The Coffinmaker S Garden

A Sunday Times bestseller for the w/c 11th January 2021

Alberto lives alone in the town of Allora where fish fly out of the sea and everyone knows everybody's business. There he makes coffins for the great and small, but being the only coffin maker in town can be lonely. That is until a little boy and a magical bird enter his life and change it forever.

Two Ash Henderson crime thrillers from the author of four consecutive No. 1 Sunday Times bestsellers.

The Garden Without Walls explores the story of a reserved young man, Dante Cardover, and his struggles to find true love. Dante was brought up with a Puritan mindset. Early in life, he lost his mother and rarely communicated with his distant father. The author presents Dante as a shy, introverted man who suppressed his feelings to the extent that it kept him from finding love. As the story moves forward, three entirely distinct women offer him different kinds of love. Ruthita is his childhood friend. Fiesole is a great flirt with profound ideals of her own. Vi Carpenter is Dante's soulmate, but a barrier exists between them. The author did an excellent job giving all the women independence and not making them appear merely for Cardover to pick and choose. The book beautifully delivers a take on the wisdom and misunderstandings of youth. It covers various events in Dante's life, including his school days to his days at Oxford, his relationship with his father, and his encounters with women. It is an incredibly written story with a delightful plot and unique characters that will please the reader of any kind.

A gripping standalone thriller from the Sunday Times No.1 bestselling author of the Logan McRae series.

A heart-stopping crime thriller and the fourth consecutive No. 1 Bestseller from the author of the Logan McRae series and Birthdays for the Dead.

The story that you have asked me to tell you does not begin with the pitiful ugliness of Lloyd’s death. It begins on a long-ago day in August when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man. Memory, the narrator of Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory, is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, after being sentenced for murder. As part of her appeal, her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. The death penalty is a mandatory sentence for murder, and Memory is, both literally and metaphorically, writing for her life. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers? Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between past and present, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award–winning writer Petina Gappah weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate, and the treachery of memory.

Why do so many people care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? What are the privileges and pleasures of fandom? Do celebrities ever deserve the outsized attention they receive? In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, to shape the stories we tell about celebrities and fans. The result: a high-stakes drama as endless as it is unpredictable. Drawing on scrapbooks, personal diaries, and vintage fan mail, Marcus traces celebrity culture back to its nineteenth-century roots, when people the world over found themselves captivated by celebrity chefs, bad-boy poets, and actors such as the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), as famous in her day as the Beatles in theirs. Known in her youth for sleeping in a coffin, hailed in maturity as a woman of genius, Bernhardt became a global superstar thanks to savvy engagement with her era's most innovative media and technologies: the popular press, commercial photography, and speedy new forms of travel. Whether you love celebrity culture or hate it, The Drama of Celebrity will change how you think about one of the most important phenomena of modern times.