The Kitchen Of Small Hours

"These poems gather five generations of family stories about an immigrant experience that emerged from the plantation economies of mid-nineteenth-century Hawaii"--

Life just keeps getting more complicated for Annie Baker. Her sister Lizzie's pregnant and wants Annie to be her birth-partner - she's planning an active labour, in water, with lots of candles and music. Her partner Matt isn't too sure, although he's bought some new swimming trunks just in case. Annie's friend Leila has got a new man, Tor, and she's getting heavily into yoga, while Kate from the village has somehow ended up having an affair with her own ex-husband. And as for the men in Annie's own life, it just gets worse. Her seven-year-old son Charlie is now officially Pagan, and desperate for his own pet pheasant. Boss Barney is building a bit of a reputation for TV commercials involving stunts, so if she's not lurching around the North Sea in a trawler, she's stuck up a crane. Then there's Uncle Monty to keep an eye on, a retired mole-catcher who collects bric-a-brac. He's eighty-three and a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and has just threatened the Meals on Wheels lady with a shotgun and refuses to leave the farm where he's lived all his life. And as if all that wasn't difficult enough, Mack comes back from New York, just when Annie was beginning to think she might be able to cope without him ... For everyone who fell in love with Annie Baker and her Only Boy for Me, here's what happened next. And for anyone who's ever wondered how to combine motherhood, the country life and a career in town, and why pheasants make that weird clicking noise, this is essential reading.

'Powerful' JOANNA GLEN 'Beautiful' KATE SAWYER 'A triumph' JENNIE GODFREY The eagerly awaited new novel from Bobby Palmer, author of the critically acclaimed debut Isaac and the Egg. If you stood before sunrise in this wild old place, looking through the trees into the garden, here's what you'd see: A father and son, a fox standing between them. Jack, home for the first time in years, still determined to be the opposite of his father. Gerry, who would rather talk to animals than the angry man back under his roof. Everything that follows is because of the fox, and because Jack's mother is missing. It spans generations of big dreams and lost time, unexpected connections and things falling apart, great wide worlds and the moments that define us. If you met them in the small hours, you'd begin to piece together their story. 'A magical, comforting read that touches on father-son relationships, male mental health and the healing power of nature' GOOD HOUSEKEEPING 'A beautiful examination of love and loss' HEAT 'Tender and touching' GLAMOUR PRAISE FOR ISAAC AND THE EGG 'A tender story of love, grief and the transformative power of friendship' Guardian 'Truly one of the most beautiful stories you will ever read' Joanna Cannon 'Will linger longer after the final page' Independent 'Unique, tender and funny' Pandora Sykes 'A future classic' Clare Mackintosh 'Like nothing I've ever read before' Stylist 'An arresting debut novel about grief in the most wonderfully oblique way' Reverend Richard Coles 'Just magic' Kate Sawyer

Richard Russo meets Tom Perrotta in this gripping, suspenseful, and gorgeous debut novel about family secrets come to light; "a tinderbox waiting to explode" (Matthew Thomas, New York Times Bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves. On a day of rising tension, Tom, a news editor, will confront the consequences of an indiscretion that he has tried desperately to hide and that now threatens to undo his family. Helen, a graphic designer who works from home, will be drawn into an escalating conflict with two street-smart teenage girls. Told hour-by-hour over the course of a single day, a husband and wife try to outrun long-buried secrets, sending their lives into chaos.

From the critically acclaimed author of A Beautiful Blue Death and A Burial at Sea comes an intriguing new mystery in what The New York Times calls "a beguiling series" Charles Lenox is at the pinnacle of his political career and is a delighted new father. His days of regularly investigating the crimes of Victorian London now some years behind him, he plans a trip to his uncle's estate, Somerset, in the expectation of a few calm weeks to write an important speech. When he arrives in the quiet village of Plumley, however, what greets him is a series of strange vandalisms upon the local shops: broken windows, minor thefts, threatening scrawls. Only when a far more serious crime is committed does he begin to understand the great stakes of those events, and the complex and sinister mind that is wreaking fear and suspicion in Plumley. Now, with his protege, John Dallington, at his side, the race is on for Lenox to find the culprit before he strikes again. And this time his victim may be someone that Lenox loves.

Lachlan MacKinnon's fourth collection opens with a gathering of lyrics and descriptive poems: observing rites of passage (elegies, wedding poems), offering nuanced accounts of places and their patchwork afterlives (the Midlands, a Suffolk sketchbook), or meditations on historical figures introspectively at odds with their time (King Canute, Edward Thomas). This preoccupation with contingency - personal and historical - opens onto The Book of Emma: a long poem of fifty-four sections, written mostly in prose, which address a lost friend and contemporary in terms which seem laconically factual, but which draw their power from archaic conventions (Egyptian, Celtic) of talking to the dead.

The watcher spies late into the night on the enviably cosy domesticity of the Titmuss household. The seemingly happy couple, the loving children, the ordered normality of it all strikes a deep chord in Lorna Gibson, so different is it from the emotional emptiness of her own existence. But over a period of time, the watcher realises the Mrs Titmuss is no longer playing by the rules, and that her behaviour, if allowed to go unchecked, threatens to shatter the harmony of husband Cecil's life. And Cecil is a decent man, as Lorna well knows. He doesn't deserve such an ignominous fate. So the watcher decides to turn observation into action, and save the Titmuss family from inevitable heartbreak. But how far is she prepared to go?