Archives de catégorie : London 2023 Fiction

THE OPPOSITE OF SUCCESS d’Eleanor Elliott Thomas

Lorrie Hope has a steady job, a partner she adores and two wonderful kids. All she wants is to get promoted, love her body and end global warming. By Friday. What could possibly go wrong?

THE OPPOSITE OF SUCCESS
by Eleanor Elliott Thomas
Text Publishing (Australia), October 2023

Lorrie Hope is about to have the worst day of her life.
Lorrie has been stuck for years in a mediocre job at the local council, and she’s applied for a promotion she’s not entirely sure she wants. Her best friend of twenty years, Alex, is stuck in a very different mess—one that involves Lorrie’s rakish ex, Ruben; or, more accurately, his wife. Oh, and Ruben’s boss happens to be the mining magnate Sebastian Glup, who is sponsoring Lorrie’s most important project at work…
As the day spirals from bad to worse to frankly unhinged, Lorrie and Alex are forced to reconsider what they can expect from life, love and middle management. THE OPPOSITE OF SUCCESS is a hilarious debut novel about our work, motherhood, friendship and ambition.

Eleanor Elliott Thomas worked for many years as a lawyer before devoting herself to writing full-time. She is a graduate of the Faber Writing Academy’s ‘Writing a Novel’ course, in which she was taught by Sophie Cunningham and Emily Bitto. She lives with her partner and two daughters in Naarm/Melbourne. THE OPPOSITE OF SUCCESS is her first novel.

NO ONE CAN KNOW de Kate Alice Marshall

The author of What Lies in the Woods returns with a novel about three sisters, two murders, and too many secrets to count.

NO ONE CAN KNOW
by Kate Alice Marshall
Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, January 2024

Emma hasn’t told her husband much about her past. He knows her parents are dead and she hasn’t spoken to her sisters in years. Then they lose their apartment, her husband gets laid off, and Emma discovers she’s pregnant―right as the bank account slips into the red.
That’s when Emma confesses that she has one more asset: her parents’ house, which she owns jointly with her estranged sisters. They can’t sell it, but they can live in it. But returning home means that Emma is forced to reveal her secrets to her husband: that the house is not a run-down farmhouse but a stately mansion, and that her parents died there.
Were murdered.
And that some people say Emma did it.
Emma and her sisters have never spoken about what really happened that night. Now, her return to the house may lure her sisters back, but it will also crack open family and small-town secrets lots of people don’t want revealed. As Emma struggles to reconnect with her old family and hold together her new one, she begins to realize that the things they have left unspoken all these years have put them in danger again.

Kate Alice Marshall is the author of the young adult novels I Am Still Alive, Rules for Vanishing, and Our Last Echoes, as well as the Secrets of Eden Eld middle grade series. She lives outside of Seattle, where she spends her time playing board games, tending a chaotic vegetable garden, and wrangling dogs and children.

WEB OF ANGELS de John M. Ford

From the brilliant author of The Dragon Waiting and Growing Up Weightless, a novel that saw the cyberpunk future with stunning clarity, years before anyone else.

WEB OF ANGELS
by John M. Ford
Tor/St. Martin’s Press, April 2024

Originally published in 1980, the legendary John M. Ford’s first published novel was an uncannily brilliant anticipation of the later cyberpunk genre—and of the internet itself.
The Web links the many worlds of humanity. Most people can only use it to communicate. Some can retrieve and store data, as well as use simple precoded programs. Only a privileged few are able to create their own software, within proscribed limits.
And then there are the Webspinners.
Grailer is Fourth Literate, able to manipulate the Web at will—and use it for purposes unintended and impossible for anyone but the most talented Webspinner. Obviously, he cannot be allowed to live.
Condemned to death at the age of nine, Grailer must go underground, hiding his skills, testing his powers- until he is ready to do battle with the Web itself.
With a new introduction from Cory Doctorow, written especially for this edition.

John M. Ford was, in his lifetime, a favorite author of many writers better known than he was, including Neil Gaiman and Robert Jordan. He won World Fantasy Awards for both his novel The Dragon Waiting and his poem « Winter Solstice, Camelot Station, » and he won the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel, Growing Up Weightless. His Star Trek™ novel, The Final Reflection, essentially created the nuanced Klingon culture seen later in the feature films, and his other novel in that universe, How Much For The Planet?, was a Star Trek™ tale told as a Gilbert & Sullivan musical, complete with songs. He was a genius. He died in 2006.

YOU CAN’T STAY HERE FOREVER de Katherine Lin

Desperate to obliterate her past, a young widow flees California for the French Riviera in this compelling debut, a tale of loss, rebirth, modern friendship, and romance that blends Sally Rooney’s wryness and psychological insight with Emma Straub’s gorgeous scene-setting and rich relationships.

YOU CAN’T STAY HERE FOREVER
by Katherine Lin
HarperCollins, June 2023
(via Sterling Lord Lieristic)

Just days after her young, handsome husband dies in a car accident, Ellie Huang discovers that he had a mistress—one of own her colleagues at a prestigious San Francisco law firm. Acting on impulse—or is it grief? rage? Probably all three—Ellie cashes in Ian’s life insurance policy for an extended stay at the luxurious Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France. Accompanying her is her free-spirited best friend, Mable Chou.
Ellie hopes that the five-star resort on the French Riviera, with its stunning clientele and floral-scented cocktails, will be a heady escape from the real world. And at first it is. She and Mable meet an intriguing couple, Fauna and Robbie, and as their poolside chats roll into wine-soaked dinners, the four become increasingly intimate. But the sunlit getaway soon turns into a reckoning for Ellie, as long-simmering tensions and uncomfortable truths swirl to the surface.
Taking the reader from San Francisco to the gilded luxury of the south of France, YOU CAN’T STAY HERE FOREVER is a sharply funny and exciting debut that explores the slippery nature of marriage, the push and pull between friends, and the interplay of race and privilege, seen through the eyes of a young Asian American woman.

Named a must-read book of summer by: Good Morning America, People, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Katherine Lin is a Bay Area attorney and writer. A graduate of Northwestern University (2011) and Stanford Law School (2014), Katherine currently represents low-income tenants as a staff attorney and clinical supervisor at a clinic at Berkeley Law School. You Can’t Stay Here Forever is her debut novel.

THE OVERNIGHTS de Ian K. Smith

#1 New York Times bestselling author Ian K. Smith brings back former Chicago detective turned private eye Ashe Cayne in this eagerly anticipated mystery in which the investigator finds himself in a race against the clock to protect a high-profile Chicago news anchor and solve the racially charged murder of a Black teen by a white police officer.

THE OVERNIGHTS
(An Ashe Cayne Mystery, 3)
by Ian K. Smith
Amistad, May 2023
(via Aaron M. Priest Literary)

Someone wants Morgan Shaw dead—or so the beautiful, brilliant, and hugely popular evening news anchor of top-rated Chicago TV station WLTV believes. Fearing for her safety, she turns to P. I. Ashe Cayne for protection. Though he sympathizes, Ashe turns her down—he’s not a bodyguard. But when Morgan’s car tires are slashed and she’s threatened again, Ashe agrees to help her.
Her mysterious assailant isn’t the only threat worrying Morgan. She’s nervous about the upcoming “sweeps”—the all-important overnight ratings period—which will determine Chicago’s highest-rated television newscast and the city’s number-one anchor. Morgan has long been Chicago’s news queen. Now, though her crown is in jeopardy. She refuses to lose to her crosstown rival, and will risk everything to stay on top—including an audacious investigation into the suspicious shooting of an unarmed African American man by a white cop. The explosive case and her discoveries boost her ratings—and create powerful enemies eager to protect their secrets.
To save his client and find the truth, Ashe must wade through the tangled layers of competitive local news and the deceptive schemes of its power players, and uncover the identities of those behind the murder of a seemingly innocent man.

“Chicago PI Ashe Cayne is the perfect hero for our times.”—Harlan Coben

Dr. Ian K. Smith is the number-one New York Times bestselling author of Shred: The Revolutionary Diet, as well as Super Shred: The Big Results Diet, Blast the Sugar Out!, The Clean 20, and twelve other books, with millions of copies in print. His novels included the award-winning The Blackbird Papers,  The Ancient Nine, and the first two books in the Ashe Cayne series, The Unspoken and Wolf Point. Dr. Smith is a graduate of Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, and is the medical contributor and cohost of The Rachael Ray Show.