Showing titles in City Life

Phoebe Spencer left home a long time ago, desperate to get away from her mother's emotional manipulation. She knows her life is better away from her family, but she can’t help feeling she’s simply running away from her problems… Then Phoebe hears that her younger sister Lucy has disappeared, leaving behind her four-year old daughter, Darcy. Phoebe's certain Lucy will be back soon - she'd never leave Darcy alone - and then Phoebe can get on with her life again.

New to town and delusionally confident, Slide imagined himself living in a glossy building with doormen and sweeping views of the skyline. Instead he's landed in a creaking, stuffy apartment with two roommates: a loping giant who hardly leaves his room, and a weight-obsessed neurotic who keeps no fewer than forty-seven lamps throughout the house, blazing at all hours. Unwilling to accept this fate, Slide—a barber with an opaque past—embarks on a quest for the perfect apartment, pinballing through the sprawling, madcap city of Polis and its endless procession of neighborhoods.

Innocent Phoebe has only known a life of privilege. Street-smart Paula has had to make her own way in the world. When the two girls meet as teenagers, they form a deep sisterly bond, recognising in one other a yearning for love and for lives that are different from the ones into which they were born. But when they each suffer a personal trauma, they are torn apart and set out on very different paths.

The troubled and anxious of Tokyo are desperate to find out. They all have their problems - and they all want to believe that a temporary feline companion from a unique pet shop can help them find a solution. Or at least provide a few days' relief and distraction. But, like all their kind, the Blanket Cats are mysterious creatures with their own unknowable agendas, who delight in confounding expectations. And perhaps what their hosts are looking for isn't what they really need. Three days may not be enough to change your life. But it can be enough to change how you see it.

Greta Davies, the features editor at a women’s magazine, is accomplished and successful. That is, in all areas except her love life. Determined to help, Greta's boss - and friend - secretly enlists the help of the Ever After Agency, and sets out to make her dreams come true. Work-obsessed Greta is nothing if not stubborn, so it’ll take some creative thinking, which leads to a lightbulb moment: a new column focused on dating in the city. With date after disastrous date, things are not looking rosy for Greta. But little does Greta know, the perfect man has been there all along.

Thirteen-year-old Alice Truelove can’t take another day of her father’s cruelty. Better a life on the streets than being constantly blamed for her mother’s sad death, or that’s what Alice thinks as she packs up her meagre possessions. But fending for herself in the Black Country town of Wednesbury is not as easy as she expected, and it soon hits her that without help she will quickly be hungry and cold.

An order is issued. A population may not meet, or touch or speak to each other. They stay inside, and the reality of a few streets in a capital city emerges. An underground river is discovered; an urban grove of pomeloes emerges. The imagination reaches out, and makes sense of the world. By the sea, two men walk into a future of uncertain violence. There is time now to see the human dramas within a hundred yards; to wait for the weather to change; to understand that what lies underneath this part of the city are seasonally wet pastures and woodlands.

Life-long friends Louisa, Jeannie and Kate are following in the footsteps of their families, working at the Clarks shoe factory. But when Britain declares war on Germany, the Somerset village of Street is shaken to its core. The Clarks factory is at the heart of life in the village, but the Clark family are Quakers and pacifists. Before long, there are fierce debates amongst the workers and tensions between those who oppose the war and those who believe the village men should go to fight.

Rudy Sharpe is the irrepressible owner of a tiny, ramshackle record store, stacked from floor to ceiling with piles of vinyl. It’s a place with real soul, where the slogan is ‘If we don't have it – them don't mek it’. Helping out behind the counter is Tasha, Handsworth’s only Black goth girl, while Rudy’s best friend Clifton regularly drops in to talk music, women and rum.

Anna had never met anyone like Willow. Entering art school with lofty ideas about Art and her role in it, Anna was wholly unprepared for someone as mysterious, moody—and cool—as Willow. Here was Anna’s muse and collaborator all in one, ready to bring her in on Art’s great secrets. Now, five years later, Anna is weary. Where art school was boundless creativity and collaboration, the New York art scene is all about survival. Worse: Willow’s true nature as a muse only to herself has become nakedly apparent, as has her cruelty.

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.

Grand Life Apartments is a middle-class apartment block surrounded by lush gardens in the coastal city of Chennai, India. It is the home of Kamala, a pious, soon-to-be retired dentist who spends her days counting down to the annual visits from her daughter who is studying in the UK. Her neighbour, Revathi, is a thirty-two-year-old engineer who is frequently reminded by her mother that she has reached her expiry date in the arranged marriage market. Jason, a British chef, has impulsively moved to India to escape his recent heartbreak in London.

Three young brothers leave Los Angeles in the dead of night for Iran, taken by their father from their mother to a country and an ancestral home they barely recognize. They return to the Valley months later, spit back into American life and changed in inexorable ways. Under the California sun, our protagonist, the youngest brother, begins to piece together a childhood shattered by his father's violence, a queer adolescence marked by a shy, secret love affair with a boy he meets on the basketball court, and his ever-changing status as a Muslim in America.

After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother.

Sophy Stevens is moving to Australia. Turning thirty has found her unexpectedly out of a job, out of a relationship, and just in need of Something Different - and Australia, where she can finally meet her grandparents and surprise them on their wedding anniversary, looks like the perfect answer...if she can save up the money for the plane ticket. So when her feckless, absent dad Johnno offers her a job at his vintage clothes shop in Primrose Hill, she can't turn it down.

For as long as she can remember, Peppa Ryan has been guided by a benevolent voice in her head who she believes is Virginia Woolf. Though she’s an exceptionally bright twenty-year-old, she suffers from crippling low self-esteem and has barely left her parents’ ramshackle home in Queens, New York. Set at the turn of the millennium, Peppa defies her parent’s wishes and ventures out on her own to start a job at a Wall Street investment firm.

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?

Shani Akilah's stunning collection brings to life the stories of Black-British Londoners as they explore friendship and romance, community and independence, and navigate their way through the relationships that make them who they are.

Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood to see his novel be adapted for the screen, but why does he get the feeling that the film project is a smokescreen for something else? Does Cassidy Carter, the troubled starlet due to play the lead, know something he doesn’t? And what is the truth about WAT-R, the synthetic water everyone drinks in LA?

Lady Georgiana Pendlebury is no stranger to breaking the rules of polite society. But when a so-called ‘friend’ invites her to a clandestine party, Georgiana is shocked to discover the event is more scandalous than even she could have imagined. So when a mysterious stranger offers help, she accepts, not realising their encounter will turn her life upside down.