A Boston Globe best book of 2016In Zimbabwe's capital, a gun left in a taxi brings together five marriages in this intricate and tightly plotted novel.This is the story of five marriages and one gun.A British couple wonders at the unknowable city beyond their guarded compound while they build walls between themselves.An American suspects his new home is having an insidious effect on his 'African queen' and their young daughter.An enthusiastic young intellectual follows his wife to the city and finds only disillusion.An Intelligence Officer loses a crucial piece of evidence. It will cost him his marriage, his girlfriend, and maybe his life.An impoverished taxi driver and his wife find a gun in the cab. From this point on, all their lives are tied to the trigger.In this tender and brutal portrait of Zimbabwe, the betrayals and conspiracies of the corrupt world are nothing compared to those of marriage.

The Death of Rex Nhongo

Literature & Fiction

George, C. B.

Contemporary

riverrun

'Mike Heron, as part of the Incredible String Band, changed the way I looked at music. Read it!' Billy Connolly 'Mike Heron's lyrics always sparkled with wit and warmth and his prose is a delightful continuation. The book evokes a smoky, unheated eccentric Edinburgh that was a crucible for so much creativity.' Joe Boyd, author of White Bicycles This singular book offers two harmonising memoirs of music making in the 1960s. Mike Heron for the first time writes vividly of his formative years in dour, Presbyterian Edinburgh. Armed with a love of Buddy Holly, Fats Domino and Hungarian folk music, he plays in school cloakrooms, graduates to rock, discovers the joy of a folk audience, starts writing songs, tries to talk to girls, wishes he was a Beatnik all while training as a reluctant accountant. When asked to join Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer, the Incredible String Band are formed - and their wildly innovative, astounding music became indelibly linked with the latter Sixties. Andrew Greig was a frustrated provincial schoolboy when he heard their songs. It changed everything. Undaunted by a lack of experience and ability, he formed a band in their image. Fate & Ferret populated back-country Fife with Pan, nymphs and Apollo, met the String Band and caught the fish lorry to London to hang around Joe Boyd's Witchseason office, watching at the fringes of the blooming Underground scene. It was forty years later that he and Mike became friends. These entwined stories will delight anyone who has loved the Incredible String Band; and their differing portraits of that hopeful, erratic and stubborn stumble towards the life that is ours will strike a chord with everyone.

You Know What You Could Be

Biographies & Memoirs

ANDREW GREIG

Arts & Literature

Pacific Heights, San Francisco. A serial seducer is targeting wealthy, vulnerable women. He's winning their hearts. He's winning their minds. And soon, unless someone can stop him, he'll be taking their lives.

Pacific Heights: A Marten Fane mystery

Harper, Paul

THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHORS OF THREE SECONDS AND CELL 8 INTRODUCE DCI EWERT GRENS TO THE CRUEL REALITY OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING.
'This is crime writing at its most ambitious and morally complex' Financial Times
Lydia Grajauskas will never forget the face.
The face of the trafficker who brought her to Stockholm: the man responsible for three unrelenting years of forced prostitution and slavery.
DCI Ewert Grens will never forget the name.
The name of the prisoner the day his life was destroyed: the man responsible for twenty-five years of torturous heartache.
Sweden will never forget their revenge . . .
Box 21 is a steely, airtight thriller containing both the harshest aspects of degradation and retaliation, and the toughest questions surrounding the morality of violent and obsessive reprisal.
 Looking for a companion to Box 21? Look no further than Roslund &amp; Hellström's Pen 33 . . .

Box 21: Ewert Grens 2 (DCI Ewert Grens)

ROSLUND, ANDERS

HELLSTRÖM, BÖRGE

THE MILLION-SELLING AND CWA AWARD-WINNING DCI EWERT GRENS SERIES CONTINUES, AS ROSLUND AND HELLSTRÖM SHIFT THEIR SOCIAL SPOTLIGHT TO SWEDEN'S NETWORK OF CHILD GANGS.
'You will find yourself utterly engaged from the very first chapter' Independent
'Very bold and very scary . . . a book to appreciate' Crime Thriller Fella
 TWO SIDES.
In the Stockholm suburb of Råby, tensions between the Swedish authorities and organised juvenile gangs are approaching critical mass. 
TWO SENTINELS.
Investigators José Pereira and DCI Ewert Grens are increasingly disturbed by the escalating militancy of these criminal enterprises. 
TWO SOLDIERS.
The police are of little concern to blood brothers Leon and Gabriel. They have vowed to secure dominance in the area, at any cost. 
A dangerous collision awaits both sides. And so does a shocking revelation that will make all four men question the direction their lives have taken.
 Loved Two Soldiers and now want to start the DCI Ewert Grens series from the beginning? Take a look at Pen 33 . . .

Two Soldiers: Ewert Grens 5 (DCI Ewert Grens)

The Arc of the Swallow

Danish author S.J. Gazan established herself as an international talent to watch with her debut thriller novel, The Dinosaur Feather. In The Arc of the Swallow,maverick police detective Søren Marhauge returns in an perilous investigation that reveals a profit-motivated conspiracy involving the upper reaches of Big Pharma, government and academia.When controversial Professor Kristian Storm is found hanged in his office, his assistant Marie Skov refuses to believe that he has committed suicide. Having just returned from West Africa on a research trip, the late scientist had uncovered a shocking truth about immunology programs in the developing world.With the unlikely help from a Nobel Prize-winning rival of Storm's, former police detective Søren Marhauge is determined to prove what really happened to the professor. Interwoven in this thrilling storyline are deeply-moving portraits of Skov's troubled family and Marhauge's tenuous relationship with his girlfriend, another biologist. The result is a complex page-turner that establishes S.J. Gazan as a world-class author.

Gazan, Sissel-Jo

Genre Fiction

Our Fathers

Wait, Rebecca

What kind of man kills his own family?\nA gripping, tender novel about fathers and sons from the highly acclaimed author 
A Guardian crime and thriller book of the year 2020\n'This is a beautifully realised novel, touching on the fallibility of memory and the unknowability of families, and gripping in its intensity. Outstanding' Mail on Sunday 
'A spectacular novel' Spectator\nWhen Tom was eight years old, his father took a shotgun and shot his family: his wife, his son and baby daughter, before turning the gun on himself. Only Tom survived.\nHe left his tiny, shocked community on the island of Litta and the strained silence of his Uncle Malcolm's house while still a young boy. For twenty years he's tried to escape his past. Until now.\nWithout knowing how to ask, he needs answers - from his uncle, who should have known. From his neighbours, who think his father a decent man who 'just snapped'. From the memories that haunt the wild landscape of the Hebrides.\nAnd from the silent ones who know more about what happened - and why - than they have ever dared admit.\nBy turns gripping, beautiful, devastating and tender, Our Fathers is a story about violence and redemption, control and love. With understated compassion and humour, Rebecca Wait gives a voice to the silenced and to the silences between men of few words.

Our Fathers: A gripping, tender novel about fathers and sons from the highly acclaimed author

Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers

'This book is an expression of love... Sublimely conceived and beautifully written' Gerard DeGroot, The Times 
'Immersive, conversational and intensely visual' Helen Castor\n------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\nManuscripts teem with life. 
They are not only the stuff of history and literature, but they offer some of the only tangible evidence we have of entire lives, long receded.\nHidden Hands tells the stories of the artisans, artists, scribes and readers, patrons and collectors who made and kept the beautiful, fragile objects that have survived the ravages of fire, water and deliberate destruction to form a picture of both English culture and the wider European culture of which it is part.\nWithout manuscripts, she shows, many historical figures would be lost to us, as well as those of lower social status, women and people of colour, their stories erased, and the remnants of their labours destroyed.\nFrom the Cuthbert Bible, to works including those by the Beowulf poet, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Sir Thomas Malory, Chaucer, the Paston Letters and Shakespeare, Mary Wellesley describes the production and preservation of these priceless objects.\nWith an insistent emphasis on the early role of women as authors and artists and illustrated with over fifty colour plates, Hidden Hands is an important contribution to our understanding of literature and history.

History

Wellesley, Mary

Europe

'Acampora is an original' Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City
An electrifying debut novel of two women's friendship, a haunting obsession and twisted ambition, set against the feverish backdrop of contemporary Hollywood.
Abby Graven is a dreamer. She dreams her way through her small, lonely life - hiding back at her parents, working at the grocery store. At night, she collects tabloid clippings that taunt her with Elise - her best friend, now Hollywood's hot new starlet.
When a school reunion throws Elise in her path, Abby seizes her chance. With feverish certainty, she boards a one-way flight to LA to become Elise's assistant and enters her gauzy realm of film sets and glamorous actors.
But behind Elise's glossy magazine veneer, she is drowning in Hollywood's vicious social cycle. Ever the devoted friend, Abby conceals her own burning desire for greatness. 
For she is smarter than Elise. More talented. A true artist. And as she edges closer to her own ambitions, Abby can see only one way to make her dream come true.
Propelled by seductive, unstoppable force, The Paper Wasp slashes through the dark side of Hollywood and the treacherous intimacies of female friendship, pursuing a heroine of blazing artistic vision and blinding drive.

The Paper Wasp

Acampora, Lauren

Literary

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