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

The Battle of the Lost Eagle saved Hadrian's Wall, but the new Roman governor of Britannia must stamp out the rebellion of the northern tribes or risk losing the province. Rampaging south with sword and flame under the command of their murderous chieftain Calgus, they have stretched his forces to the limit. For Marcus - now simply Centurion Corvus of the 1st Tungrian cohort - the campaign has become doubly dangerous.

Artist's daughter Penelope Keeling can look back on a full and varied life: a Bohemian childhood in London and Cornwall, an unhappy wartime marriage, and the one man she truly loved. She has brought up three children - and learned to accept them as they are. Yet she is far too energetic and independent to settle sweetly into pensioned-off old age.

Cloud Atlas features six characters in interlocking stories, each interrupting the one before it: a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified dinery server on death row; and Zachry, a young Pacific islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation.

Ove is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He isn't as young as he used to be. He drives a Saab. He points at people he doesn't like the look of. He is described by those around his as 'the neighbour from hell'.Every morning he makes his inspection rounds of the local streets. He moves bicycles and checks the contents of recycling bins, even though it's been years since he was fired as Chairman of the Residents' Association in a vicious 'coup d'état'.

The Center for women's reproductive health offers a last chance at hope - but nobody ends up there by choice. Its very existence is controversial, and to the demonstrators who barricade the building every day, the service it offers is no different from legalised murder. Now life and death decisions are being made horrifyingly real: a lone protester with a gun has taken the staff, patients and visitors hostage.

Olivia fled her abusive marriage to return to her hometown and take over the family beekeeping business when her son was six. Now Asher is more than six feet tall and in his last year of high school, a kind, good-looking, popular ice hockey star with a tiny sprite of a new girlfriend whom Olivia loves. Then Lily is found with a catastrophic head injury at the bottom of the stairs—and Asher is arrested on a charge of murder. What was the truth of their relationship?

The new audiobook from number one best-selling author Jodi Picoult, with the biggest of themes: birth, death, and responsibility. When a newborn baby dies after a routine hospital procedure, there is no doubt about who will be held responsible: the nurse who had been banned from looking after him by his father. What the nurse, her lawyer and the father of the child cannot know is how this death will irrevocably change all of their lives, in ways both expected and not.

In an isolated house on the New South Wales coast, Ruth - a widow whose sons work abroad - lives alone. Until one day a stranger bowls up, announcing that she's been sent by the authorities to be Ruth's carer. At first, Ruth is happy to have the company. Frida is efficient and helpful, and willing to listen to Ruth's stories about her childhood in Fiji and the man she fell for there. But why does Ruth hear a tiger prowling through the house at night? How far can Ruth trust this enigmatic woman? And how far can she trust herself?

Can you ever re-create that first great love? Victoria Bradshaw fell in love with London playwright Oliver Dobbs when she was just 18. But he left her and disappeared from her life. Now, years later, he is a widower standing on her doorstep with his two-year-old son in his arms. And Victoria is foolish enough to want to take him back. Their early spring journey to a castle in Scotland becomes an odyssey of emotional discovery....

Written by Naoki Higishida when he was only 13, this remarkable book explains the often baffling behaviour of autistic children and shows the way they think and feel - about the people around them, time and beauty, noise, and themselves. Naoki abundantly proves that autistic people do possess imagination, humour and empathy, but also makes clear, with great poignancy, how badly they need our compassion, patience and understanding.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who lost his mother.... As twelve-year-old David takes refuge from his grief in the myths and fairytales so beloved of his dead mother, he finds the real world and the fantasy world begin to blend. That is when bad things start to happen. That is when the Crooked Man comes. And David is violently propelled into a land populated by heroes, wolves, and monsters, and begins his quest to find the legendary Book of Lost Things.

Life is lived according to The Rulebook and social hierarchy is determined by your perception of colour. Eddie Russett is an above average Red who dreams of moving up the ladder by marriage to Constance Oxblood. Until he is sent to the Outer Fringes where he meets Jane - a lowly Grey with an uncontrollable temper and a desire to see him killed. For Eddie, it's love at first sight. But his infatuation will lead him to discover that all is not as it seems in a world where everything that looks black and white is really shades of grey.

Artist Harriet Burden, consumed by fury at the lack of recognition she has received from the New York art establishment, embarks on an experiment: she hides her identity behind three male fronts who exhibit her work as their own. And yet, even after she has unmasked herself, there are those who refuse to believe she is the woman behind the men.

1910. With the disappearance of her mother and the sudden death of her father, Lena instantly loses any security she has within the circus she has known all her life. She is advised to sell the carousel her father cared for like a child and look for a husband, or a job in a factory. Until flame-haired Violet, known to all in the fairgrounds as 'the greatest trapeze artist that ever lived', suggests they go it alone with their own, all-female act. With her outspoken ways and her refusal to marry, Violet is as much an outcast as Lena. What do they have to lose?

Emma Litton can't get on with her life until she finds out just what place she has in her father's heart. She'd been at school in Europe since she was 14, then found a job in Paris, always wondering what her famous artist father was doing in Japan or America or at their cottage in Cornwall. Even after she meets Robert Morrow, a handsome gallery owner, and rediscovers her stepbrother, Christo, she still feels compelled to probe into the truth about her past.

We don't want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. The story starts there, but the book doesn't. And it's what happens afterwards that is most important. Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

France is mired in a losing war against England. Its people are starving. Its king is in hiding. And out of the chaos, an unlikely heroine is emerging. Reckless, steel-willed and brilliant, Joan has survived a childhood steeped in both joy and violence to claim an extraordinary—and fragile—position at the head of the French army. The battlefield and the royal court are full of dangers alike, and Joan finds herself under suspicion from all sides—as well as under threat from her own ambition.

Natural-born healer Emma Starling once had big plans for her life, but she's lost her way. A medical school dropout, she's come back to small-town Everton, New Hampshire, to care for her father, who is dying from a mysterious brain disease. Clive Starling has been hallucinating small animals, as well as having visions of the ghost of a long-dead naturalist, Ernest Harold Baynes, once known for letting wild animals live in his house. This ghost has been giving Clive some ideas on how to spend his final days.

Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it. At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.

Japanese-occupied Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara's children are in terrible danger. Her eldest child Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day. Jasmin, the youngest, lives confined in a basement for her own safety. And her son, Abel, has disappeared without a trace. Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the truth.