Showing titles in Literature & Fiction

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her.

After Hannah Atkins, the magazine world’s most unlikely beauty editor, is dumped for the local TV weather girl, she adopts some hardcore rules to attain the perfect life. She will learn how to blend her eye makeup so she doesn’t resemble an over-emotional beauty queen. She will triumph over the catty mag-hags waiting to see her trip in her new-season Jimmy Choos. She will not drunkenly disgrace herself at achingly hip PR launches. She will not accidentally go home with inappropriate men. And she absolutely will not fall in love with one of them....

Finlay Donovan - single mum, floundering crime writer and accidental hit-woman - is, once again, struggling to finish her crime novel. Ever since someone misinterpreted her talking about her new book, she has been busier than ever working as a hit-woman and taking on the life she usually reserves for her characters. On the bright side, the only dead body she's dealt with lately is that of her daughter's pet goldfish. On the not-so-bright side, someone wants her ex-husband dead.

A Signature Performance: Four-time Emmy Award winner David Hyde Pierce delivers an air of lovable self-importance in his rendition of the classic social satire that remains as fresh today as the day it was published.

Outside Los Angeles, a driver pulls up to find a young woman sitting on a large black box. She offers him $200,000 cash to transport her and that box across the country, to Washington, DC. But there are rules: He cannot look inside the box. He cannot ask questions. He cannot tell anyone. They must leave immediately. He must leave all trackable devices behind. As these eccentric misfits hit the road, rumors spread on social media that the box is part of a carefully orchestrated terror attack intended to plunge the USA into civil war.

Meet Grace Bernard. Daughter, sister, colleague, friend, serial killer. Grace has lost everything. And now she wants revenge.

The Marjorie Marshall Memorial Cafeteria has been serving refreshments and raising money at the hospital for over 50 years, long after anybody can remember who Marjorie Marshall actually was. Staffed by successive generations of dedicated volunteers, the beloved cafeteria is known as much for offering a kind word and sympathetic ear (and often unsolicited life advice) as for its tea and buns.

Arbuthnot ‘Arbie’ Swift arrives at Dashwood House, a glamorously modern hotel in the up-and-coming resort of Galton-next-the-Sea, but all plans for a relaxing stay are scuppered when one of the guests is found dead. The body is found in the writing room, the victim part of a set visiting the seaside town for an engagement party, which happens to include Arbie’s old friend, Val. Familiar with Val and Arbie’s previous experience in solving puzzling crimes, the bride asks the pair to investigate.

In the second installment in the best-selling Detective Varg series, Ulf and his team investigate a notorious philanderer - a wolf of a man whose bad reputation may be all bark and no bite.

A great Australian yarn about a bold Australian outback adventure belonging to another time in another world, inspired by a true story. The happy routine life of two Perth boys is shattered one November day in 1950 when they are falsely accused of theft. With fabricated evidence mounting against them they decide to run away from their homes and families to avoid prosecution and pooling their meager pocket money they back the winner of the Melbourne Cup and fund an escape.

They're a Weird Mob chronicles the hilarious attempts of an English-speaking Italian migrant coming to grips with the Australian way of life. It is also an insight into the importance of idiomatic language to the Australian people.

Four classic episodes from the original TV series: Arrival, Songs of Praise, Easter Special and The Christmas Lunch Incident. Welcome to Dibley, a perfect village full of some perfectly peculiar people - including Alice Tinker and her underactive brain, Owen Newitt and his overactive bowels, and Letitia Cropley and her orange cake with Branston pickle icing.

Bunny McGarry is back – and he’d really like a nice holiday. Somewhere with hot weather and cold drinks that come with little umbrellas for reasons he never understood. A certain nun has other ideas though and instead, he finds himself dispatched to London to find Sean Malone, a runaway teenager who doesn’t know his mother hasn’t got long left to live. The only leads Bunny has are a last-known address for the deadbeat dad Sean had gone in search of, and some letters the teenager had sent to his mum, one of which included a picture of him with the current heavyweight champion of the world.

Bertie Wooster has taken up the banjolele, but the manager of the building in central London has issued an ultimatum to either give up the music or clear out. Even the faithful Jeeves threatens to leave, so Bertie seeks refuge in the country.

If we were as tiny as ants to another being, what would they make of our philosophies? The great satirist Voltaire imagines alien visitors who have opinions. Bedtime stories are narrated by the world's most celebrated voices and written with no beginning, middle, or end so you don't stay up to hear what happens next. They're interesting enough to give your mind something to focus on, but delivered in a way that encourages sleep.

Twenty years ago, Carly Cooper went on an epic quest to track down all the men she’d ever loved and lost in the hope that one of them was her Mr Right. Now, two decades and two teenage sons later, she thinks she might have got it all wrong. As the years have passed, lots of things have changed, leaving Carly asking, ‘What now?’ With a divorce and an empty nest on the horizon, Carly sets off once more to Los Angeles with her band of trusty girlfriends, to find the carefree, wild and adventurous Carly Cooper that she used to be.

Grace Williams and Elliot Dowd meet for a blind date arranged by Connector Magazine’s ‘Match-Ups’ feature, a popular free mag flung in to the hands of commuters at tube stations. They both arrive with good intentions but the date quickly turns sour due to a series of hilarious mishaps...the date is deemed a disaster, and neither Grace not Elliot want to see each other ever again.

Frank is a miserable old curmudgeon. An agoraphobic recluse and widower whose only company is the 'ghost' of his wife, Marcie. He is estranged from friends and family and is entirely cut off from the rest of the world. That is until he meets Red. Red is six years old. He's a funny, imaginative, and kind little boy who - following the separation of his parents - moves in next door. Red is fascinated by his new neighbour and seemingly oblivious to Frank's grumpy demeanour and strange ways.

Meet Aisling. She's a country girl learning to love the city sophistication of unlimited Pinot Greej and brunch, though smashed avocado still mystifies her. She can plan anything, from Secret Santa for her ungrateful colleagues to a hen party for not one but two brides. But even Aisling is thrown off course when her job and relationship suddenly go up in smoke. Life in the city was supposed to be glamorous and grown-up, but all at once she's heading home to live with her mother. (Not without a detour to Vegas first - she's unemployed and single, not dead.)

As Constantinople is being pillaged and burned in April 1204, a young man, Baudolino, manages to save a historian and a high court official from certain death at the hands of crusading warriors. Born a simple peasant, Baudolino has two gifts: his ability to learn languages and to lie. A young man, he is adopted by a foreign commander who sends him to university in Paris. After he allies with a group of fearless and adventurous fellow students, they go in search of a vast kingdom to the East.