Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Literature & Fiction

An over-achieving teenager in New York City, Luna Johnson, accidentally becomes a medium and starts to crack from seeing ghosts everywhere.

The hilarious, heartbreaking novel by the author of the international best seller A Man Called Ove. Granny has been telling fairy tales for as long as Elsa can remember. In the beginning they were only to make Elsa go to sleep, to get her to practise Granny's secret language, and a little because Granny is just about as nutty as a granny should be. But lately the stories have another dimension as well. Something Elsa can't quite put her finger on....

After five long years of waiting for a new novel, Dawn’s millions of fans will fall in love with this tantalising story of motherhood. This is a story about mothers and daughters, love and loss, mistakes and regret. It’s a story about nature and nurture. Ultimately, it’s a story about what makes us who we are - it is a story for all of us.

Andy's story wasn't meant to turn out this way. Living out of a suitcase in his best friends' spare room, waiting for his career as a stand-up comedian to finally take off, he struggles to process the life-ruining end of his relationship with the only woman he's ever truly loved. As he tries to solve the seemingly unsolvable mystery of his broken relationship, he contends with career catastrophe, social media paranoia, a rapidly dwindling friendship group and the growing suspicion that, at 35, he really should have figured this all out by now.

Retired schoolteachers Liz, Pat and Thelma never expected they would be caught up in a crime even once in their lives, let alone twice. But when poison pen letters start landing on the doorsteps of friends and neighbours in their Yorkshire village, old secrets come to light. With the potential for deadly consequences. It won’t be long until the three friends are out on a case yet again.

Is it possible to write a sidesplitting novel about the breakup of the perfect marriage? If the writer is Nora Ephron, the answer is a resounding yes. For in this inspired confection of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast, the creator of Sleepless in Seattle reminds us that comedy depends on anguish as surely as a proper gravy depends on flour and butter.

Meet Clare Barker, the social worker who likes nothing more than sorting out other people's problems (while failing to deal with her own). Wracked with guilt over being white, middle-class and heterosexual, she has a dedicated social conscience (unless it's inconvenient for her) and lives to interfere in other people's lives—both on a personal and professional basis. Bearing the brunt of her control freakery and lack of self-awareness are her family, colleagues and long-suffering teacher partner, Brian—all of whom have their own frustrations, disappointments and dramas.

The first novel from the award-winning, best-selling author of Everything I Know About Love. Thirty-two-year-old Nina Dean is a successful food writer with a loyal online following but a life that is falling apart. When she uses dating apps for the first time, she becomes a victim of ghosting and by the most beguiling of men. Her beloved dad is vanishing in slow motion into dementia, and she's starting to think about ageing and the gendered double-standard of the biological clock.

Meet Ava: rule-abiding lawyer who has ticked all of life’s boxes. She’s married to a successful surgeon and has just taken an indefinite career break to raise her adorable toddler. A picture-perfect life. Meet Winnie: Ava’s old college roommate. Once awkward, quiet and apparently academically challenged, she left Stanford in a shroud of scandal. But now, she is charismatic, wealthy and has returned to town dripping in designer accessories. An actual perfect life. When the two women bump into one another at a local coffee shop, it seems like fate has intervened.

Les is quite happy resting up after the flu when Warren has to tip him into an earn. Norton's mate from the Albanian Mafia, Bodene Menjou, is planning to make the most politically correct movie ever made in Australia, Gone With the Willy Willy, and has a script stolen. If Les can find it, a lazy $50,000 could fall in. How can Norton say no?

Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonnegut's literary reputation.

Rue Siebert might not have it all, but she has enough: a few friends she can always count on, the financial stability she yearned for as a kid, and a successful career as a biotech engineer at Kline, one of the most promising start-ups in the field of food science. Her world is stable, pleasant, and hard-fought. Until a hostile takeover and its offensively attractive front man threatens to bring it all crumbling down. Eli Killgore and his business partners want Kline, period.

Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days.

Frederick Fife was born with an extra helping of kindness in his heart. If he borrowed your car he'd return it washed and polished, with a full tank of petrol. The problem is, he has no one left to borrow from. At 82 he's desperately lonely, broke and on the brink of homelessness. But Fred's luck changes when, in a bizarre case of mistaken identity, he takes the place of cranky Bernard Greer at Wattle River Nursing Home. Suddenly he has a roof over his head, warm meals in his belly and, most importantly, the chance to be part of a family again.

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.

When Jonathon Fairfax accidentally helps a murderer bump off Sarah Morecambe, the secretary of a senior politician, he sets off a chain of events that astonishes him. Jonathon is wrong-footed by even the most everyday things, so he's particularly startled to find himself caught up in a conspiracy that goes right to the heart of government. Teaming up with a suave private investigator, a glamorous granny and the probable love of his life, Jonathon must confront his greatest fears - including talking to girls and balaclava-clad killers - and answer some very difficult questions.

In David Sedaris' world, no one is safe and no cow is sacred. A manic cross between Mark Leyner, Fran Lebowitz, and the National Enquirer, Sedaris' collection of essays is a rollicking tour through the national Zeitgeist: a do-it-yourself suburban dad saves money by performing home surgery; a man who is loved too much flees the heavyweight champion of the world; a teenage suicide tries to incite a lynch mob at her funeral; a bitter Santa abuses the elves.

The art of love is never a science.: Meet Don Tillman, a brilliant yet socially inept professor of genetics, who’s decided it’s time he found a wife. In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs The Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a 16-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers. Yet, Rosie Jarman possesses all these qualities and. Don easily disqualifies her as a suitable candidate (even if she is "quite intelligent for a barmaid").

Joe Goldberg is done with cities, done with the muck and the posers, done with Love. Now, he's saying hello to nature, to simple pleasures on a cosy island in the Pacific Northwest. For the first time in a long time, he can just breathe. He gets a job at the local library—he does know a thing or two about books—and that's where he meets her: Mary Kay DiMarco. Librarian.

When academic Nadia is disowned by her puritanical mother and dumped by her lover, she decides to make a getaway - accepting a UN job in Iraq. Tasked with rehabilitating ISIS women, Nadia becomes mired in the opaque world of international aid, surrounded by bumbling colleagues. But then Nadia meets Sara, a precocious and sweary East Londoner who joined ISIS at just fifteen, and she is struck by how similar their stories are. Both from a Muslim background, both feisty and opinionated, with a shared love of Dairy Milk and rude pick-up lines, Sara and Nadia immediately connect.