Showing results by publisher "Orion Publishing Group" in Genre Fiction

On the 20th anniversary of Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder returns with a spellbinding fable. When 15-year-old Anna begins receiving messages from another time, her parents take her to the doctor. But he can find nothing wrong with Anna; in fact he believes there may be some truth to what she is seeing. Anna is haunted by visions of the desolate world of 2082. She sees her great-granddaughter, Nova, in a wasteland peopled by ragged survivors, after animals and plants have died out.

In 1910, eleven-year-old Iris Villarca lives with her father at Rawblood, a lonely house on Dartmoor. Iris and her father are the last of their name. The Villarcas always die young, bloodily. Iris believes it's because of a congenital disease which means she must isolate herself from the world. But one sunlit autumn day, beside her mother's grave, she forces the truth from her father: the disease is biologically impossible. A lie, to cover a darker secret.

Running out on your wedding day never goes down well. When the pressure of her forthcoming marriage becomes too much, Jude bolts from the church, leaving a good man at the altar, her mother in a fury, and the guests with enough gossip to last a year. Guilty and ashamed, Jude flees to Pengarrock, a crumbling cliff-top mansion in Cornwall, where she takes a job cataloguing the Trevillion family's extensive library.

Smoke opens in a private boarding school near Oxford, but history has not followed the path known to us. In this other past, sin is a physical attribute, visible to all, and children are born carrying the seeds of evil within them. It is in this school, surrounded by the sons of the wealthy and well connected, that two boys called Thomas and Charlie discover that the world of smoke, soot and ash is not as it seems, for sin has a secret history and virtue a politics both intricate and murderous.

Georgie McCool knows her marriage is in trouble - that it's been in trouble for a long time. She still loves her husband, Neal, and he still loves her - but that almost seems besides the point now. Two days before they're supposed to visit Neal's family in Omaha for Christmas, Georgie tells him that she can't go. She's a TV writer, and something's come up on her show; she has to stay in Los Angeles. She knows that Neal will be upset with her - he is always a little upset with her - but she doesn't expect to him to pack up the kids and go home without her.

Some moments can change your life for ever. Have you ever wondered, what if....? A man is walking down a country lane. A woman, cycling towards him, swerves to avoid a dog. On that moment, their future hinges. There are three possible outcomes, three small decisions that could determine the rest of their life. Eva and Jim are nineteen and students at Cambridge when their paths first cross in 1958. And then there is David, Eva's then lover, an ambitious actor who loves Eva deeply.

Nurse Millie Sullivan is now Nurse Millie Smith, having married aspiring MP Jim Smith. The war has ended and the NHS has just come into action, so the nurses are busier than ever as the community realise that they no longer have to pay for the services. Minor ailments need attention, babies need to be helped into the world and some of the larger-than-life characters need keeping in line so Millie has enough drama to deal with without having to deal with more from home.

A prisoner sits on death row in a high-security prison. His only escape is through the words he dreams about, the world he conjures around him using the power of language. For the reality of his world is brutal and stark. He is not named, nor do we know his crime. But he listens. He listens to the story of York, the prisoner in the cell next to him who has been sentenced to death. He hears The Lady, a mitigation specialist who is piecing together York's past. He watches as The Lady falls in love with The Priest and wonders if love is still possible in this place.

It's 1945 and, as the troops begin to return home, the inhabitants of London attempt to put their lives back together. For 25-year-old Millie, a qualified nurse and midwife, the jubilation at the end of the war is short-lived as she tends to the needs of the East End community around her. But while Millie witnesses tragedy and brutality in her job, she also finds strength and kindness. And when misfortune befalls her own family, it is the enduring spirit of the community that shows Millie that even the toughest of circumstances can be overcome.

From the best-selling author of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a ghost story, a psychological thriller and a tale of love rediscovered. Elizabeth has been married to Michael for ten years. She has adjusted to a fairly monotonous routine with her wealthy, decent but boring husband. Part of this routine involves occasional visits to Beinn Caorrun, the dank and gloomy house in a Scottish glen that Michael inherited. There are memories there that Michael will not share with her. But then Michael begins to change. It starts when he thinks he sees, in a picture, the figure of a girl on a landing.

Violet Parry is living the quintessential life of luxury in the Hollywood Hills with David, her rock-and-roll manager husband, and her darling toddler, Dot. She has the perfect life - but she's deeply unhappy. David expects the world of Violet but gives little of himself in return. When she meets Teddy, a roguish small-time bass player, Violet comes alive, and soon she's risking everything for the chance to find herself again.

Ben Jewell has hit a breaking point. His 10-year-old son, Jonah, has severe autism, and Ben and his wife, Emma, are struggling to cope. When Ben and Emma fake a separation - a strategic decision to further Jonah's case in an upcoming tribunal - Ben and Jonah move in with Georg, Ben's elderly father. In a small house in North London, three generations of men - one who can't talk, two who won't - are thrown together.

Nurse Connie Byrne has lived and worked through the Second World War, has celebrated its ending with friends and patients in the East End of London and is now enjoying a fresh new chapter in her life and looking forward to her wedding. But, as many a young bride-to-be has proved, the path of true love never runs smooth.... Connie's busy professional life and the characters who are her patients serve to give her a much-needed sense of perspective.

When her beloved father dies, Vivien Epstein - a 22 year old hairdresser from Manchester - leaves her hometown for London in the hope of finding Jack Fox - a man she had a brief, but intense, love affair with some months ago. All Vivien has to go is one letter Jack sent to her father, the address of a boarding house scribbled hastily on the back, and very soon her hopes of finding him are dashed.

Bath, 1821: Rachel Crofton escapes her unhappy employment as a governess by marrying a self-made businessman. But her new life soon takes an unexpected turn. Reclusive Jonathan Alleyn is a man tormented by the disappearance of his childhood sweetheart, Alice. Starling, foundling child and now servant, is convinced that Alice, the woman she loved as a sister, was stolen from her. Did Alice run away? Or did something altogether more sinister occur? As Starling tries to expose the lies behind Bath's immaculate facades, others want only to forget, and will go to extreme lengths to do so.

Molly Sullivan said that the new baby was a little star. She was no trouble at all and she was always smiling - so she became known as Star and no one remembered that her name was Oona.Star Sullivan just wanted everyone to be happy - her father to stop gambling, her mother not to work so hard, her brother to stay out of trouble, her sister to stop worrying about every little thing she ate.

Rose waits for her family to arrive at their villa in Tuscany when a casual glance at her husband's phone tips her world upside down. The text reads simply: 'Miss you. Love you. Come back soon.' Daniel has always been popular with women, she knows that. But until this moment she has had no cause for worry. Has something shifted within their marriage without her realising? As the family gathers for the summer break, Rose's faith in Daniel is shaken. How well does she really know him?

When a young man washes up, naked, on the sands of St Piran, he is quickly rescued by the villagers. From the retired village doctor and the schoolteacher, to the beachcomber and the owner of the local bar, the priest's wife and the romantic novelist, they take this lost soul into their midst. But what the villagers don't know is that Joe Haak worked as an analyst and has fled the City amid fears of a worldwide banking collapse caused by a computer program he invented. But is the end of the world really nigh?

The aliens are here. And they want to help. The extraordinary new project from one of the country's most acclaimed and consistently brilliant SF novelists of the last 30 years. The Jackaroo have given humanity 15 worlds and the means to reach them. They're a chance to start over, but they're also littered with ruins and artifacts left by the Jackaroos' previous clients.

In the hilltop villa with its spectacular views across rolling countryside to the straits of Gibraltar, Lucy anxiously awaits the arrival of her brother and sister. They're spending the weekend together to say farewell to Casa de Sueños, the house in the mountains of Southern Spain where they grew up. Her sister, Jo, landing at the airport with her fractious four-year-old, dreads the prospect of this time with her family, fulfilling their mother's last instructions that they celebrate her birthday party together.