Showing results by publisher "Hodder & Stoughton" in Literary Fiction

The clock is ticking on Hollywood actress Edie O'Dare's contract with FWM Studios. Her acting career is going nowhere, and she's running out of time to find a new role in the industry - other than providing salacious details of the latest party or premiere to the press. So when an up-and-coming starlet hands her an explosive letter - alleging an assault by an A-list actor - Edie helps get the story into print, and buys herself a new career as Tinseltown's new reigning gossip columnist.

Christmas on Nantucket finds Winter Street Inn owner Kelley Quinn and his family busily preparing for the holiday season. Though the year has brought tragedy, the Quinns have much to celebrate: Kelley has reunited with his first wife, Margaret; Kevin and Isabelle have a new baby; and Ava is finally dating a nice guy. But when Kelley's wife, Mitzi, shows up on the island along with Kevin's devious ex-wife, Nora, and a dangerously irresistible old fling of Ava's, the inn is suddenly overrun with romantic feuds, not to mention guests.

She's only been gone two hours. Her husband, David, was meant to be looking after their two-week-old daughter. But when Alice Fancourt walks into the nursery, her terrifying ordeal begins, for Alice insists the baby in the cot is a stranger she's never seen before. With an increasingly hostile and menacing David swearing she must either be mad or lying, how can Alice make the police believe her before it's too late?

On May 30th, 1593, a celebrated young playwright was killed in a tavern brawl in London. That, at least, was the official version. Now let Christopher Marlowe tell you the truth: that his 'death' was an elaborate ruse to avoid his being hanged for heresy; that he was spirited across the channel to live on in lonely exile, longing for his true love and pining for the damp streets of London; that he continued to write plays and poetry, hiding behind the name of a colourless printer from Stratford - one William Shakespeare.

Driven by money, power and success, Gabriel has worked ruthlessly to get to the very top of the banking game. He's not going to let the inconvenience of a terminal brain tumour get in his way. But the tumour has other ideas. As it grows, it appears to be doing strange things to Gabriel's personality. Whether he likes it or not, he seems to be becoming less selfish, less mercenary, less unlikeable. Once he could dismiss the rest of humanity as irrelevant. Now he's not so sure.

With Glow, Ned Beauman has reinvented the international conspiracy thriller for a new generation. A hostage exchange outside a police station in Pakistan. A botched defection in an airport hotel in New Jersey. A test of loyalty at an abandoned resort in the Burmese jungle. A boy and a girl locking eyes at a rave in a South London laundrette... For the first time, Britain's most exciting young novelist turns his attention to the present day, as a conspiracy with global repercussions converges on one small flat above a dentist's office in Camberwell.

Iris Vegan, a graduate student living alone and impoverished in New York, encounters four strong characters who fascinate and in different ways subordinate her: an inscrutable urban recluse who employs her to record the possessions of a murdered woman; a photographer whose eerie portrait of Iris takes on a life of its own; an old woman in hospital who tries to claim a remnant of the ailing Iris; and a professor she has an affair with.

The year is 1831. Down the murky alleyways of London, acts of unspeakable wickedness are taking place, and no one is willing to speak out on behalf of the city's vulnerable poor as they disappear from the streets. Out of these shadows comes Hester White, a bright young woman who is desperate to escape the slums by any means possible. When Hester is thrust into the world of the aristocratic Brock family, she leaps at the chance to improve her station in life under the tutelage of the fiercely intelligent and mysterious Rebekah Brock.

Mark is going on the trip of a lifetime: a summer touring Europe in the pay of the travel company he works for. For his plus one, he turns to his idolised cousin, Paris. Everything Mark's not, Paris is a man of the world with a thirst for adventure - even his name is better than Mark's. But after a catastrophic argument, Mark finds himself setting off alone on his voyage, instead emailing an unresponsive Paris from the road.

Beneath the stars, on a stony beach, stand two brothers. They are wearing lifejackets that are too big for them and their most precious belongings are sealed in waterproof bags tucked inside the rucksacks on their backs. Turkey is behind them. Two or three kilometres' swim away is the Greek island of Samos, now only a smudge in the moonlight.

An extraordinary reimagining of the life of one of the greatest screen comedians the world has ever known: a man who knew both adoration and humiliation; who loved and was loved in turn; who betrayed and was betrayed; who never sought to cause pain to others yet left a trail of affairs and broken marriages in his wake...and whose life was ultimately defined by one relationship of such tenderness and devotion that only death could sever it: his partnership with the man he knew as Babe. he is Stan Laurel. But he did not really exist. Stan Laurel was a fiction.

John visits his ageing mother, Mary, in her nursing home by the sea, and mourns the slow fading of her mind. Hoping to shore up her receding memory, he prompts her with songs, photographs, and questions from their shared past, taking her back to the 1940s, when she was a young woman and he a child in a small Cumbrian town. But as he rekindles her memories, it is her own mother she longs for - and John finds himself delving further back, into the secrets and silences of Mary's fractured childhood, and the unsung sorrows of her thwarted yet spirited mother, Grace.

When Juliet Montague's husband disappears, so does she. As far as the conservative Jewish community in which she lives is concerned, she is invisible. She does her best to conform to their rules, but then on her thirtieth birthday she does something unexpected. Instead of the fridge she has scrimped for, she impulsively spends her savings on a portrait of herself.It is the first in a series of portraits that punctuate Juliet's adult life as she joins London's lively post-war art scene and proves to be an astute spotter of talent.

Argyll, 1998. Stories run deep in the MacArthur family, passed from generation to generation. Tales not just of selkies and changelings, but of the lives and deaths of the family themselves. Anna MacArthur has heard how her beautiful grandmother Netta boarded a ship for Canada after the war, leaving behind her young son Donnie, and was never seen again. Now, fifty years after her disappearance, Anna accidentally pulls a loose thread in the story of Netta's fate, causing the tale of her vanishing to unravel completely.

When Alex pulls up to meet 'Max', he expects everything but a 90-year-old lady who has her heart set on getting to Brussels by carpool. As for 'Max', who is actually called Maxine, she could not be more ill at ease when settling into the seat next to this young man with bloodshot eyes. When it becomes clear that Maxine is suffering from Alzheimer's and wants to take matters into her own hands while she still can, and that Alex battles severe depression, a wonderful friendship starts to form between the unlikely pair. Before long, their travel plans take an unexpected turn.

When a late life love affair blooms between Mr. Forrest Payne, the owner of the Pink Slipper Gentleman's Club, and Miss Beatrice Jordan, famous for yelling warnings of eternal damnation at the Club's departing patrons, their wedding summons a legend to town. Mr El Walker, the great guitar bluesman, comes home to give a command performance in Plainview, Indiana, a place he'd sworn never to set foot in again.

Iris, desperate to escape her unhappy marriage to her beautiful but controlling wife Claude, flees New York City for the remote Catskill Mountains. When she was a child, Iris and her father found solace in the beauty and wilderness of the forest, and now Iris needs time and space to clear her head and come to terms with the mistakes which have led her here. But what Iris doesn't expect in this journey of survival and self-discovery is to find herself - quite literally.

After an acclaimed career in ceramics making things and breaking things, it is now Jay herself who has cracked. Recovering from a breakdown, she and her husband, Simon, move to the desolate edges of the Yorkshire moors, where they find and fall in love with the Two Houses: a crumbling Victorian property whose central rooms were supposedly so haunted that a previous owner had them cut out from the building entirely.

For fans of The Help and The Invention of Wings, a searing and sweeping debut novel that gives a new and unforgettable perspective on modern-day domestic workers. Set in the blistering heat of Singapore, The Maid's Room follows the lives of two Filipina maids - sisters Dolly and Tala - who are working hard to send money back home and British expat Jules, who has left her job as a midwife to move to Singapore with husband David.

Just before D-Day in 1944, on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, an elderly woman walks into a police station. She has information, she says, about human remains recently discovered nearby. The bodies could have stayed buried for ever - like the pain and passion that put them there. But Mary Holmes is finally ready to tell the truth. The young constable sent to take her statement is still suffering from the injuries that ended his army career. As he tries to make sense of her tale, William finds himself increasingly distracted.