Wife.Mother.Spy. A double life is no life at all.Since the disappearance of her husband in 1951, Laura Leverett has been living in limbo with her daughter in Geneva. All others see is her conventional, charming exterior; nobody guesses the secret she is carrying.Her double life began years ago, when she stepped on to the boat which carried her across the Atlantic in 1939. Eager to learn, and eager to love, she found herself suddenly inspired by a young Communist woman she met on the boat. In London she begins to move between two different worlds - from the urbane society of her cousins and their upper class friends, to the anger of those who want to forge a new society. One night at a party she meets a man who seems to her to combine both worlds, but who is hiding a secret bigger than she could ever imagine.Impelled by desire, she finds herself caught up in his hidden life. Love grows, but so do fear and danger. This is the warm-blooded story of the Cold War. The story of a wife whose part will take her from London in the Blitz, to Washington at the height of McCarthyism, to the possible haven of the English countryside. Gradually she learns what is at stake for herself, her husband, and her daughter; gradually she realises the dark consequences of her youthful idealism.Sweeping and exhilarating, alive with passion and betrayal, A Quiet Life is the first novel from a brilliant new voice in British fiction.

Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. His publisher has committed suicide and his agent is in hiding. In flight from personal disappointment and universal despair, Guy wonders if it's time to take his love for Poppy to another level.

Weaving matters of the heart and mind into the compelling story of one family, this novel traverses time and place, from East End of London in the early 1900s to great archaeological sites in Africa. Russ Codron, a well-meaning optician, has dark secrets not even his wife has been able to unearth. However, when he is confronted with the mummified remains of his fossil-hunting father in the pages of the Sunday Times , Russ's chaotic past crashes into the stability of his present. Needing desperately to find out what really happened to his father, Russ begins a quest that will lead him to the very core of the biggest scientific fraud of all time--the forgery of the Piltdown Man fossils--and to the understanding of what it really means to love.

Can We Still Be Friends is the debut novel by the editor of British Vogue Alexandra Shulman. Summer 1983. Best friends Sal Annie and Kendra are fresh-faced and fresh out of university. Three very different girls about to walk three very different but equally tangled paths . . . Sal's the aspiring journalist whose personal demons threaten to destroy everything she achieves. Annie's the domestic beauty convinced that marriage will give her everything she wants. And Kendra the daughter of chic liberal parents is searching for her an identity all of her own. As they plunge headlong into the years of pixie boots and shoulder pads Duran Duran and Margaret Thatcher they find that for all their plans and hopes and dreams nothing in life is certain - and that includes friendship. 'Exquisite time travel . . . Every detail - from fashion design and music to social tribes and verbal tics - is spot on' Guardian 'Warm and entertaining . . . captures the excitement of being young and glamorous at a time when the sky really did seem to be the limit' The Times 'Wonderfully evokes that ping-pong between trivial and tremendous so characteristic of the Eighties . . . great on atmosphere . . . An engaging debut alive with human sympathy' Wendy Holden Daily Mail Alexandra Shulman has edited British Vogue since 1992. She is a contributor to The Times Daily Mail Guardian and Daily Telegraph and lives in London. This is her first novel.

Rose Zwi's stories embrace people from different countries and cultures drawn together by a common humanity. Her characters range from a political activist who is house-arrested, to the child of immigrant parents caught between two cultures; from a city-educated woman returning to the arid homeland of her tribal grandfather, to a Rabbi and his wife in an East European shtetl; from a solitary dingo in a small Australian town, pursued to its inevitable end to a farmer obsessed with returning his land to its natural state.

In a house in a quiet street in North London, Helena struggles with her self-appointed task of writing a book about the reclusive American artist Joseph Cornell. At the same time she dreams and thinks about her sister Alice working in an orphanage in Chechnya. She is certain that Alice despises her for living a life of comfort and privilege, far away from the horrors of war; yet she knows too that her work is more than self-indulgence. How to reconcile these two visions? Enter Ed, a Czech journalist and photographer who claims he has been working in Chechnya and brings news of Alice, along with the request for a bed for the few days he has to be in London. Gabriel Josipovici’s sparkling new novel charts the course of those few days, as Joseph Cornell’s mysterious life and the strange boxes he constructed wage a silent struggle in Helena’s mind and spirit with the imperatives of the present.