THE DEAD ARE RELENTLESS GOSSIPS, OR AT LEAST THESE DEAD ARE…

A year after her father’s death, Aubrey learns she has inherited a share of a farm on the sun-streaked plains of Tennessee. Seeking a way to erase a mounting pile of debt, she travels South to meet a family she barely knows.
Watching her arrival are four ghosts: Aubrey’s ancestors, and the keepers of the farm’s secrets. As Aubrey gets to know her living relatives, the story of the land unfolds – her great-grandfather who bought it, one of the first Black landowners in the community, the four children set to inherit it, their bitter rivalries, and a tragedy that echoes through the decades…
With the sale of the farm looming, the ghosts face exile, and Aubrey must decide how much of her future she is willing to sacrifice to the claims of the past.
Dazzling and expansive, The Great Wherever is a multigenerational portrait of the American South, exploring land and legacy, race and generational wealth, and the sharp fragments of the past – how they spark and shine against the surface of our ordinary lives.
PRAISE FOR THE GREAT WHEREVER:

'An epic and deeply human story' PATRICK RYAN, author of the international bestseller Buckeye

'A gift of a book' VANESSA CHAN, author of the international bestseller The Storm We Made

'Gripping, moving, witty, and wise, this is historical fiction at its finest' MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON, author of On the Rooftop, a Reese’s Book Club Pick

'I felt dazzled and . . . in awe of all its beauty and magic' DAWNIE WALTON, Women's Prize-longlisted author of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev

NAMED ONE OF 2026'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS BY: ESQUIRE LITERARY HUB BOOKPAGE DEBUTIFUL

'Wonderful' Judith Flanders

'A whirling, waltzing panorama through the last carefree age of British nobility’ New Statesman

Adrian Tinniswood opens the doors on the excess, intrigue and absurdities of life in the late Victorian and Edwardian country house

In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side by side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with self-made millionaires and society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line.

Adrian Tinniswood opens the doors to the country house during this glittering golden age, when – for the privileged few – life in the country house was the best life of all.

'Fascinating' TLS

'Illuminating' Literary Review

'The range and scope of his book is breathtaking' Country Life

With stunning full-colour images

‘An unforgettable story of love, loss, and the choices that shape our lives . . . but it’s also a masterfully crafted mystery that will keep you guessing until the very last page. Seriously, that ending?! I did not see it coming’
REESE WITHERSPOON

‘This story of a love affair is so addictive it could be at home with the thrillers . . . A simmering book of secrets, scandal and devastating consequences’ The i

‘Excellent . . . a vivid, forceful love story which plays out at the pace of a thriller’ Irish Times

Everyone in the village said nothing good would come of Gabriel’s return. And as Beth looks at the man she loves on trial for murder, she can’t help thinking they were right.

Beth was seventeen when she first met Gabriel. Over that heady, intense summer, he made her think and feel and see differently. She thought it was the start of her great love story. When Gabriel left to become the person his mother expected him to be, she was broken.

It was Frank who picked up the pieces and together they built a home very different from the one she’d imagined with Gabriel. Watching her husband and son, she remembered feeling so sure that, after everything, this was the life she was supposed to be leading.

But when Gabriel comes back, all Beth’s certainty about who she is and what she wants crumbles. Even after ten years, their connection is instant. She knows it’s wrong and she knows people could get hurt. But how can she resist a second chance at first love?

A love story with the pulse of a thriller, Broken Country is a heart-pounding novel of impossible choices and devastating consequences.

‘Lyrical, brutal and passionate. I devoured it’
MIRANDA COWLEY HELLER, author of The Paper Palace

‘Evocative, sensitive and compelling . . . Fires directly at the heart and hits the mark’
DELIA OWENS, author of Where the Crawdads Sing

‘Broke my heart then mended it again. An epic, tortured love story. Bring tissues’
JENNIE GODFREY, author of The List of Suspicious Things

‘I stayed up until 4am to finish it, something I haven’t done in years. It’s a page-turner, but also beautifully written’
FLORENCE KNAPP, author of The Names

‘A love story like no other’
CHRIS WHITAKER, author of All the Colours of the Dark

READERS LOVE BROKEN COUNTRY ?????
‘This book is everything. Love, heartbreak and hope’
‘Will break you into pieces and then put you back together again’
‘I was absolutely gripped and didn’t want it to end’
‘If I could give more than five stars, I would. Perfect’

‘Attends to the bonds we have to family, landscape, global politics with uncommon attention, extraordinary depth and lightness of touch’ ELIZABETH O’CONNOR, author of Whale Fall

It is autumn 2004 and in a farmhouse on the hills outside Llandudno, Catrin and John endure the agonizing wait for their older son to return from Iraq. His decision to join up has left them reeling, yet there are other battles at home: the working of the land that has been theirs for generations and what to do with their troubled younger son.

Catrin’s childhood sweetheart comes back to their small town, forcing the boys’ doting mother to confront the life she might have had. And John, desperate to keep farm and family together, turns to ever riskier methods to stay afloat.

As each member of the family grasps at their own tenuous lifeline, they drift further from one another – until, on a cold winter evening, there is a fateful knock at the door.

Written in luminous, exquisitely calibrated prose, Cloudless is a masterful portrayal of the fragility and resilience of human connection.

‘Dastur writes with devastating compassion on what it means to be human’ CATHERINE AIREY, author of Confessions

‘A story about love and war, family and nation . . . Told with intelligence, sensitivity and a huge heart’ PAUL McVEIGH, author of The Good Son

Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as a MP of Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape, its rugged history as a frontierland, and in the spirit of its people.

Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, Middleland is an unforgettable portrait of rural Britain today – a place caught in tensions between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, between local and national politics – as well as a timeless evocation of the history, people and landscape of Cumbria.

Originally published in 1951 from the author of beloved holiday classic The Feast comes a glorious coming-of-age tale about a heroine whose wedding day does not go entirely to plan . . .

With a foreword by Lucy Mangan

***

‘People seem to get over things, don’t they? I don’t know how, but they do – ordinary people. I’m very ordinary, so I expect I shall do what they do.’

Lucy Carmichael is jilted at the altar. But no matter. Her loving and kind family never liked her explorer fiancé anyway.

Instead of moping or falling into her supportive family’s arms, however, Lucy abandons their suburban home. Heading for the country, she takes up a teaching position in the industrial town of Ravonsbridge.

There, she finds solace in her work, in her new (rather gossipy) colleagues – and rediscovers her sensible young self.

But if Lucy has, despite everything, kept her head – where lies her heart?

Praise for Margaret Kennedy:
‘She is not only a romantic but an anarchist, and she knows the ways of men and women very well indeed’ Anita Brookner
‘Kennedy was immensely popular in her heyday’ Washington Post
‘Margaret Kennedy’s poised style, cool wit and skilful characterization kept her novels welcome for three decades’ Cambridge Guide to Literature in English

Highway Cottage weaves the story of a strange homecoming. A young poet travels to the heart of the English countryside – back to the West Country village where he grew up. Descending into the valley where the small riverside community still resides, he finds himself within a dreamlike landscape, peopled by uncanny figures: drone operators and hunters; half-familiar friends; local historians, and braying councillors trying desperately to oust a community of Travellers. Hovering between reality and folklore, the locale is at once idyllic and in decay; the visitor is both unsettled and soothed by it. Slowly, we start to sense that both villagers and poet might be under threat – not just from the future, but from the past.

This book-length sequence of poems represents a ground-breaking artistic achievement by acclaimed poet Ralf Webb. Blending the eerie musicality of children’s rhymes with echoes of traditional balladry and free verse, the collection swells to an extraordinary chorus. With great clarity and affection, but not a trace of sentimentality, Webb conjures a precise vision of a rural community, surfacing the deep and urgent tensions – personal, political, and environmental – that run through Britain today. The result is a unique portrait of contemporary country life, enchanting and unnerving in equal measure.

‘Miraculous’ Isabella Tree
‘Exquisite’ FT

From the No.1 bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life, an unforgettable story of friendship, redemption and a life-changing voyage of discovery on a remote Norwegian island

How far do you have to go to find yourself?

One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on.

Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly – and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come quickly: her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island.

This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique and ancient landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. It traces the pattern of her work from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter, to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for gathering, like feathered gold.

Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not what he had previously thought. What began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge and forgiveness.

*Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year Award*

Readers love Wives Like Us…
‘I devoured this in one day’ *****
‘Gloriously good fun’ *****
‘Absolutely delightful’ *****

No one knows better than Ian Palmer – Executive Butler – that social position is everything in the rose-strewn Cotswolds.

So when his boss, Tata Hawkins, flounces out of her (new-build) manor house after a row with husband Bryan, Ian is alarmed: for one thing, if Tata is on the social slide downwards, that means he is too; for another, he’s lost his home and has nowhere to store his prized collection of vintage Gucci loafers; even worse, a vacuum among the Country Princess set has opened up for a new Queen Bee.

With the old-money Pennybacker-Hoare sisters plotting to rid ‘their’ county of Tata and her ilk, a bikini influencer on the prowl for a husband just like Mr. Hawkins, a glamorous American divorcee threatening to steal Tata’s crown, and the heiress-next-door threatening to steal Ian, the Cotswolds are in chaos.

Can Ian restore Tata’s country crown and reinstate her to the comforts of the Manor?

‘A forensically well-observed narrative . . . a shiny satirette of country living where everyone is unmuddied but filthy rich.’ The Times

‘It may finally be time for Jilly [Cooper] to make way for a new chronicler of Cotswolds life.’ Daily Mail