Showing titles in City Life

Charles lives in the testosterone-driven, high-powered, brutal world of investment banking. It is a world dominated by deals, bonuses, bravado, and savagery. Charles is a master of this world. Each day, he shrugs on a metaphorical suit of armour and goes out into a dog-eat-dog world to accumulate power and make money. He's a man who is familiar with casual brutality - his childhood saw to that.

In Lahore, Daru Shezad is a junior banker with a hashish habit. When his old friend Ozi moves back to Pakistan, Daru wants to be happy for him. Ozi has everything: a beautiful wife and child, an expensive foreign education - and a corrupt father who bankrolls his lavish lifestyle. As jealousy sets in, Daru's life slowly unravels. He loses his job. Starts lacing his joints with heroin. Becomes involved with a criminally minded rickshaw driver. And falls in love with Ozi's lonely wife. But how low can Daru sink? Is he guilty of the crime he finds himself on trial for?

Serena Mills should be at her wedding. Instead, she’s eating an ice cream sundae and drinking an obscenely large glass of wine in a Harvester off the M25. She’s left the man everyone told her she was ‘so lucky’ to find–because she’s realised that she wants to find love. Real love. So she sets herself a challenge: 52 weeks. 52 dates. 52 chances to find real love. But sometimes even the best laid plans don’t work out. And it’s the people that take you most by surprise who can really sweep you off your feet . . .

Zadie Smith's deeply funny, subversive and splendidly entertaining The Autograph Man is a whirlwind tour of celebrity and our fame-obsessed times. Following one Alex-Li Tandem - a 20-something, Chinese Jewish autograph dealer turned on by sex, drugs and organised religion - it takes in London and New York, love and death, fathers and sons, as Alex tries to discover how a piece of paper can bring him closer to his heart's desire. Exposing our misconceptions about our idols - about ourselves - Zadie Smith delivers a brilliant, unforgettable tale about who we are and what we really want to be.

Peggy could lose her beloved pub. Maggie her acclaimed restaurant. Maureen her business and her home. Everyone had something to lose. Whilst old friends try to come to terms with the shocking news, the younger generation continue to forge ahead in the swinging sixties. Relationships flourish and new opportunities blossom; the ever changing world becoming their oyster. But family bonds remain strong, after all, it's people that matter not the buildings.

Maria, a trans woman in her 30s, is going nowhere. She spends her aimless days working in a New York bookstore, trying to remain true to a punk ethos while drinking herself into a stupor and having a variety of listless and confusing sexual encounters. After her girlfriend cheats on her, Maria steals her car and heads for the Pacific, embarking on her version of the Great American Road Trip.

For 30-somethings Lindy, Ailbhe and Roe, the move to the new hyper-polished, luxury housing development, Monteray Valley, feels like slow death by Netflix, neighbourhood Whatsapp groups and Saturday nights in. Potential for exciting possibilities seem to be withering faster than you can say 'postnatal dryness' as their lives are consumed by other halves, domestic drudgery and obligations. Compiling a snag list to send to their builder sees the new friends contemplating their own personal snag lists and inspires a business idea that will change the course of all their lives.

Coco is having a hell of a month. She’s lost her boyfriend and her business, been forced to uproot her daughter to move back in with her parents in Paris, and now an infuriatingly handsome stranger is yelling at her for acting like a tourist… Right underneath the Eiffel Tower. Storming away from him – and swearing off men for life – she decides she’s going to take the first job that comes her way. Then, as if fate hears her, later that day she stumbles into a little bookshop – but not any old bookshop.

After a long and lonely silence from Cody Coleman, Bailey Flanigan begins to spend more and more time with her Hollywood co-star Brandon Paul. Nights on the town in New York City and long talks on the balcony of Brandon's Malibu Beach home make Bailey dizzy with new feelings and cause her to wonder if her days with Cody are over forever. Meanwhile, Cody's work coaching a small-town football team has brought him and his players national attention. In the midst of the celebration and success, Cody finds himself much closer to a woman who seems to better understand him and his new life.

From the internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies comes an exquisitely crafted work of fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri sets her gaze on the eternally beautiful city, illuminating the frailties of the human condition and dissecting lives lived on the margins.

Known for its luxury and discrete service, the Hotel Louis XVI in Paris has attracted an international clientele of the rich and famous for many decades. Now, after extensive renovation and under new management, an esteemed group of loyal returning guests is set to descend upon the hotel, joined by a group of new faces who have managed to secure coveted reservations. Anxiously awaiting the guests is the new manager, Olivier Bateau, and his assistant, Yvonne Philippe. Both strive to continue the hotel's tradition for excellence.

Ray Eke has always found peace in his job, collecting litter for the city council. Until the day he finds the brutalized, bloodless body of a girl on his round. He recognizes her immediately too. Lauren Pascoe went missing three years before. It’s also clear she hasn’t been lying on the roadside verge all this time. Someone’s clearly been holding her prisoner. Keeping her as their very special toy.

In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, Tamar Abadi's world collapses when her sister-in-law is killed in what appears to be a terror attack but what is really the result of a secret relationship with a Palestinian poet. Tamar's husband, Salim, is an Arab and a Jew. Torn between the two identities, and mourning his sister's death, he uproots the family and moves them to the US.

I know all about guys like Cullen Hunt. Gorgeous. Wealthy. Powerful. I just fled New York to escape one. But when I reach Colorado, it’s either take a job at Cullen’s Trident Rescue or become homeless. And Cullen? He’s worse than I thought. Controlling. Demanding. Jerk. A grenade always teetering on the edge. He’s also hot as sin and makes my toes curl. I hate that I dream about him. Kissing me, holding me. He has dreams as well. Nightmares that only I can tame. I know all about guys like Cullen Hunt. I’m smart enough to stay away. Aren’t I?

It's the turn of the millennium and, landing in London with nothing but her CD collection and demo tape, Orla Quinn moves into a squalid Kilburn house with her best mate and a band called Shiva. Orla wants to make music, but juggling two jobs and partying every night isn't helping. Back in Ireland her parents' marriage has crumbled, she's not speaking to her father, and her mother and sister are drinking too much.

Sophie and Tom first visited Paris together as students. During their weekend away in the world’s most romantic city, falling in love – with the place, and each other – was simply inevitable. They resolved to return every summer and kept their word, until something happened that changed their world forever.

It is 1968, and Frederica Potter is surprised to find herself embarking on a new career in television. While she endeavours to navigate this fast-paced and occasionally bewildering industry, her lover John takes up a post working with a pair of unusual scientists. Yet in Frederica’s home county of Yorkshire, tumultuous events are unfolding. Soon her future, and that of the people closest to her, begins to look rather different.

In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a Black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.

Jade isn't even my real name. Jade began as my Starbucks name, because all children of immigrants have a Starbucks name. Jade has done all the right things. She's curated herself to fit right in at her law firm, but tells herself she has no choice. She's with a man who loves her, but isn't always herself around him. She's made her Omma and Baba proud, but resents that they can't properly understand her. Jade is perfectly in control of her life. Until one terrible night unravels Jade's carefully constructed world, leaving her wondering who she truly is.

Damani is tired. Every day she cares for her mom, drives ride shares to pay the bills and is angry at a world that promised her more before spitting her out. That is until the summer she meets Jolene and life opens up. Jolene seems like she could be the perfect girlfriend—attentive, attractive, liberal—and their chemistry feels genuine. So maybe Damani can look past the one thing that's holding her back: Jolene is white. But Jolene really doesn't seem like one of the bad ones—she's done the reading, she goes to every protest, she even listens.