London, 1985. Joe, father to 11-year-old Matty, has disappeared and nobody will explain where he's gone, or why. In the long, hot summer that follows, Matty's hunt for Joe leads to the ponds at Hampstead Heath. Beneath the water, there is a new kind of freedom. Above the water, a welcoming community of men offer refuge from an increasingly rocky home life. Fourteen years later, a new revelation sees Matty set off alone in a campervan, driving westwards...

*The Top 10 Bestseller* 'Beautifully written, comforting and utterly uplifting, Lucy Coleman?s stories are the perfect tonic when life is a little grey.' Holly Martin Is a change as good as a rest? When married couple Fern and Aiden have a windfall, their reactions could not be more different. While Fern is content to pay off their mortgage and build a nest egg before starting a family, her husband is set on traveling the world. Fern?s not much of...

Summer has come to Busman's Harbor, Maine, and tourists are lining up for a taste of authentic New England seafood, courtesy of the Snowden Family Clambake Company. But there's something sinister on the boil this season. A killer has crashed a wedding party, adding mystery to the menu at the worst possible moment. . . Julia Snowden returned to her hometown to rescue her family's struggling clambake business--not to solve crimes. But that was before...

Edinburgh basks in glorious, but brief, summer sunshine, and Isabel Dalhousie - philosopher, philanthropist and mother - searches for the perfect birthday present for her husband Jamie. While carefully seeking out a gift, Isabel finds herself at a viewing for an auction, and happens upon an old friend in distress - a friend who decides to unburden herself of her secrets, and to reveal a clue within a painting hanging on the walls of the auction house....

Icelandic sisters �r�ra and �safold live in different countries and aren?t on speaking terms, but when their mother loses contact with �safold, �r�ra reluctantly returns to Iceland to find her sister. But she soon realizes that her sister isn?t avoiding her ? she has disappeared, without trace. As she confronts �safold?s abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend Bj�rn, and begins to probe her sister?s reclusive neighbours - who have their own...

During one long, hot summer, five-year-old Pea and her little sister Margot play alone in the meadow behind their house, on the edge of a small village in Southern France. Her mother is too sad to take care of them; she left her happiness in the hospital, along with the baby. Pea's father has died in an accident and Maman, burdened by her double grief and isolated from the village by her Englishness, has retreated to a place where Pea cannot reach...

In the summer of 2006, Emma Price watched helplessly as her six-year-old son?s red coat was fished out of the River Ouse. It was the tragic story of the year - a little boy, Aiden, wandered away from school during a terrible flood, fell into the river and drowned. His body was never recovered. Ten years later, Emma has finally rediscovered the joy in life. She?s married, pregnant and in control again ... until Aiden returns. Too traumatised to speak,...

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819. How about Autumn 2016? Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever. Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered...

Jean Echenoz, the multi-award-winning French literary magician whose work has been compared to Joseph Conrad and Lawrence Sterne, has brought that deathtrap back to life, leading us gently from a balmy summer day deep into the insatiable-and still unthinkable-carnage of trench warfare. With the delicacy of a miniaturist and with irony both witty and clear-eyed, the author offers us an intimate epic with the atmosphere of a classic movie: in the panorama...