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What price tag would you put on a baby? Set in and around Glasgow, Buy Buy Baby is a moving and funny story of life, loss and longing. Packed full of bitchy banter, it follows the bittersweet quest of two very different women united by the same desire - they desperately want a baby. Carol talks to her dog, has an expensive eBay habit and relies on wine to forget she's no longer a mum following the death of her young son. Cheeky besom Julia is career-driven and appears to have it all. But after...

The Wrong Box is one of Stevenson's strangest works. Written with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, it is a masterpiece of black comedy, turning on mistaken identity, the disappearance of a corpse, and several makeshift coffins. The Finsbury family has long been involved in a Tontine - a scheme in which subscribers invest money in a fund which then falls to the last survivor. Now there are only two aged uncles between Morris and John Finsbury and their fortune. A railway accident appears to dispose of...

A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN TIME, EVENING STANDARD and METROWhen Tash, daughter of a Russian oligarch, is sent to an English boarding school, she is new to the strange rituals of the girls there. Theirs is a world of strict pecking orders, eating disorders and Instagram angst.While she spends her time with the other girls at the lake and the stables, a hand-picked few are invited to join the Headmaster at his house for extra lessons. Then her friend Bianca mysteriously vanishes, and quickly the routin...

Clare Thorpe's need for order and symmetry governs everything she owns - from tins and toiletries, to cushions and clothes. Yet she has always managed to hide the compulsions dominating her world. Until now. When long-distance boyfriend Tom proposes, her secret life begins to unravel. How can she share a future with the man she loves, if she can't even share her space? And when the only way forward brings a threat greater than any compulsive behaviour, do they have a future together at all? A po...

In 1869, Godwin Tudor, a young English photographer sets out to taste the classical beauty and exotic wilderness of Greece. Whilst in Athens, he encounters the charismatic and maverick British landowner Edgar Brooke, whose vast estate dominates Pyroxenia, an island north of Attica. Although Brooke is ill-mannered, has many political enemies and is branded a social outcast, Godwin is intrigued by him, and sets out to visit. Whilst staying there Godwin finds himself enchanted by the breathtaking l...

'We never should've gone up there . . .'One Sunday, nine-year-old Jess Hall watches in horror as his autistic brother is smothered during a healing service in the mountains of North Carolina.The unimaginable violence that follows must be untangled by a local sheriff with his own tragic past. A Land More Kind Than Home is a spellbinding, heartbreaking story about cruelty and innocence, and the failure of religion and family to protect a child. It is a novel thick with stories and characters c...

"Chart Throb" is the ultimate pop quest. Ninety five thousand hopefuls. Three judges. Just one winner. And that's Colin Simms, the genius behind the show. Colin always wins because Colin writes the rules. But this year, as he sits smugly in judgement upon the mingers, clingers and blingers whom he has pre-selected in his carefully scripted 'search' for a star, he has no idea that the rules are changing. The 'real' is about to be put back into 'reality' television and Colin and his fellow judges...

Glue is the story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh schemes, and about the loyalties, the experiences - and the secrets - that hold them together into their thirties. Four boys becoming men: Juice Terry, the work-shy fanny-merchant, with corkscrew curls and sticky fingers; Billy the boxer: driven, controlled, playing to his strengths; Carl, the Milky Bar Kid, drifting along to his own soundtrack; and the doomed Gally - who has one less skin than everyone else and seems to find catastrophe...

A middle-aged Jewish man who fantasizes about being a cowboy goes on an eccentric quest across Europe after the 1941 Nazi invasion of Lithuania in this wild and witty yet heartrending novel from the bestselling author of Yiddish for Pirates, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Motl is middle-aged, poor, nerdy, Jewish and in desperate need of a shave. Since having his balls shot cleanly off as a youth in WWI, he's lived a quiet life at home in Vilnius with his shrewd and shrewish mom, G...

Denis Hillier is an aging British agent on his last assignment. His old school friend Roper defected to the USSR long ago, to become one of the evil empire's great scientific minds. Hillier must persuade, or force, Roper to come back to England or risk losing his retirement fund. However, he hadn't foreseen the obstacles between him and his mark. Mr Theodorescu, a fellow passenger on board the ship to Hillier's target, and his companion Miss Devi, prove both irresistible and dangerous. This mor...

A boat has gone missing. Goods have been stolen. There is blood in the water. It is the twenty-first century and a crew of pirates is terrorizing the San Francisco Bay. Phil is a husband, a father, a struggling radio producer and the owner of a large condo with a view of the water. But he’d like to be a rebel and a fortune hunter. Gwen is his daughter. She’s fourteen. She’s a student, a swimmer and a best friend. But she’d like to be an adventurer and an outlaw. Phil teams up with his young,...

'Chalmers balances tragedy and comedy with the skill and poise of John Irving' IndependentTowards closing time in a London pub, Daniel Linnell has the idea of writing Who's Who In Hell: a mammoth compendium of the damned. Daniel is supported by his girlfriend Laura, a feisty American with aberrant instincts and a dangerous attraction to altitude, and by his boss Alexander Whittington, the maverick obituaries editor of a national newspaper. News of the book's publication precipitates a sequence o...

When a boy named Will meets Alice, he can't believe his luck. She's smart, sexy and, much to Will's surprise, in love with him. Alice brings meaning to his urban existence and his McJob. But the course of modern love did never run smooth and soon devotion leads Will to something darker. Elsewhere in the city Helen is an actress. Or she will be one day. For now she finds work as a model. She used to be called Clair, but she wants to be something new and she can be anyone. She's an actress, remem...

'There were many staff at Kensington, fulfilling many roles; a man who was employed to catch rats, another whose job it was to sweep the chimneys. That there was someone expected to hunt Demons did not shock the new Queen; that it was to be her was something of a surprise.'London, 1838. Queen Victoria is crowned; she receives the orb, the sceptre, and an arsenal of blood-stained weaponry. Because if Britain is about to become the greatest power of the age, there's the small matter of the demons...

Hank Devereaux, a fifty-year-old, one-time novelist now serving as temporary chair of the English department, has more than a mid-life crisis to contend with when he learns that he must cull 20 per cent of his department to meet budget. Half in love with three women, unable to understand his younger daughter or come to terms with his father, he has a dangerous philosophy that life, and academic life, could be simpler, but he fails to see the larger consequences of his own actions or of the small...