'So smart, so funny, so moving. I absolutely loved it' Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry

'A moving examination of what it means to be alone in the world, and what it means to find connection. It is, by turns, heartbreaking, hilarious, and deeply hopeful. Meg Mason is a dazzling talent' Ann Patchett, bestselling author of Tom Lake and The Dutch House
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Sophie Pattison is a lovely person – warm, kind, relentlessly positive. She's cherished by her brother Laurie, adored by her best friend Emma and valued by her colleagues. Sometimes, it’s true, one day in her life can feel like the entire month of January. It’s also true she can go an entire day without speaking. But she's fine really. She spends her time alone reading, finding comfort in the pages of the books she devours.

Until one day she stumbles upon an author she hasn’t read in years. Her books, interviews and podcasts soon become a lifeline; every word is a solace, company she hasn't felt in so long. It's almost like love.

A lot like love. And Sophie would love to meet the author, although she never will obviously. In a way, thank goodness, because that would change everything. Sophie's entire life. Wouldn’t it?

Hilariously candid and raw, Sophie, Standing There is a bittersweet story of love, loneliness and finding connection in the most unlikely of places.
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'Sophie, Standing There unfolds like a strange origami crane in reverse – so achingly tender and so brilliantly subtle that I could never put it down… Dazzling' Catherine Newman, bestselling author of Wreck and Sandwich

'I loved Sophie, and I love Meg Mason’s brain and the strange, wonderful, funny stories she gives us' Ann Napolitano, bestselling author of Hello, Beautiful and Dear Edward

THEY WILL FALL IN LOVE.
Jane tells herself it’s only a fling – one perfect, carefree summer, on her way to achieving her dream of becoming an architect and moving to the continent. But as the days pass, the pair find themselves falling hard into first love.

AND THEN EVERYTHING WILL VANISH.
Then tragedy strikes – when a tsunami destroys much of Hilo, leaving both Jane and Kenji convulsed with grief. While Jane leaves, unable to look back, Kenji stays, bound by duty to rebuild their community.

WHEN ALL IS LOST, HOW DO WE FIND OUR WAY HOME?
Seven years later, Jane and Kenji collide again – and find that the past is not as easily laid to rest as they thought.

A decade-long story of home and belonging, destruction and renewal, betrayal and forgiveness, Everything to the Sea is an unforgettable love story – about what it means to rebuild a life worthy of what was lost.

‘A life-affirming, heartbreaking novel you won’t want to miss’ JEAN CHEN HO
‘An epic and deeply moving love story’ KRISTIANA KAHAKAUWILA
‘A beautiful and soul-stirring novel’ CRISTINA HENRIQUEZ

A powerfully evocative and tenderly realised debut novel about family secrets, the power of imagination – and coming of age in the dying dreams of the 1970s

1976. Nine-year-old Frank Dart dreams of his absent dad, away at sea; while making sure his mum’s got all the cigarettes she needs for the long drive in their battered Citroën down to their new home in North Devon.

Here in Aunt Perry’s house, Frank and his little sister Odette must make sense of their cousins’ hostility – while their mum seems to drift further and further away. The house is haunted by secrets, past and present; and as spring turns to a suffocatingly hot summer, the past threatens to boil over and scald everything in its wake.

Trouble Was is a raw and tender story of growing up too soon, betrayal and resilience, love and survival – and a dazzling exploration of toxic family politics, buried secrets and the power of the imagination.

'An evocation of a seventies English childhood that’s so intense, so immediate, that you can almost taste the sticky orange squash on your tongue' Hari Kunzru

'Nobody writes trains like Monisha Rajesh' IRVINE WELSH
'Full of the stuff of life' SPECTATOR
'Travel writing heaven' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
'I loved it' JOANNE HARRIS

From the award-winning author of Around the World in 80 Trains, a romantic and hugely entertaining tour of some of the world's most spectacular night trains.

The night train: headlamps ablaze, passengers boarding after sunset and leaving before sunrise, slipping in and out of compartments unseen. From Austria’s Nightjet to the Caledonian Sleeper and the Santa Claus Express, journalist Monisha Rajesh invites us on an adventure aboard the world’s most wondrous moonlit journeys on the tracks. Along the way, she samples reindeer stew in Scandinavia, retraces the original route of the Orient Express, sips on pisco sours aboard the Andean Explorer, and watches the sun rise over the Potomac River on the Silver Meteor to New York.

By turns romantic and hilarious, Moonlight Express brings us along for the ride – and drops us back at the platform before sunrise.

From Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labor, and class.

'I live in a world of Susans. I got name tags for everyone who works at this nail salon, and on every one is printed the name “Susan”.'

‘One of the greatest novels I have ever read’ RITA BULWINKELL
‘Wickedly funny and moving’ AVNI DOSHI
‘A knockout: every punch lands’ ELEANOR CATTON

Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer's day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound depth. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complicated power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.

As the day's work grinds on, the friction between Ning's two identities – as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances – will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.

Told over a single day with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Colour confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa's place as literature's premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.

'Hauntingly good' ED PARK
‘Subverts the comforting mundane’ PITCHAYA SUDBANTHAD
‘A master over the sentence’ DAISY JOHNSON

Reader Reviews:
'Unlike anything I've read before, a talent to watch' (5-star review)
'The prose was liquid gold' (5-star review)
'I was devastated to finish it so soon' (5-star review)

‘Nothing to My Name lives honestly in its history – foolhardy and loving and yet uncharted. A formidable and astonishing new voice‘ T. Kira Madden

‘A gripping story of family bonds, redemption and triumph. A masterful debut!’ Marcela Fuentes

1948, Zhoushan, China. Twelve-year-old Ah Xue watches her mother earn a living combing the hair of the wealthy women in their small fishing village, as reports of civil war and the rising Communist revolution grow closer to home.

Years later, Mimosa grows up in the shadow of her parents’ struggles, while the looming tension of the Cultural Revolution threatens to pull her family apart.

And Fei, raised as a boy by the activist father she can’t help but idolise, grapples with her identity in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Spanning four decades and three generations, Nothing to My Name braids an unforgettable story of the ordinary women caught in the tides of societal upheaval, but bound by an insuppressible instinct to survive. From an astonishing new writer, it explores with remarkable tenderness the enduring repercussions of trauma, the search for stability in disorder, and the often contradictory nature of familial love.

As a young girl, Aurora del Valle suffered a brutal trauma that erased the first five years of her life from her mind. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, she grows up with privilege, comfort and everything she could ask for.

But while she is free of the limitations that most other women face, she is tormented by terrible nightmares. When she finds herself alone at the end of an unhappy love affair, she decides to explore the mystery of her past, to discover what had such a devastating effect on her young life all those years ago.

Portrait in Sepia is both a magnificent historical novel set at the end of the nineteenth century in Chile and a marvellous family saga, peopled by characters from Daughter of Fortune and The House of the Spirits. This engrossing story of the dark power of hidden secrets is intimate in its probing of human character, and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.

Sara is at the airport, travelling home from a work conference. Out of nowhere she’s pulled aside by agents from the Risk Assessment Administration. Their algorithm has determined that she’s an immediate threat to her husband, and must be kept under observation at a retention centre for twenty-one days.

The evidence? Data collected from her dreams.

When she arrives at the centre, she discovers that each slight deviation from their strict and ever-changing rules – loitering in the hallway, a ‘non-compliant hairstyle’ – results in her stay being extended. Desperate to return to her family, Sara must make a choice. Does she play by their rules, or risk taking matters into her own hands?

The Jackson women, Indiana and Amanda, are as close as a mother and daughter can be. Yet, while their bond is strong, they are as different as night and day. Indiana, a beautiful holistic healer, is a free-spirited bohemian; meanwhile her daughter, Amanda, is fascinated by the dark side of human nature.

When a string of strange murders occurs across the city, Amanda plunges into her own investigation, discovering, before the police do, that the deaths may be connected. But the case becomes all too personal when Indiana suddenly vanishes. With her mother’s life now on the line, the young detective must solve the most complex mystery she’s ever faced before it’s too late.