A TLS, FINANCIAL TIMES AND TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR'Feels less like reading a novel and more like sitting in a car beside a dear friend . . . a profoundly moving experience' ANN PATCHETT'Deeply human . . . a beautifully quiet and devastating book' SARAH JESSICA PARKER'Funny, wise and knowing' CLARE CHAMBERSWhen Tom's wife had an affair, he resolved to leave her once their c...

Meet Lisa. Smart, bookish, an only child.Having navigated school and adolescence - mainly under the influence of the Brontës and Jane Austen - she goes to college and falls in love with Eric, a fellow student, whose ambition pushes him towards a summer work placement in NY and then a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. But it's Lisa who helps him, who may have to follow him if she wants their relationship to have a chance, and who could be compromising her own ambitions ...

'Elegant and absorbing.' Guardian'A book to be savoured.' Observer'Intimate, funny . . . Masterfully done.' Daily Mail'Sophisticated and engrossing.' Literary ReviewPaul is a mid-ranking tennis professional on the ATP tour. His girlfriend Dana is an ex-model and photographer, and together with their two-year-old son they form a tableau of the contented upper-middle-class New York family. But Paul's parents an...

ONE OF THIS WEEK'S BEST NOVELS OF 2022The perfect novel for fans of The Last Dance, Hoop Dreams and Winning Time'Exquisite. . . Warm, humane, and tragic.' JONATHAN LETHEMAt his high school basketball try-outs, nerdy sports-obsessed Brian Blum meets new kid MarcusHayes. As a sportswriter, Brian spends the following twenty years tracking his friends' superstar NBAcareer...

A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE 21ST CENTURYWINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZETen years out of Yale and drifting, Greg Marnier heads for his college reunion. There he bumps into an old friend, Robert James, now influential and wealthy from dotcom success. He has a plan: to buy up several abandoned neighbourhoods in Detroit and build a new America from their ruins. But for every urban misfit who's come for a fresh start, there's a nat...

Award-winning adult author Benjamin Markovits delivers a poignant coming-of-age middle grade story that will give comfort to anyone feeling like a small fish in a Texas-size sea. Perfect for fans of Kevin Henkes, Rebecca Stead, and Kate DiCamillo.Twelve-year-old Ben is a shy, quiet kid. His life isn’t perfect, but he feels at home in his New York City apartment. Then his dad takes a job in London, and everything changes.His parents separate, and Ben’s mom m...

What is it to pursue a goal, to strive for an ideal, to follow a dream?These are the questions explored by The Balvenie in this unique collection compiled by award-winning novelist Alex Preston. The stories – from some of the brightest and most exciting voices writing today – tell of determination, endeavour and perseverance against the odds. They range across wildly different contexts and cultures, from the epic to the intimate, in fiction and non-fiction, illustrating and illumin...

A frighteningly prescient novel of today’s America—one man’s story of a racially charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan.“You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away. It’s easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs.”Greg Marnier, Marny to his friends,...

There is in the short story, at its most characteristic, something we do not often find in the novel, Frank O’Connor wrote, ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness.’The stories shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award with BookTrust 2017 all feature characters that are disconnected, willingly or unwillingly, from those around them: a mysterious out-of-towner is shunned by her new colleagues; a grieving husband retreats into his old compulsion for hoarding; a promising a...

Three years after Lord Byron dismissed him from his service, Dr John Polidori has fallen on hard times. And then a young woman mistakes the doctor for the poet.As the pair fall in love, Polidori knows that he can only emerge from Byron's shadow if he confesses his true identity to the deluded girl; but was it only Byron's shadow that led her to love him in the first place? And a ghost story, The Vampyre, is published under Byron's name, but will the truth of the matter be ...

When his former colleague Peter Sullivan dies, the narrator of Childish Loves inherits his life's work - a number of fragmentary manuscripts about the life of Lord Byron. Fascinated by his prose - and intrigued by the rather sinister rumours surrounding Peter's life, including whispers of an inappropriate liaision with a young boy - he has the manuscripts published and then sets out to discover whether the reimagining of Byron's lost memoires can provide a key to Sullivan's own elusive lif...

In print for the first time in the United States, acclaimed novelist Benjamin Markovits’s Playing Days is a mostly autobiographical narrative concerning the author’s season playing minor league professional basketball in Germany and the love affair with another player’s estranged wife that ushers him into adulthood.Growing up in Texas, Ben experienced basketball as a mostly solitary pursuit, one he gave up after riding the bench in high school. But as his college classmate...