Showing titles in Literature & Fiction

The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a mari­juana overdose - and the next thing she knows, she’s in Hell.

In an alien city torn apart by crooked cops and ruthless criminals, private detective Dan Deadman specializes in cases unusual and bizarre. Sure, he doesn't smell great, and he's technically been dead for quite some time, but if you've got a rampaging Hell-beast tearing up your street, or a portal to another dimension appearing in your bathroom, Dan's your man. After saving a mysterious young woman named Ollie from the clutches of something big, slimy, and unpleasant, Dan gets entangled in a missing child case.

This series contains mature themes and strong language, and listener discretion is advised.

If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe? Which is exactly what the crew of the Heart of Gold plan to do. There’s just the small matter of escaping the Vogons, avoiding being taken to the most totally evil world in the Galaxy and teaching a space ship how to make a proper cup of tea. And did anyone actually make a reservation?

Sasha is well and truly over it all: work (all-consuming), friendships (on the back burner), sex-life (non-existent). Sasha has hit a brick wall. Armed with good intentions to drink kale smoothies, try yoga and find solitude, she heads to the Devon resort she loved as a child. But it's off-season, the hotel is falling apart and now she has to share the beach with someone else: a grumpy, stressed-out guy called Finn. How can she commune with nature when he's sitting on a rock, watching her? Especially when they don't agree on burnout cures.

As Wodehouse himself once noted, "Blandings has impostors like other houses have mice." On this particular occasion, there are two imposters, both intent on a dangerous enterprise. Lord Emsworth's secretary, the Efficient Baxter, is on the alert and determined to discover what is afoot - despite the distractions caused by the Honorable Freddie Threepwood's hapless affair of the heart.

John Fuller-Carp, the Machiavellian head of chambers at Forecourt Buildings, is determined to become a QC and will perform almost any moral contortion to achieve his goal. When left-wing Ruth Quirke, rumoured to be a High Court judge's daughter, applies to join his chambers, Fuller-Carp's imagination goes into overdrive and promotion seems inevitable. However, his attempts to project a 'New Labour' image cut no ice with Ruth, and the two are soon at each other's throats.

Rhiannon Lewis should be happy. Her cheating fiancé is in jail – framed for the depraved killing spree she committed. Her ex-lover is chopped up and buried where no-one will find him. But there’s one small problem. She’s pregnant. And as much as Rhiannon wants to continue working her way through her kill lists, a small voice inside is trying to make her stop. Now Rhiannon has to choose – motherhood or murder.

In Everthing Is F*cked, Mark Manson turns his gaze from the inevitable flaws within each individual self to the endless calamities taking place in the world around us. Drawing from the pool of psychological research on these topics, as well as the timeless wisdom of philosophers such as Plato, Nietzsche, and Tom Waits, he dissects religion and politics and the uncomfortable ways they have come to resemble one another. He looks at our relationships with money, entertainment, and the internet, and how too much of a good thing can psychologically eat us alive.

Felicity Lewis' 50th birthday party in her newly renovated home, loving husband and daughter Greta by her side, is going off with a bang when disaster strikes. Her father, Franklyn, with his usual impeccable timing, has keeled over and died. For some members of the family, his wife Hazel, for example, Franklyn's death is not the great loss it first appears to be. But when his toxic and inexplicable will is read out, it becomes clear that long-buried secrets are about to surface, starting with the astonishing reappearance of Hazel's long-lost sister.

Past Imperfect is the story of a quest. Damian Barker wishes to know if he has a living heir. By the time he married in his late 30s he was sterile (the result of adult mumps), but what about before that unfortunate illness? He was not a virgin. Had he sired a child? A letter from a girlfriend from these times suggests he did. But the letter is anonymous.

Glasgow for Bertie is the promised land. The city of pies and Irn Bru, far from his controlling mother, Irene, – his place of escape. But how will he respond to the news of the proposed merging of Edinburgh and Glasgow? A new member of Bertie’s class at school is causing ripples in his social circle. She is called Galactica MacFee and is going to be a match for Olive and her lieutenant, Pansy. And an incredible new discovery: a Pictish stone that is said to have the first-know written poem carved into it is the talk of the town.

An alpha among the wolves of Wall Street, Kennedy Dawson rose to the top of the pack by striking the right contracts at the right times. But there's one deal that's been giving him a run for his money - a pact to never again let his assistant, Kate, get under his skin. She may be smart, gorgeous, and sharp as a whip, but she's definitely off-limits.

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.

Nell Stevens’ life is a mess. When her business goes bust and her fiancé with it, Nell’s happy ever after in California falls apart and she moves back to London to start over. But a lot has changed since she’s been gone. All her single friends are now married with children, sky-high rents force her to rent a room in a stranger’s house and in a world of perfect Instagram lives, she feels like a f--k up.

Joanna Lumley and Roger Allam play a married couple who met in the Summer of Love and have stayed together ever since. Children of the '60s, they are still free spirits, drawn together by their love for music and one another. We follow their conversations from the café to the kitchen table, taking in everyday chores, dealing with problems with long-held friendships and tackling their frustrations with each other.

Marnie is stuck. Stuck working alone in her London flat, stuck battling the long afternoons and a life that increasingly feels like it's passing her by. Michael is coming undone. Reeling from his wife's departure, increasingly reclusive, taking himself on long, solitary walks across the moors and fells. When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship. But can it survive the journey?

Alexander McCall Smith, best-selling author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, has turned his hand to humour. The delightful result is a creation of comic genius. For in the unnaturally tall form of Professor Doctor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, we are invited to meet a memorable character whose sublime insouciance is a blend of the cultivated pomposity of Frasier Crane and of Inspecteur Clouseau's hapless gaucherie.

Lucy Sullivan is 26 and living it up (and occasionally down) in London. Hers is a life of quiet, undisciplined desperation. But when she and three friends visit a psychic for a bit of fun and the woman's predictions start coming true, Lucy is horrified. For the fortune-teller insisted she'd soon be married - within the year, in fact. Not only does Lucy not have a boyfriend, but the chances of getting one are looking slim. Between the bottles of wine, antidepressants and her addiction to self-help books, she's not quite ready to walk, or even stumble, down the aisle sober.

Night Vale is a small desert town where all the conspiracy theories you've ever heard are actually true. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge. Nineteen-year-old Night Vale pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro is given a paper marked 'KING CITY' by a mysterious man in a tan jacket. She can't seem to get the paper to leave her hand, and no one who meets this man can remember anything about him.