This Is My Visitors Book

With the smart suspense of Emma Donoghue’s Room and the atmospheric claustrophobia of Grey Gardens, this “bizarrely unsettling, yet compulsively readable” (Iain Reid, internationally bestselling author of I’m Thinking of Ending Things) thriller explores the twisted realities that can lurk beneath even the most serene of surfaces. What becomes of a child who grows up without love? Marion Zetland lives with her domineering older brother John in a crumbling mansion on the edge of a northern seaside resort. A timid spinster in her fifties who still sleeps with teddy bears, Marion does her best to live by John’s rules, even if it means turning a blind eye to the noises she hears coming from behind the cellar door...and to the women’s laundry in the hamper that isn’t hers. For years, she’s buried the signs of John’s devastating secret into the deep recesses of her mind—until the day John is crippled by a heart attack, and Marion becomes the only one whose shoulders are fit to bear his secret. Forced to go down to the cellar and face what her brother has kept hidden, Marion discovers more about herself than she ever thought possible. As the truth is slowly unraveled, we finally begin to understand: maybe John isn’t the only one with a dark side....

In this small but perfectly formed collection of supernatural short stories, Sophie Hannah takes the comforting scenes of everyday life and imbues them with a frisson of fear, then a gust of terror. Why is a young woman so unnerved by the presence of a visitors book in her boyfriend's inner-city home? And whose spidery handwriting is it that fills the pages? Who is the strangely courteous boy still lingering at a child's tenth birthday party when all the parents have gathered their children and left? And why does the presence of a perfectly ordinary woman in a post office queue leave another customer pallid and sweating with fear? Beware what you open this Christmas!

On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she's now the sole proprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, at loose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, a stack of bills, a new erotic interest in her oldest girlfriend, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a rogue garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse . . . C needs to put her medical debt and her sex life in order, but how to make concrete plans with this little visitor haunting her apartment, sporting a three-piece suit and delivering impromptu lectures on the vulnerability of the national grid? Moreover, what's all this computer code doing in the story of her life? And do the answers to all of C's questions lie with an eco-hacktivist cabal threatening to end modern life as we know it? The Visitors is mordantly funny as it follows a woman dealing with debt, lust and an unwelcome visitor in the last days of a broken status quo. It peers into How We Got Here and asks What We Do Next, whatever our personal hallucinations may be.

From the New York Times bestselling author Sally Beauman comes an intensely atmospheric, spellbinding re-creation of Lord Carnarvon's hunt for Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. Sent abroad to Egypt in 1922 to recover from the typhoid that has killed her mother, eleven-year-old Lucy becomes swept up in the feverish excitement surrounding the search for Tutankhamun's tomb. Through her friendship with Frances, the daughter of an American archaeologist, Lucy witnesses first-hand the intrigue, politics, and passions surrounding this quest. Raised in a world in which adults are often cold and unpredictable, Lucy forms an immediate bond with Frances. Their friendship sustains them throughout childhood, guides them through the class-ridden colonial society in which they grow up, and takes them into an adult life that promises fulfilment—until it veers toward heartbreak. Deftly constructed and transportive, peopled by powerful characters, moving from the 1920s to the present day, The Visitors is a timeless coming-of-age narrative set against the backdrop of profound historical change. But how is such change documented? Whose testimony is reliable? Which witness should we believe? Looking back on her past much later in life, viewing it from the perspective of age, Lucy tells a deeply moving story of love and loss, of mistakes made and incendiary secrets concealed. She reveals the circumstances that lie behind the most celebrated discovery ever made in the Valley of the Kings, a discovery clouded by deception, in which triumph swiftly turned to tragedy; it is a story, as she comes to see, whose truths are both elusive and occluded, one that mirrors her own. As Lord Carnarvon and the archaeologist Howard Carter force the desert to yield its treasures, Lucy reveals the extremes to which people are driven by desire—even when these extremes involve building a life around a lie.

Some of the most wondrous gifts cost nothing. This is a story of such gifts. On a silent and magical Christmas Eve night, three children and their grandparents bear gifts down the starlit path to a stable. They take this peaceful, wintry journey to thank the visitors of centuries ago for their historic and holy visit. The children deliver simple gifts and sincere gratitude to the visitors in tribute for that long-ago night honoring a newborn babe.

Is there a future time when newcomers and visible minorities will be enabled to feel like they belong in Canada? Or will they have to accept their experience as visitors to Canada no matter how long they have lived here? These are some of the questions Anthony Stewart tackles eloquently and with considerable wit.

Seeing a strange glow hovering over Harley Hills, Nick and his twin sister Jessie are shocked when the adults of their hometown begin talking like robots and eating strange foods. Original.

An alien invasion which begins with the landing on Jerry Conklin's car of what looks like a huge black box changes life in Lone Pine, Minnesota, and threatens to destroy Earth's civilization