Coming Soon

It's 1973 and Mona Glass is a 24-year-old amateur tennis star in a long-running affair with Saul Plotz, her former college professor. Her parents like Saul and desperately want the free-spirited Mona to marry. But 34-year-old Saul already has a wife and two children. One day, Saul happens on an idea: stage a fake wedding for the benefit of her old world parents, invite a few friends in on the joke, and go about their lives. The ruse works. Except Saul realizes he actually wants to marry Mona, who vows never to permanently tie herself to a man.

Some would say the Market is the last authentic part of the city centre. This northern city has reinvented itself as a business and financial centre, bristling with designer shops and bars. A cosmopolitan, twenty-four hour city. Yet slap bang in the centre the Victorian City Market remains what it has always been; a place where you can get anything and see anything - a place teeming with life. The market is the real face of the city - mucky, multicultural and magnificent. Listen to this immersive collection of full-cast BBC radio dramas exploring the high and lows of this unique place.

Based on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the field with two women, and inside his head was a ticking time-bomb.

Kara McIntyre is supposed to be jetting off to her destination wedding in Hawaii. However, a last-minute hitch appears to have left her without a job, home and, more importantly, a fiancé. TV sensation Ollie Chiles and Kara always have each other’s backs. But when his wife goes viral in a compromising clinch with another man, Ollie must choose between supporting his best friend in her hour of need or going home to save his marriage.

Sophie and Tom first visited Paris together as students. During their weekend away in the world’s most romantic city, falling in love – with the place, and each other – was simply inevitable. They resolved to return every summer and kept their word, until something happened that changed their world forever.

A dazzling novel about one young woman’s summer of infinite possibility . . .

It’s 1968 and it’s cold when Felicity arrives in London to stay with her mother, improve her English, do a secretarial course - and meet a suitable man. She is already missing her home in Provence and her father and his new wife and their extended family. But it’s only for a year she tells herself - and then she can go back to France and do what she really wants and become a painter. And then she bumps into Oliver who is quite the most interesting young man she has ever met.

When Luca drops out of his prestigious PhD programme and moves back home to Manchester, he thinks he'll take some time to consider his life choices: the failed love affair that ended in a disastrous holiday and embarrassing exit, the pursuit of an academic life that gave him nothing but a strong sense of failure. In need of money, and still convinced the literary life might be for him, Luca takes on a job as a ghost writer: Andy, who has progressive MS, wants Luca to write his life story.

Years after escaping her unbearable artworld friends in New York for a new life in London, an unnamed writer finds herself back on the Lower East Side attending a dinner party hosted by Eugene and Nicole – an artist-curator couple – and attended by their pretentious circle. It’s the evening after the funeral of their mutual friend, a failed actress, and if the narrator once loved and admired Eugene and Nicole and their important friends, she now despises them all.

Joybird Martin—an Uber driver with cheerfulness to spare—desperately wants to be a life coach. She’s so sunny about her chances that even her snarky father—a has-been TV writer with a failed third marriage—can’t dim her light. So when he shows up broke on her doorstep, Joybird takes him in with no questions asked, trying to find a balance between her bright optimism and his sarcastic pessimism. It works, and she continues sharing her earnest wisdom with her Uber riders.

Detective Lola is heading back over the river from a rare night out when she spots a crowd of people looking over the parapet. Someone’s gone in. A young man called Cammy witnessed everything. He swears it’s the work of the Clyde Pusher, but is terrified of the police. The Clyde Pusher is the stuff of urban legend. A hooded figure who throws men into the river to drown. Eight victims in five years. But according to the police, the Pusher doesn’t exist. There are no reliable witnesses, nothing to link the victims.

Zoe, Al, Rachel, Rob, Yas and Indie. Six friends who were inseparable at university, who have all had their secret or not so secret passions for each other, their own hopes and fears. Set over one year and told from multiple perspectives, BIRTHS, DEATHS AND MARRIAGES is an era-spanning, globe-trotting novel about love, friendship, and how to stay at least relatively sane in an ever crazier world. It’s about a group of friends growing older, a pair of sometime lovers finding their way back to each other, about kindness and joy. It’s about births, deaths, marriages, and everything in between.

Sharif is a good person. He knows that he is good because he’s aware of the privilege that he holds as a white man. He knows he is good because he chose to be a social worker at a nonprofit in Brooklyn, scraping by in New York City. And he knows he is good because his wife, Adjoua, a progressive Black novelist, has always said so.

Hugo Hunter was the most celebrated gay novelist of the 20th century. He published two masterpieces, securing his place alongside the dazzling literary greats of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and rubbing shoulders with everyone from Truman Capote to James Baldwin. But after decades of fame and excess, just as New York City enters the 1980s and awakes to the coming horror of AIDS, Hugo finds himself running out of money. Out of nowhere, he receives an extraordinary lifeline: an offer from his longtime publisher. The money will solve all his problems – except for one thing. Hugo Hunter is an imposter.

In their Saitama office, Ashikawa is the kind of woman Nitani knows he will likely marry: sweet, obliging, and determined to wean him off his addiction to instant noodles. But he finds himself increasingly unable to respect her – or the sugary treats she shares around the workplace, winning their colleagues’ affection with baking rather than hard work. Oshio is bolder and uninhibited – she is Nitani's drinking buddy. In the oppressive office atmosphere, the pair grows closer, both outsiders struggling with the rigid status quo.

Sunning himself in the south of France, Johnny has started to believe that his life is finally on the up. But the arrival of a face from his past drags him back down to earth with a harsh dose of cold reality. Johnny Klein once again finds himself walking the tightrope between redemption and despair. When his daughter is in danger of getting consumed by the sins of Johnny’s own past, and a dark secret threatens to engulf people he holds dear, light at the end of the tunnel feels further away than ever.

Thomas, a young German musician, is dying. Leo, a renowned Italian writer and Thomas's boyfriend, finds it impossible to mourn his loss and condemns himself to wandering the Earth, in the hope of finding the dividing line between the living and the dead. He travels through a Europe where past and present overlap, roads intersect, years merge and faces emerge - and tries in vain to bring into focus the blurred lines of their relationship.

Romance author Tessa Elliot has writer's block, and worse - she isn’t sure she still believes in love. To heal her broken heart, she decides to go on the romantic break in Paris she’d booked before her world fell apart. But when she arrives at the Airbnb, Tessa is stunned to find someone is already there. Her ex’s best friend Ethan has made himself at home, being told that the place would be empty. As it’s Paris Fashion Week, and with no other options, they agree to share the apartment.

Beatrice Donovan would do anything for her identical twin sister. Including stepping into her hotel management job temporarily and pretending to be her - she’s desperate. What could go wrong? A lot apparently! Because her sister Delilah has hugely understated her role – the hotel is at risk of closure and she’s promised she can turn it around. Now Bea has to find a way to fly under the radar, get the job done before anyone notices their switch up. Sounds easy, all Bea has to do is avoid her temporary new boss Jonah. However, that’s a lot harder than she thought.

Caught between his well-meaning yet misapprehending family, his boisterous friends, and his self-assured partner Ben, Elom struggles to fit in. All he ever wants is to feel understood – but what does it mean to live authentically when the only thing changing faster than the world around you is the world within? Moving between Accra, Glasgow, London, and the islands of the outer Hebrides, Selali Fiamanya’s extraordinary debut asks what it means to love and be loved in return. Before We Hit the Ground is an intimate portrait of a family, and one man’s struggle to find his place.