Fiction

For five years Phil Hogan has been delighting Observer readers with his brutally hilarious accounts of family life with a houseful of children. He sees his weekly outpourings as a comfort to those similarly blessed, a warning to anyone thinking about it, and useful source material for those who have decided that it might be less trouble being an aunt or uncle instead.

Finally, the secrets to a well-lived adult life are now available in compact, readable form. Financial stability? Social sophistication? Psychological health? Delicious smoothie recipes? They’re all inside, amid the occasional sensibility and unflinching hilarity of pocket Guide to Adulthood.

When Keynon Baker moves with his parents to the coast, he faces a grim summer renovating holiday cottages- like he’s suddenly a partner in their dumb idea to enter the tourism business. Still, in exchange for  painting cottages, he’s allowed to stay in one of his own, with space for his own darkroom to print his photographs.

Angel expects nothing from men but betrayal. Sold into prostitution as a child, she survives by keeping her hatred alive. And what she hates most are the men who use her, leaving her empty and dead inside.

“Fantasizing mysterious abound amount the human and inhuman inhabitants of the bleak landscape, and the post apocalyptic plot is satisfyingly full of twists.”

The Butcher of Belle Vue’ has struck again. Like the first two victims, the third has partially skinned and dumped- her muscles, tendons and ligaments exposed to view. Only time her face gone.

Little remains of the glamour of Setton, once the Noth-East’s premier pleasure resort. The Spanish City is boarded up; its famous Charleston roller coaster turning rapidly to rust. Only in Moscadini’s ice-cream parlour, with its glowing mural of an arcadian coastline, is there a hint of its former glory. It is here that the world-weary teacher Hal Price is brought by his teenage kidnappers to meet a ghost. As the snow falls outside and Hal relives the memories of his dancing days, he tells the boys a story – a tale of wartime dreams and peacetime disappointments, of love, betrayal, death and resurrection. Sarah May’s fictional worlds are comic and macabre, lyrical and violent. In this second novel, she applies her unique vision to the boom and bust of post-war England to create a romantic fable as heart-stopping as the Charleston Coaster itself.

Stitch is a Runyonesque tragedy of manners that’s as vividly polluted by users, abusers and three-time losers as we’ve come to expect and relish in a John B Spencer novel.

Synagogue Carey’s life is just as she’d always dreamed it would be. Engaged to a wonderful man, the daughter of doting parents, a faithful child of God, she has it all.

But in one horrific, terrifying moment, Dinah’s world is shattered by rape, her future irrevocably altered by an unwanted pregnancy, her family torn apart by the tragedy and the long-held secrets it brings to light.

Katherine Millar is eighteen and desperate to be less fat, less swortty, and to have cooler friends. But most of all she wishes she had two parents, instead of one grandma, poll.

In Venice, 1756, the city is at the height of its prodigious power. But as the madness of Carnival descends, a dark force stalks the gothic shadows. The body of one of Venice’s brightest actors has been discovered: crucified, lines of verse carved into his chest. And it is not an isolated killing. For the murderer, known only as Chimera, is determined to people the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno with the traitorous, the depraved, and the gluttonous. Only by releasing the Black Orchid—childhood friend of Casanova, rake, gambler, lover, spy, and soon-to-be detective—a man condemned to death for adultery, can the doge of Venice hope to put an end to the grotesque killings. The Black Orchid soon finds himself ensnared in a terrible game of cat and mouse. As the streets of Venice fill with masked Carnivalgoers, and as the Orchid’s old enemies—and old lovers—return to haunt him, he is drawn further into the Inferno, to the heart of a secret sect and a plot to bring about the downfall of Venice.

Romance,  adventure, murder and intrigue in the latest Chevalier Galeran medieval mystery. France 1145, and Normandy coast is bracing itself against the impending gales of the autumn equinox.