Showing titles in Genre Fiction

'Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen.' A saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance, Tipping the Velvet follows the glittering career of Nan King - oyster girl turned music-hall star turned rent boy turned East End 'tom'.

Ted Ainsworth has always worked at his family's ice cream business in the quiet Lancashire town of St Luke's-on-Sea. He doesn't even like ice cream, though he's never told his parents that. When Ted's husband suddenly leaves him, the bottom falls out of his world. But what if this could be an opportunity to put what he wants first? This could be the chance to finally follow his secret dream: something Ted has never told anyone.

When Zoe Stamper, specialist in Ancient Greek Tragedy, meets fellow academic Dr Penny Cartwright at a faculty music recital, she seems impossibly glamorous to Zoe, who is, after all, several rungs down the academic pecking order - and a nervous ingénue as far as Penny’s sophisticated circle is concerned. But Penny leaves Zoe a cryptic note, and a passionate affair ensues . . .

Stuck in a dead-end job, broken-hearted, broke and estranged from her best friend, Violet's life is nothing like she thought it would be. She wants more - better friends, better sex, a better job - and she wants it now. So, when Lottie - who looks like the woman Violet wants to be when she grows up - offers Violet the chance to join her exciting start-up, she bites. Only it soon becomes clear that Lottie and her husband, Simon, are not only inviting Violet into their company, they are also inviting her into their lives.

In the house on Violin Road he found the bodies of his brother, his mother, and the man who killed them both-his father. From the house on Violin Road, in Missing Mile, North Carolina, Trevor McGee ran for his sanity and his soul, after his famous cartoonist father had exploded inexplicably into murder and suicide. Now Trevor is back. In the company of a New Orleans computer hacker on the run from the law, Trevor has returned to face the ghosts that still live on Violin Road, to find the demons that drove his father to murder his family-and worse, to spare one of his sons. But as Trevor begins to draw his own cartoon strip, he loses himself in a haze of lines and art and thoughts of the past, the haunting begins. Trevor and his lover plunge into a cyber-maze of cartoons, ghosts, and terror that will lead either to understanding-true understanding-or to a blood-raining repetition of the past.

After Sappho is Selby Wynn Schwartz's joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th century as they battle for control over their lives; for liberation and for justice. Sarah Bernhard—Colette—Eleanora Duse—Lina Poletti—Josephine Baker—Virginia Woolf... these are just a few of the women (some famous, others hitherto unsung) sharing the minutes of a novel as fierce as it is luminous—lush and poetic; furious and funny.

In 1883, Thaniel Steepleton returns to his tiny flat to find a gold pocket watch on his pillow. When the watch saves Thaniel’s life in a blast that destroys Scotland Yard, he goes in search of its maker, Keita Mori—a kind, lonely Japanese immigrant. Meanwhile, Grace Carrow is sneaking into an Oxford library, desperate to prove the existence of the luminiferous ether before her mother can force her to marry. As the lives of these three characters become entwined, events spiral out of control until Thaniel is torn between loyalties, futures and opposing geniuses.

Grace has what one might call a 'full and interesting life', which is code for not married and has no kids. Her life is the envy of her straight friends, but all this time she has been waiting in secret for love to hit her so hard that she would run out of breath, like the way a wave in a rough sea bowls you over, slams you into the sand and nearly drowns you.

Charlie Matthews’ love story begins in a pebble-dashed house in suburban Bolton, at a time when most little boys want to grow up to be Michael Jackson, and girls want to be Princess Di. Remembering the Green Cross Code and getting out of football are the most important things in his life until Auntie Jan gives him a gift that will last a lifetime: a seven-inch single called "Lucky Star"....

It's 1984 in The Valleys, South Wales, and Eluned Hughes is stuck. The miners' strikes are ravaging her family and community, and her boyfriend of six years, Lloyd, is starting to bring up marriage more than she would like. She spends her days selling shoes, listening to Madonna, and trying to hold it all together. Meanwhile, Eluned's clever and precocious little sister, Mabli, thinks she knows it all. Mabli takes her older, moneyed, Thatcherite, policeman boyfriend, Graham, as the ticket out of her working class reality.

Ellen is tired of being overshadowed at work. Tired of watching less competent, entitled suits take the promotions she’s earned. But when one of them pushes her too far, things take a murderous turn. And it turns out the darker Ellen goes, the shinier her future starts to look. Business can be murder, but it turns out murder can also be good business for Ellen.

Driven by the glory he'll earn from the Royal Horticultural Society for such an achievement, Gregor ignores the flaws in his plan: that intelligence cannot be controlled; that plants cannot be reasoned with; and that the only way his plant-beast will flourish is if he uses a recently deceased corpse for the substrate. The experiment-or Chloe, as she is named-outstrips even Gregor's expectations, entangling their strange household. But as Gregor's experiment flourishes, he wilts under the cost of keeping it hidden from jealous eyes.

Mae and Ari are not your average power couple. Their love story started when they met at Leeds University. Back when Mae, whilst never short of a date and confident about who she is at her core, needed Ari's bright light to help her grow into herself. Ari, having run from New York following an undisclosed scandal and battling his own demons, held onto Mae as his grounding anchor. Though they quickly become inseparable, their inimitable bond must survive guilt, secrets, growing up and, ultimately, love in all its complex and fluid forms.

First, there were the flamingos. And then there were two families. Sherry and Leslie and their daughters, Rae and Pauline - and Eve and her son, Daniel. Sherry loves her husband, Leslie. She also loves Eve. It couldn't have been a happier summer. But then Eve left, and everything went grey. Now Daniel is all grown up and broken. And when he turns up at Sherry's door, it's almost as if they've all come home again. But there's still one missing. Where is Eve? And what, exactly, is her story?

Welcome back to Pride High, where the delicious drama continues! Ricky tries to sort through his feelings for Diego—the hot guy who has been bullying him—and ends up in the middle of a feud. Anthony and Cameron, now a couple, must navigate first times and coming out. Silvia finds herself questioning her feelings for Omar when someone else catches her eye…and it’s a girl.

Brian, an aimless slacker, works doubles at his shift job, forgets to clean his room and lays about with his friends Nik and Darby. He's been struggling to manage his transition to adulthood almost as much as his monthly transitions to a werewolf. Really, he is not great at the whole werewolf thing, and his recent murderous slip-ups have caught the attention of Tyler, a Millennial were-mentor determined to take the mythological world by storm.

The day of the garden party should’ve been a celebration of love for Raphael and his fiancée, as they toast their engagement with their families. But for someone, it’s an opportunity to unveil the lies that have bound the family together over the years. With their nearest and dearest gathered at the family manor, as the first glass is raised, the secrets that bind them begin to crack. And what should have been the happiest day of their lives, might just end as a day they’d rather forget…

Jack Turner grew up in the darkness of London's slums, born into a life of crime and willing to do anything to keep his belly full and his siblings safe. Now he uses the tricks and schemes of the underworld to help those who need the kind of assistance only a scoundrel can provide. His distrust of the nobility runs deep, and his services do not extend to the gorgeous high-born soldier who personifies everything Jack will never be.

We're all something else inside.... 1952. Standing in a cold Suffolk field with her family, six-year-old Mary Ward has a revelation: I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I'm a boy. So begins Mary's heroic struggle to change gender. Moving from the claustrophobic rural community of the 1950s to London in the swinging '60s and beyond to the glitter of America in the '70s, Sacred Country is the story of a journey to find a place of safety and fulfilment in a savage and confusing world.

Frances had been picturing her lodgers in purely mercenary terms - as something like two great waddling shillings. But this, she thought, was what it really meant to have paying guests: this odd, unintimate proximity, this rather peeled-back moment, where the only thing between herself and a naked Mrs Barber was a few feet of kitchen and a thin scullery door. An image sprang into her head: that round flesh, crimsoning in the heat.