Turn a betrayal inside out and you found its opposite, a secret and a bond. Perhaps that was what friendship came down to: a lifelong, affectionate mutual blackmail.Neil and Adam, two young men on the cusp of adulthood, meet one golden summer in California and, despite their different backgrounds, soon become best friends. Buton a camping trip in Yosemite they lead each other into wrongdoing that, years later, both will desperately regret.Their connection holds thr...

A son’s search for his mother, a feminist pioneer—and a casualty of her timeIn London, 1965, a brilliant young woman—a prescient advocate for women’s rights—has just gassed herself to death, leaving behind a suicide note, two young sons, and a soon-to-be-published book: The Captive Wife. No one had ever imagined that Hannah Gavron might take her own life. Beautiful, sophisticated, and swept up in the progressive sixties, she was a promising academic and the wife of a risin...

**NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR“Taut, elegant . . . Black is a writer of great wisdom.”—Claire Messud, The Guardian (UK)**Augusta Edelman—Gus to her friends—is a painter, a wife, and not always the best judge of her own choices—one of them bad enough that she and her husband, Owen, have fled their longtime city home and its reminders of troubling events. Now, three years into their secluded country life, Gus works daily on the marriage she nearly l...

Harper wakes every night, terrified of the sounds outside his hut halfway up the mountain in Bali. He is afraid that his past as a mercenary has caught up with him and that his life may now be in danger.As he waits to discover his fate, he meets Rita, a woman with her own tragic past, and begins a passionate affair. Their exile makes Harper realise that exile comes in many forms - but can Rita and Harper save each other while they are putting each other very much at risk?Mo...

Beyond the boundaries of the town of Gost, Croatia, an old house which has lain empty for years is showing signs of life: Laura and her teenage children have arrived. As Duro Kolak, a local handyman, helps with repairs to the old house, they uncover a mosaic and painstakingly restore it. But Gost is not all it seems; conflicts long past still suppurate beneath the scars.

From the novelist the New York Times compares to Paul Bowles, Evelyn Waugh and Ian McEwan, an evocative new work of literary suspense Adrift in Cambodia, Robert Grieve - pushing thirty and eager to side-step a life of quiet desperation as a small-town teacher - decides to go AWOL. As he crosses the border from Thailand, he tests the threshold of a new future. And on that first night, a small windfall precipitates a chain of events involving a bag of "jinxed" money, a suave American, a trun...

Listen. There’s a problem and it can’t be solved. You need to disappear.This is Stephen Lawrence Sutler’s last morning at Camp Liberty, Iraq. In two hours a massive explosion will conceal the theft of $53,000,000. Sutler, shaken by the blast and forced to go the run, is unaware that any money is missing or that he has been set up. His problems are just beginning.

What if you began to suspect your child of an unspeakable crime?One night changed everything. A father murdered in his bed. A mother beaten almost to death. A daughter who claims she knew nothing about her boyfriend's murderous plans. But is she telling the truth?Hanna can't remember the details of what happened that traumatic night, she barely survived the brutal assault that left her a widow. However, if she is to keep her husband's killer in jail, she kn...

Brighton, May 1940. A time of tension and change. Geoffrey Beaumont becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp on the edge of town, his son Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton his English HQ, and his wife Evelyn meets Otto Gottlieb, a 'degenerate' German-Jewish painter imprisoned in the camp. As love collides with fear, the power of art with the forces of war, the lives of Evelyn, Otto and Geoffrey are changed irrevocably.

One hot summer's day, John Cole decides to leave his life behind. When his car breaks down on an isolated road, he goes looking for help and stumbles upon a grand but dilapidated house. Its residents claim to have been waiting for him… There’s Hester, their controlling host, Alex and Claire, siblings full of child-like wonder, the mercurial Eve, Elijah - a faithless former preacher and chain-smoking Walker, wreathed in smoke and hostility. Who are these people? And what do they intend for ...

Julia is married and eight years Julian’s senior; he is a gifted English student, a life of academia ahead. Ignoring warnings, they each give up all they have to be together. When Julian hears that his boyhood home is for sale, he sets out to recreate a paradise for his new family. It is only when their daughter Mira becomes terrifyingly ill that it is impossible for Julia to conceal the explosive secret that she has been keeping from him.

Anna Benz lives in comfort and affluence with her husband and three young children in Dietlikon, a picture-perfect suburb of Zurich. Anna, an American expat, has chosen this life far from home; but, despite its tranquility and order, inside she is falling apart.Feeling adrift and unable to connect with her husband or his family; with the fellow expatriates who try to befriend her; or even, increasingly, her own thoughts and emotions, Anna attempts to assert her agency in the only wa...