Barrington Jedidiah Walker is 74 and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney, London, for years. A flamboyant character with a fondness for William Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father, grandfather - and also secretly gay. His deeply religious and disappointed wife, Carmel, thinks he sleeps with other women. When their marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away?

While the Celtic Tiger rages, and greed becomes the norm, Johnsey Cunliffe desperately tries to hold on to the familiar, even as he loses those who all his life have protected him from a harsh world. Following the deaths first of his father and then his mother, Johnsey inherits the family farm, and a healthy bank account, both of which he proves incapable of managing on his own. Village bullies and scheming land-grabbers stand in his way, no matter where he turns.

Calling Major Tom is a funny, uplifting tale of friendship and community about a man who has given up on the world...but discovers in the most unlikely way that it might not have given up on him. We all know someone like Thomas. The grumpy next-door neighbour who complains to the residents' committee about the state of your front lawn. The man who tuts when you don't have the correct change at the checkout. The colleague who sends an all-company email when you accidentally use the last drop of milk.

Faith Fox has led a life full of heartbreak and abandonment, lacking in simplicity and love - and she's not even one week old. She has suffered the unexpected and inexplicable loss of her mother in childbirth; her father, an overworked doctor grown callous with stress, has neither the ability nor the interest to take on the difficult task of raising his child alone; her grandmother, Thomasina, has decided to abscond to Egypt with a retired general rather than acknowledge and accept the loss of her daughter, whom she loved so distressingly well.

Dottie and Mary forged a friendship over a bag of penny sweets when they were eight years old. They've shared everything together since then. Now, at seventeen, they're both shopgirls working at Woolworths. As they go out in the world in pursuit of love and happiness and life becomes more complicated, the simplicity of their childhood dissolves. The heady excitement of first love will consume them both, but the pain of unintentional betrayal will test their friendship.

Alan Groombridge had a fantasy. Husband to a woman he didn't like, father of two children he had never wanted,and manager of the second smallest branch of the Anglian-Victoria bank in the country, Alan was doomed to a life of domestic boredom and tedious routine.All that saved him was that one fantasy: stealing enough of the bank's money to allow him just one year of freedom -one year in which to live a different sort of life. But one day there was no more dreaming and no more games.

There are only two things in life that interest Stanley: solving crossword puzzles, and getting his hands on his mother-in-law’s money. For 20 years, the puzzles have been his only pleasure, the money his only dream. It has never occurred to Stanley that his mother-in-law would try to outsmart him and the money would never be his. Until now. It is only now that Stanley, so clever at misleading double meanings and devious clues, decides to construct a puzzle of his own - and so give death a helping hand.

Just moved into a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly's for a pint, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and a pink shirt comes over and sits down. He seems to know Victor's name and to remember him from secondary school. His name is Fitzpatrick. Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes, too, the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers.

When Glasgow journalist Shona McGilvery moves with her partner Mikey and their baby to an idyllic cottage in rural Scotland, they believe that all that lies ahead of them is happiness. But with Mikey working offshore, the frightening isolation of the Aberdeenshire countryside begins to drive her insane.... That is, until she is rescued by a new friendship with the enchanting Valentina. She has the perfect home, the perfect man, and a charismatic new best friend - or does she? As her fairytale life begins to unravel, the deep dark wood becomes the least of her fears....

Daft Wee Stories is Limmy’s first book. It is a collection of stories. There are short stories. There are longer stories. There are stupid stories. There are thoughtful stories. There are upside-down stories. There are normal-way-up stories. There are weird stories. There are less weird stories. There are really weird stories. There is nothing else like it. Have a listen.

Nineteen thirty-four, London. Into the decaying cul-de-sac of Bleeding Heart Square steps aristocratic Lydia Langstone fleeing an abusive marriage. However, unknown to Lydia, a dark mystery haunts Bleeding Heart Square. What happened to Miss Penhow, the middle-aged spinster who owns the house and who vanished four years earlier? Why is a seedy plain-clothes policeman obsessively watching the square? What is making struggling journalist Rory Wentwood so desperate to contact Miss Penhow?

Evacuated from Blitz-battered London, shy and genteel Elizabeth White is sent to stay with the boisterous O'Connors in Kilgarret, Ireland. It is the beginning of an unshakeable bond between Elizabeth and Aisling O'Connor, a friendship which will endure through 20 turbulent years of change and chaos, joy and sorrow, soaring dreams and searing betrayals.

The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village. Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, Trumpet by Jackie Kay is a starkly beautiful modern classic about the lengths to which people will go for love.

Mary Hetherington was a mother who dominated her family. And when David brought home Sarah from the "wrong end" of the 15 Streets, a girl who brought life and laughter into her dustless house, she soon took against her.

Loveday Cardew prefers books to people, and her job in a York bookshop is her refuge. If you look carefully, you might see the first lines of the novels she loves the most tattooed on her skin, but there are secrets Loveday will never share. Into the bookshop come a poet, a lover, a friend and three mysterious deliveries, each of which stirs unsettling memories she wants to forget. Turning the pages of her past will be the hardest thing Loveday has ever done. Can she trust those around her?

As Britain stands alone against a monstrous enemy, the inhabitants of Pearl Street face hardship and heartbreak with courage and humour. The war touches each of them in a different way: for Annie Poulson, a widow, it means never-ending worry when her twin boys are called up and sent to France; Sheila Reilly's husband, Cal, faces the terror of U-Boat attacks; Eileen Costello is liberated from a bitter, loveless marriage when her husband is sent to Egypt.

When Simon Serrailler was a rookie constable with the Met, he did something reckless in the course of a night's work which caused a man's death. But his act was praised by his colleagues, and he was called a hero. Years later, now a detective chief superintendent who has been badly injured in the course of duty, he receives a medal for bravery at Buckingham Palace while recollecting that fateful night of his early career, when chance disguised itself as bravery.

The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village. Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, Trumpet by Jackie Kay is a starkly beautiful modern classic about the lengths to which people will go for love.

Loveday Cardew prefers books to people, and her job in a York bookshop is her refuge. If you look carefully, you might see the first lines of the novels she loves the most tattooed on her skin, but there are secrets Loveday will never share. Into the bookshop come a poet, a lover, a friend and three mysterious deliveries, each of which stirs unsettling memories she wants to forget. Turning the pages of her past will be the hardest thing Loveday has ever done. Can she trust those around her?

Jamaica, 1938. Gloria Campbell is sixteen years old when a single violent act alters the course of her life forever. Taking along her younger sister, she flees their hometown to forge a new life in Kingston. But in a capital city awash with change, a black woman is still treated as a second-class citizen. From a room in a boarding house and a job at a supply store, Gloria finds her way to a house of ill repute on the edge of the city, intrigued by the glamorous, financially independent women within.

"It was in the first week of October in the year 1391 that I first came face to face with the man who owned me… the man whose lightest word was to us, his villeins, weightier than the King’s law or the edicts of our Holy Father…” So began the story of Martin Reed - a serf whose resentment of the automatic rule of his feudal lord finally flared into open defiance.

Introducing Stuart, Gillian and Oliver. One by one they take their turn to speak straight out to the camera - and give their side of a contemporary love triangle. What begins as a comedy of misunderstanding slowly darkens and deepens into a compelling exploration of the quagmires of the heart.

Unlike the other residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is elegant, smart and in control. Only Jenny, her care assistant, knows that she harbours a painful secret, and only she can prevent Stella from carrying it to the grave. As the women talk, Jenny pieces together the answers to many questions that arise: Why has she kept possession of a house that her family don’t know about? What happened there that holds the key to a distant tragedy?

When Evelyn Dooley married her high school sweetheart James, she thought she was set for life. Now she’s 28, single, and fleeing to Dublin from her hometown to avoid the gossip surrounding their breakup...all because of a test-your-relationship board game. This was not in her five-year plan. Then, a chance encounter with gorgeous musician, Danny, leads to an unlikely friendship, and soon the pair are running music nights together in one of the oldest pubs in Dublin.

A novel that grips from the very beginning and that will live long in the memory, The Last Thing I Remember is Deborah Bee's startling debut thriller. Sarah is in a coma. Her memory is gone - she doesn't know how she got there. And she doesn't know how she might get out. But then she discovers that her injury wasn't an accident. And that the assailant hasn't been caught. Unable to speak, see or move, Sarah must use every clue that she overhears to piece together her own past.

Miranda's sister Kerri has a new boyfriend. He's a handsome charmer who seems to dote on Kerri. But Brendan isn't the man he says he is. Miranda should know. She broke off her own affair with him just a few weeks ago when she found him reading her diary.

Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write. But he slides instead into a self-induced poverty that destroys his creativity and his spirit. Only Rosemary, ever-faithful Rosemary, has the strength to challenge his commitment to his chosen way of life.

At the Man with a Load of Mischief, they found the dead body stuck in a keg of beer. At the Jack and Hammer, another body was stuck out on the beam of the pub’s sign, replacing the mechanical man who kept the time. Two pubs. Two murders. One Scotland Yard inspector called in to help. Detective Chief Inspector Richard Jury arrives in Long Piddleton and finds everyone in the postcard village looking outside of town for the killer - except for one Melrose Plant....

Polly has two sets of memories.... One is normal: school, home, friends. The other, stranger memories begin nine years ago, when she was 10 and gate-crashed an odd funeral in the mansion near her grandmother's house. Polly's just beginning to recall the sometimes marvelous, sometimes frightening adventures she embarked on with Tom Lynn after that. And then she did something terrible, and everything changed. But what did she do? Why can't she remember? Polly must uncover the secret, or her true love - and perhaps Polly herself - will be lost.

This first entry in John Dos Passos's celebrated U.S.A. trilogy paints a grand picture of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century.