITAIN'S TEN MOST OUTSTANDING LGBTQ WRITERS by Val McDermid for the International Literature Showcase in 2019

Things We Say in the Dark

*Now a major film SEPTEMBER SAYS* 
 
The electrifying novel from the Booker shortlisted author of Everything Under. 
 
'A short sharp explosion of a gothic thriller' Observer 
 
Something unspeakable has happened to sisters July and September. 
 
Desperate for a fresh start, they move across the country to an old family house that has a troubled life of its own. Noises come from behind the walls. Lights flicker of their own accord. Sleep feels impossible, dreams are endless. 
 
In their new, unsettling surroundings, July finds that the fierce bond she's always had with September - forged with a blood promise when they were children - is beginning to change in ways she cannot understand.

Sisters

Ruth Ware

THEIR DREAM HOUSE WILL BECOME HER WORST NIGHTMARE 
 
'Ruth Ware just gets better and better’ Lisa Jewell, bestselling author of The Family Upstairs 
 
‘The queen of creepy crime’ Metro 
 
When Rowan comes across the advert, it seems too good to be true: a live-in nanny position, with an extremely generous salary. 
 
What she doesn't know is that she's stepping into a nightmare – one that will end with her in a cell awaiting trial for murder. 
 
She knows she's made mistakes. 
But she's not guilty – at least not of murder. 
Which means someone else is... 
 
THE TURN OF THE KEY IS: 
 
‘Eerie and Tense’ Prima 
 
‘Dark and dramatic’ AJ Finn, bestselling author of The Woman in the Window 
 
‘Deliciously dark and spooky’ Sunday Mirror 
 
‘Powerfully atmospheric, unguessably twisty’ Louise Candlish, bestselling author of Our House

The Turn of the Key

From the author of The It Girl, read a gripping psychological thriller that will leave you wanting more

Kristen Roupenian

NOW A MAJOR FILM 
 
'It's a new literary genre... Supernatural horror meets bedroom politics' Sunday Times 
 
'If you enjoyed Cat Person, this is for you&rsquo; Evening Standard 
 
These are stories of women's lives now. They also happen to be horror stories. In some, women endure the horror. In others, they inflict it. 
 
Here are women at work, at home, on dates, at the doctor's, with their families and with their friends. Here are women grappling with desire, punishment, guilt and anger. These are stories to make you feel fascinated but repelled, scared but delighted, revolted but aroused. 
 
Previously published as You Know You Want This

Cat Person and Other Stories

***LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019*** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE 2020** 
**LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI PRIZE 2020** 
 
'Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful.' 
 
Inspired by Mary Shelley's gothic classic Frankenstein, discover this audacious new novel about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire. 
 
As Brexit grips Britain, Ry, a young transgender doctor, is falling in love. The object of their misguided affection: the celebrated AI-specialist, Professor Victor Stein. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his Mum again, is set to make his fortune with a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. 
 
Ranging from 1816, when nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley pens her radical first novel, to a cryonics facility in present-day Arizona where the dead wait to return to life, Frankissstein shows us how much closer we are to the future than we realise. 
 
'Intelligent and inventive...very funny' The Times 
 
'One of the most gifted writers working today' New York Times

Frankissstein

A Love Story

Lawrence Osborne

SOON TO BE A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM, STARRING COLIN FARELL AND TILDA SWINTON 
 
‘I waited patiently for the next hand to be played out, and I had a feeling it was going to be a Natural, a perfect nine.’ 
 
His name is Lord Doyle. 
 
His plan: to gamble away his last days in the dark and decadent casino halls of Macau. 
 
His game: baccarat punto blanco -- 'that slutty dirty queen of casino card games.' 
 
Though Doyle is not a Lord at all. He is a fake; a corrupt lawyer who has spent a career siphoning money from rich clients. And now he is on the run, determined to send the money – and himself – up in smoke. 
 
So begins a beguiling, elliptical velvet rope of a plot: a sharp suit, yellow kid gloves, another naughty lemonade and an endless loop of small wins and losses. When Lady Luck arrives in the form of Dao-Ming, a beautiful yet enigmatic lost soul, so begins a spectacular and unnatural winning streak in which millions come Doyle’s way. But in these shadowy dens of risk and compulsion, in a land governed by superstition, Doyle knows that when the bets are high, the stakes are even greater. 
 
The Ballad of a Small Player is a sleek, dark-hearted masterpiece: a ghost story set in the land of the living, and a decadent morality tale of a Faustian pact made, not with the devil, but with fortune’s fickle hand.

The Ballad of a Small Player

Jack Wolf

The year is 1750. 
 
Meet Tristan Hart, precociously talented student of medicine. 
 
His obsession is the nature of pain and preventing. He is on a quest to cut through superstition with the brilliant blade of science. 
 
Meet Tristan Hart, madman and deviant. 
 
His obsession is the nature of pain, and causing it. He is on a quest to arouse the perfect scream and slay the daemon Raw Head who torments his days and nights. 
 
Troubled visionary, twisted genius, loving sadist. 
 
What is real and what imagined in Tristan Hart’s brutal, beautiful, complex world?

The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones

Koethi Zan

‘As gripping as Gone Girl’ Elle 
 
NEVER GO OUT ALONE AFTER DARK 
 
For years, Sarah and Jennifer kept the Never List: a list of things to be avoided at all costs. 
 
NEVER GET IN THE CAR 
 
But one night, they broke their own rules – with horrifying consequences. 
 
NEVER TAKE RISKS 
 
Sarah has spent ten years trying to forget her terrifying ordeal. But it seems the killer has not forgotten her… 
 
NEVER TRUST ANYONE

The Never List

E F Benson

A VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERY 
WH Auden, Nancy Mitford and Noel Coward were among his fans... But have you discovered E. F. Benson yet? 
 
In a Holbein portrait above the grand old fireplace, Francis Vail, second baronet, brandishes a beautiful golden goblet, encrusted with pearls, rubies and emeralds. But this treasure, the Luck of the Vails, has since brought the family nothing but ruin and death. 
 
On the eve of his twenty-first birthday, Harry Vail discovers the Luck hidden in the attic of his ancestral home, the family curse is reawoken, and a tale of madness, avarice and murder unfolds. 
 
Murder mystery... Ghost story... Whodunnit. This is a classic detective story from the author of Mapp and Lucia. Crime fiction at its best.

The Luck of the Vails

Sadie Jones

A sinister tale of haunting beauty, from The Outcast author Sadie Jones. 
 
It is the eve of Emerald Torrington’s twentieth birthday and the family has assembled at Sterne, the once grand, now crumbling, family seat. The cake is iced, the wine decanted, the house gleams invitingly. 
 
But before the first dish can be served, a mysterious group of strangers arrives at the door. Victims of a local train accident they are seeking shelter at the house. 
 
The Torringtons welcome them in but there is something unsettling about the group and, as night falls and a storm rages outside, the family begins to wonder if something more malevolent than stranded travellers is in their home...

The Uninvited Guests

Steve Earle

Doc Ebersole lives with the ghost of Hank Williams. Literally. 
 
In 1963, ten years after giving Hank the overdose that killed him, Doc is wracked by addiction. Having lost his licence to practise medicine, he lives in a rented room in the red-light district on the south side of San Antonio, performing abortions and patching up the odd knife or gunshot wound. But when Graciela, a young Mexican immigrant, appears in the neighbourhood in search of Doc's services, miraculous things begin to happen. Everyone she meets is transformed for the better, except, maybe, for Hank's angry ghost - who isn't at all pleased to see Doc doing well. 
 
I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive is a poetic ghost story, as well as a ballad of regret and redemption, and miracles.

I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive

John Harwood

London, 1881. Constance Langton lives in a gloomy home with a distant father and a grief-stricken mother; seeking refuge and comfort, she secretly attends a séance which has tragic consequences. Left alone, her only legacy is a mysterious inheritance that will blight her life and take her deep into a world of apparitions, betrayal and blackmail, black-hearted villains - and murder.

The Seance

Rebecca was Daphne du Maurier's most famous and best-loved novel. 
 
But what happened next? 
 
Married to the sophisticated, wordly-wise Maxim, the second Mrs de Winter's life should be happy and fulfilled. But the vengeful ghost of Rebecca, Maxim's first wife, continues to cast its long shadow over them. Back in England after an absence of over ten years, it seems as if happiness will at last be theirs. 
 
But the de Winters still have to reckon with two hate-consumed figures they once knew - both of whom have very long memories...

Mrs de Winter

Gothic Fiction

Justin Evans

George Davies has a problem: he can't bring himself to hold his newborn son. Desperate to save his dwindling marriage and redeem himself as a father and husband, George visits a therapist and begins to delve into the childhood memories that may be the root of his issues. Ten-year-old George, in the wake of his father's harrowing and unexpected death, is experiencing ominous visions - some friendly, others outright terrifying. Unable to control those visions, George starts to display erratic behaviour and eventually becomes violent. When a mysterious murder is ultimately revealed, the stakes are suddenly much higher for him and his family. Are the visions just the product of a grief-stricken child's overactive imagination? Symptoms of mental illness? Or is ten-year-old George possessed by a darker, more malevolent force?

A Good and Happy Child

Chuck Palahniuk

Haunted is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter. They are told by the people who have all answered an ad headlined 'Artists Retreat: Abandon your life for three months'. They are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of 'real life' that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But 'here' turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theatre where they are utterly isolated from the outside world - and where heat and power and, most importantly, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the stories they tell - and the more devious their machinations to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/non-fiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight.

Haunted

Viola Hatherley was a writer of ghost stories in the 1890s whose work lies forgotten until her great-grandson, as a young boy in Mawson, Australia, learns how to open the secret drawer in his mother's room. There he finds a manuscript, and from the moment his mother catches him in the act, Gerard Freeman's life is irrevocably changed. What is the invisible, ever-present threat from which his mother strives so obsessively to protect him? And why should stories written a century ago entwine themselves ever more closely around events in his own life? 
 
Gerard's quest to unveil the mystery that shrouds his family, and his life, will lead him from Mawson to London, to a long-abandoned house and the terror of a ghost story come alive.

The Ghost Writer

Diary takes the form of a 'coma diary' kept by one Misty Tracy Wilmot as her husband lies senseless in hospital after a suicide attempt. Once she was an art student dreaming of creativity and freedom; now, after marrying Peter at art school and being brought back to once quaint, now tourist-overrun Waytansea Island, she's been reduced to the condition of a resort hotel maid. Peter, it turns out, has been hiding rooms in houses he's refurbished and scrawling vile messages all over the walls. Angry homeowners are suing, and Misty's dreams of artistic greatness are in ashes. But then, as if possessed by the spirit of Maura Kinkaid, a fabled Waytansea artist of the nineteenth century, Misty begins painting again, compulsively. The canvases are taken away by her mother-in-law and her doctor, who seem to have a plan for Misty - and for all those annoying tourists...

Diary

Carl Streator is a reporter investigating Sudden Infant Death Syndrome for a soft-news feature. After responding to several calls with paramedics, he notices that all the dead children were read the same poem from the same library book the night before they died. It's a 'culling song' - an ancient African spell for euthanizing sick or old people. Researching it, he meets a woman who killed her own child with it accidentally. He himself accidentally killed his own wife and child with the same poem twenty years earlier. Together, the man and the woman must find and destroy all copies of this book, and try not to kill every rude sonofabitch that gets in their way. Lullaby is a comedy/drama/tragedy. In that order. It may also be Chuck Palahniuk's best book yet.

Lullaby

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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