Showing results by publisher "----RM Alexander" in Contemporary Fiction

When Mina receives an urgent call from her best friend back in Melbourne, her world is turned upside down. Her reclusive mother, Elaine, has left the house for the first time in 12 years. Mina drops everything to fly home, only to discover that Elaine will not talk about her sudden return to the world, nor why she's spent so much time hiding from it. Their reunion leaves Mina raking through pieces of their painful past in a bid to uncover the truth.

Iris Turner, an unworldly young Englishwoman, arrives in the French Riviera to take up a secretarial role for the mysterious Hammond Brooke. Living in a small, exclusive hotel among eccentric and unpredictable aristocrats and struggling to gain her employer's trust, she soon realises that nothing is as it seems. Initiated into the mysterious world of perfume, she finds herself entangled in a web of intrigue and deception.

Birgit ist zu Kaspar in den Westen geflohen, für die Liebe und die Freiheit. Erst nach ihrem Tod entdeckt er, welchen Preis sie dafür bezahlt hat. Er spürt ihrem Geheimnis nach, begegnet im Osten den Menschen, die für sie zählten, erlebt ihre Bedrückung und ihren Eigensinn. Seine Suche führt ihn zu einer völkischen Gemeinschaft auf dem Land - und zu einem jungen Mädchen, das in ihm den Großvater und in dem er die Enkelin sieht. Ihre Welten könnten nicht fremder sein. Er ringt um sie.

Khadija is packing up her home of fifty years. In her box of special belongings are the last reminders she has of her son Ahmed, missing for more than twenty years. Her belongings take her back to her village childhood, her marriage and move to Marrakesh, and the birth of Ahmed when she was just thirteen.

For two young brothers, a hidden cave a short walk from the family farm seems the perfect escape from their abusive, shell-shocked father — until the older brother goes missing. Fearful of his father, nine-year-old Kip lies about what happened. It is a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

A new, exclusive straight-to-digital Temperance Brennan short story from Kathy Reichs, world leading forensic anthropologist and number-one best-selling author of Deja Dead, Bones Are Forever and Bones of the Lost. Forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan has just arrived in Florida's Everglades for a much-needed break when she is unwittingly thrown into the middle of a deadly case with its roots in the darkest depths of the swamp.

Now a major film written and directed by the Coen Brothers. There is no knowing what lies in a man's heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by Torn Chancy, who shoots him down for a horse, $150 cash, and two gold pieces. Ross's single-minded teenage daughter, Mattie, travels to claim his body... Then she meets Rooster - a man with grit - and persuades him to join her on a deadly quest to avenge her father's murder.

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. A Guardian Fiction Book of the year. Sometimes discovery brings destruction. "When We Cease to Understand the World" shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness.

The BookWorld's leading enforcement officer Thursday Next is four months into an enforced semi-retirement following an assassination attempt. She returns home to Swindon for what you'd expect to be a time of recuperation. If only life were that simple.

In the second novel in the Pop Larkin series, the Larkin family descends upon Brittany in France. Like fish out of water, they find that things don't quite turn out their way: The weather is less than ideal, the food is awful, and the hotel is in a bad state of repair. But things slowly improve as Pop manages to sweet-talk Mlle Dupont, Angela Snow and her sister, Iris; and Charley and Mariette celebrate their first wedding anniversary. A Breath of French Air is a delightful book full of nostalgia, fun, and frivolity.

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J R R Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations.

Everything is changing in Rossmore. No longer a sleepy Irish town where the young people leave to travel the world, nowadays it's a prosperous place, so busy that a new bypass has been proposed. The people of Rossmore are divided, particularly since the road will go right through the Whitethorn Woods and the well dedicated to St Ann - a well thought by some to have near-spiritual properties, and by others dismissed as a superstition.

One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood’s Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea. Staying with Dulcie, Robert’s life opens into one of rich food, sea swimming, sunburn and poetry.

Born into the lowest class of her society, Flora 717 is a sanitation bee, only fit to clean her orchard hive. Living to accept, obey and serve, she is prepared to sacrifice everything for her beloved holy mother, the Queen. But Flora is not like other bees. Despite her ugliness she has talents that are not typical of her kin. While mutant bees are usually instantly destroyed, Flora is removed from sanitation duty and is allowed to feed the newborns, before becoming a forager, collecting pollen on the wing. She also finds her way into the Queen's inner sanctum, where she discovers secrets both sublime and ominous.

This is... Denise. Married to Ray, her first and only love, Denise has never, for one moment, regretted putting the husband she idolised on a pedestal above everyone and everything else. But, after forty years of marriage, he is gone, leaving Denise to discover that their perfect marriage was fatally flawed. Now she faces a future alone. But first, she must face the betrayals of the past. This is... Claire. The estranged daughter of Denise, the woman who put her husband before her children, Claire took the opposite path and devoted her life to raising her family, sacrificing.

At nearly 90, retired nature writer Hattie Bloom prefers the company of birds to people, but when a fall lands her in a nursing home, she struggles to cope with the loss of independence and privacy. From the confines of her 'room with a view' of the carpark, she dreams of escape. A fellow 'inmate', the gregarious would-be comedian Walter Clements, also plans on returning home as soon as he is fit and able to take charge of his mobility scooter.

A young Australian woman leaves Sydney for a new world, Guyana, South America. Captivated by Guyana's wild, unspoiled beauty, Madison Wright joins the native Amerindians struggling to preserve their culture against corporate exploitation. But her new-found commitment soon plunges Madison into a mire of murder, drug smuggling and political corruption, and finally, an unexpected love that pits her heart against her beliefs.

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?

For more than three decades Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture...from a groundbreaking newspaper serial, to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of six novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales of the City is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

In the lucrative world of Wall Street finance, Vincent, Jules, Sylvie and Sam are the ultimate high-flyers. Ruthlessly ambitious, they make billion-dollar deals and live lives of outrageous luxury. Getting rich is all that matters, and they'll do anything to get ahead.When the four of them become trapped in an elevator escape room, things start to go horribly wrong. They have to put aside their fierce office rivalries and work together to solve the clues that will release them. But in the confines of the elevator the dark secrets of their team are laid bare.