Showing results by publisher "Quercus" in Literature & Fiction

Angelica Angelotti has grown up in her parents' Italian food business. Now she is using her cooking talent to strike out on her own, moving to Paris to go to culinary school. There, among the excitement and wild emotion of the student barricades, she falls in love with her charismatic but unreliable cousin, Mario - a manic-depressive 10 years older than her whom her mother had sacked from their restaurant.

Carmen is happily married to Tom, a successful London lawyer and divorcé with three children. She is content to absorb the stresses of being a stepmother to teenagers and the stain of 'second wife'. She knows she'll always live in the shadow of another woman - not Tom's first wife, Laura, who is resolutely polite and determinedly respectable, but the lover who ended his first marriage: Zena. Zena, who was shockingly beautiful. Zena, who drowned swimming late one night.

Eve Sturridge, a high-flying divorcee and mother of two girls, is head teacher of Ivy House, an Ofsted 'Outstanding' prep school in Sussex. Eve is passionate about her school and its pupils. When Danish power couple Stefan and Anette Sorenson jet in and choose Ivy House over other schools, Eve is justifiably proud. The Sorensons are A-listers who bring an aura of style and power to Ivy House. Zoe is Eve's pretty 17-year-old daughter. Unlike her mother, Zoe's not so keen on school.

The setting is October 1879. The stage is New Georgetown, West Virginia. A mysterious figure by the name of The Maker has entered this small community and, almost immediately upon doing so, started entering the minds of the townsfolk. Townsfolk who are as curious as The Maker himself. Like Dr Umbründ, the pint-sized physician with a prodigious capacity for sin; like the three sisters in the house on the hill - one stern, one wild, one mysterious; like the tavern's semimythical siren....

Harare, Zimbabwe, 2011. This is a story of five marriages and one gun. A British couple wonder at the unknowable city beyond their guarded compound while they build walls between themselves. An American begins to suspect his new home is having an insidious effect on his 'African queen' and their young daughter. An enthusiastic young intellectual follows his wife and his dreams to the city and finds only disillusion. An intelligence officer loses a crucial piece of evidence.

The Lion of Mistra is the third in this epic historical series, shaped by the quest for a powerful relic which could save the endangered Byzantine Empire. It's a different world. Bayezid, leader of the Ottomans, is dead; his heirs, Suleyman and Mehmed, are at war with each other; and the dread Tamerlane, who was on the brink of invading China, is also dead. Luke is now pushed into the role of protector of Mistra.

1915. As a child it never mattered to Blake that he had no mother, that no one knew who his father was. He was secure in his grandparents' love, happy on their farm in the Yorkshire dales. But when his grandparents die suddenly, Blake's world collapses. Taken in by a neighbouring farmer as hired help, Blake's life becomes focused on the land--and on his secret love for Annie, his employer's daughter.

Tripoli, 1960s: During the years in which post-colonial Libya fell prey to the sprawling greed of the West, Michele Balistreri suffered a succession of blows that would scar him for life. The death of his mother; the unspeakable horror that befell his best friend's family; his father's role in Gaddafi's ascent to power; and the innocent blood pact that would corrupt the course of his future.

A select band of soldiers led by Luke Magoris are given the mission of persuading Tamerlane to defend Constantinople. The great conqueror must turn his forces to the West to fight the Ottomans, who otherwise would destroy Constantinople and the Byzantine empire.

The spy novel that anticipated the Snowden revelations. Carina Dymek is on a fast track for promotion at the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when she is approached by a stranger and given a USB stick containing a report to circulate in her department. Unwittingly, she delivers a time bomb of classified information that sends her career up in flames and puts her on the radar of the security service,

Eustace is undisputed patriarch of the Farquhar family. That is, he would be if everyone stopped mumbling, let him get on with his shaving and find his way downstairs. It's not Henry's fault that he snores and that his marriage has collapsed. Or that he failed to get into the cricket team. But he has made up for it and is now a faster motorist than ever he was bowler. He is a good father, too, and one day, when he wakes up from daydreaming, his son Kenneth will thank him.

Hong Kong, August 2017. On the eve of a crisis summit for world economic leaders, two Chinese Methodist ministers are killed in an apparently motiveless execution in Hong Kong’s financial district. Luck makes Detective Alex Soong one of the first officers at the scene. Yet Soong begins to suspect his involvement to be more than incidental, and the crime itself more than a senseless assassination: an instinct that is proven correct when Soong is contacted by a mysterious figure, and more massacres follow.

Amelia has a dream: toasting chestnuts by the fire with her husband Jack in their own cosy cottage. Their real life is another world - a cramped one-bedroom flat in Hackney. But when life takes a surprising turn, removal vans are soon heading to the Kent countryside. They soon realise the cottage makeover is a far bigger project than they'd anticipated. On top of that, there's Amelia's newly loved-up mum and her tearaway half-sister, Mirabel, to contend with - pushing Amelia and Jack's marriage to breaking point.

When night falls, fear spreads...The Lake District: a wild landscape, rife with stories. Detectives Zoe Barnes and Sam Taylor are called to investigate the disappearance of two children. But they quickly realise they have been drawn into a complex and unnerving case that hides a much darker intent: as they dig deeper, whispers grow of a community hiding a deadly secret - and talk of witches, the like of which hasn't been heard since the seventeenth century, is spreading.

Annie Delancey is happily married with three grown children. But she guards a secret. Aged eighteen she had a baby boy, and gave him up for adoption. Out of the blue, she receives an official-looking letter from Social Services. Herson wants to make contact. As the son she has never known comes back into her life, his presence begins to expose the cracks in the family that Annie now has to try, desperately, to hold together.

Life isn't turning out quite how Annie expected. In her 20s, she had a dream job, an amazing social life and bags of confidence. Now, she's living with her boyfriend, Luke, and is a stay-at-home mum to their baby daughter. The promising career has petered out, and along with it, her confidence and creativity. And then Luke does the unforgivable. Annie will need the help of her group of loyal friends more than ever. Is old Annie gone forever, or could this finally be the chance to find herself once more?

Cat panics when she sees a photofit of a murder suspect flash up on the news. It looks exactly like her, and to make matters worse, the victim is her childhood best friend, Charlie. The following day, the police arrive at her doorstep to question her. She hadn't seen or spoken to Charlie in years, but could the secrets of their past finally be coming back to haunt her? Desperate to find out who gave the police her description and to protect her five-year-old son, Cat investigates. She knows she is innocent and will stop at nothing to prove it. But some secrets are best left buried....

The newly discovered diary of Boris Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson, aged 13¼, provides a fascinating glimpse into how Boris, a lazy, bumptious and overweening child, comes to believe he should be Prime Minister. Along the way, we see him hone the techniques and persona that will one day hoodwink a nation.

In their rise to fame over the course of the war, Bea Herron, Ivy Sparrow and Rainey Bird have faced down bombs and looked tragedy in the eye. They have also found love, created their own families and had careers that they never thought possible. With peace finally on the horizon, what will the new world hold for them?

April 1940, and Britain is in turmoil. Chamberlain's government is faltering, and a German invasion may be only weeks away. A body, wearing the uniform of a Luftwaffe captain, is found in the grounds of Trent Park - a stately home and now a prison to house high level German POWs. Trent Park's true purpose, however, is intelligence, gathered covertly from prisoners by secret listeners. The morning after the discovery of the body, one of the listeners goes missing.