Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

GIRL ON WARD A de Christie Newport

Gripping historical thriller – perfect for all fans of Kate Morton and Hannah Kent.

GIRL ON WARD A
by Christie Newport
Storm Publishing, June 2024
(via Northbank Talent Management)

In 1995, journalist Olive Brown receives a threatening letter hinting at her connection to a dark past in an asylum in 1952. With a controlling and abusive husband and two young daughters to protect, Olive decides to investigate the matter herself to avoid jeopardizing her career.

Meanwhile, in 1952, Martha Littler is a pregnant teenager hiding her condition from her abusive parents. After giving birth, Martha’s baby is taken away by her parents, and she is admitted to Wynwarden Asylum, where she befriends fellow patient Lizzie. They discover the horrifying truth about the abusive treatments and atrocities happening within the asylum. As bodies begin to appear, Martha tries to seek the truth – whilst being torn between saving her sister and finding her baby.

The lives of Olive and Martha are linked in ways they could never imagine. As they begin to uncover the hidden pasts of those closest to them, there are deadly consequences.

Christie Newport is a mixed-heritage writer living in Northumberland. Since developing a rare illness as a child, Christie found reading and creating stories to be an escape. In recent years Christie has taken her writing seriously, honing her skills through courses and various brilliant opportunities. Writing crime and psychological thrillers set in her home city is her passion.

ALL AT SEA de Jonathan Whitelaw

A destination murder-mystery – think Below Deck meets Knives Out. Perfect for all fans of Only Murders In the Building.

ALL AT SEA
by Jonathan Whitelaw
HarperNorth, TBC
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Howie Temple is down on his luck and desperate for cash. A once promising action movie star, he now lives off a crumbling reputation. On his way to film a new reality TV show, which casts a team of c-list celebrities as crew aboard a luxury yacht, he meets fellow contestant, influencer-of-the-moment Cassandra Troy. The duo take an immediate dislike to each other.

After a hectic first day of filming, the pair are shocked discover that the captain of the ship has been murdered – locked in his control room, slumped over the wheel, a knife in his back. Convinced by the show’s ever-opportunistic director to keep the cameras rolling, the pair team-up to hunt the murderer.

Will the show make Howie and Cassandra bigger stars than they could ever dream of? And can they crack the case before the killer strikes again, or will they go down with this sinking ship?

Jonathan Whitelaw is a Scottish writer and journalist based in Canada, and he’s also a regular host at book events and panels, as well as a regular arts reviewer on BBC Radio Scotland’s Afternoon Show. Jonathan is a leading author in the cosy crime market. His latest series, Bingo Hall Detectives, is published by HarperNorth. There are currently two books in the series, The Bingo Hall Detectives (2022) and The Village Hall Vendetta (2023), the first of which awarded the Gilpin Hotel Prize for Fiction at this year’s Lakeland Book Awards.

THE HOUSE IN THE WATER de Victoria Darke

May Day House sits, imposing and crumbling, on its own island in the Thames.

THE HOUSE IN THE WATER
by Victoria Darke
Boldwood Books, Summer 2024
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Only accessible by boat, the house has been sitting empty for two decades. It wasn’t always empty, of course. It’s a house that’s brimming with history. During WW2, it hosted hundreds of recuperating wounded soldiers. And now, there are the ghosts – staring out at those who sail past its windows.

In the autumn of 2013, and Philip and Meredith Holland are the proud new owners of May Day House. Following a string of tragedies, the couple have moved to the area in search of a new start. But all is not what it seems in this friendly, close-knit neighbourhood. Will shadows from the past darken their new-found happiness?

Victoria Darke is the pen name for Faber Academy graduate Victoria Scott. She has a degree in English from King’s College, London and a Postgraduate Diploma in Broadcast Journalism from City University, London. She lives near London with her husband and two children, and works as a freelance journalist, media trainer and journalism tutor.

LOVING ME AFTER WE de Ginger Dean

A breakup can feel like the end of the world—but what if it could also serve as the start of a better you?

LOVING ME AFTER WE
The Essential Guide to Healing, Growing, and Thriving After a Toxic Relationship
by Ginger Dean
Flatiron, July 2024
(via Writers House)

This radical question is at the heart of celebrated psychotherapist Ginger Dean’s teachings. Dean, who specializes in helping women overcome heartbreak, knows all too well that often in our search for love and acceptance, we can find ourselves repeating dysfunctional patterns with new partners. In her essential debut, LOVING ME AFTER WE, Dean argues that not only is it possible to break this cycle, but that doing so will set you on a crucial path to healing and self discovery.

Through personal anecdotes, practical guidance, and a little bit of tough love, Ginger brings her wisdom and empathy to any reader who is ready to join the revolution of women healing their hearts so they can start the best love affair they’ve ever known—with themselves. And, of course, loving ourselves first is the key to finding healthy, fulfilling, and passionate love in our future partnerships.

For anyone looking to heal their heart, rediscover themselves, and find renewed peace and passion in their life, LOVING ME AFTER WE is here to help.

Ginger Dean is a psychotherapist and founder of Loving Me After We. Her specialty is helping women overcome heartbreak, increase self-love and confidence after a toxic relationship so they can become the best version of themselves.

SEARCHES de Vauhini Vara

From the Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of Immortal King Rao, a collection of essays exploring how technology has become an inextricable part of modern life.

SEARCHES
by Vauhini Vara
Pantheon, March 2025
(via Writers House)

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT sparked a global commotion. Now, anyone could be a novelist. Brands could generate copy and students could pen essays in mere seconds, all thanks to this frighteningly smart algorithm turned ghostwriter that could crank out pages of text at the drop of a prompt. Had writing just been democratized or destroyed?

It was a question that Vauhini Vara—tech journalist, former New Yorker business editor, and prize-winning author of the novel The Immortal King Rao—had long been grappling with. Her own relationship with ChatGPT began in 2021, when, using a beta version, she decided to use the program to attempt to write an essay about the death, two decades earlier, of her older sister. What resulted from the exercise was both a far more moving experience than she imagined, and an essay unlike any she had ever written—one that soon went viral. In the months that followed, it would be aired on the radio by This American Life; anthologized in The Best American Essays; and adapted for the stage.

In that essay, along with the others in this searing yet playful collection, Vara’s experiments with technology double as critiques of it. From Google search data to Amazon reviews to crowdsourced confessionals from both Vara’s peers and anonymous contributors, the raw material of Searches explores what it means to be alive in a world where human communication is inseparable from technology. Like the programs she explores, Vara’s voice is ever-evolving, at once experimental and deeply familiar to anyone who has experienced both wonderment and fear about our technological future, a future that has come to be seen as inevitable.

Vauhini Vara is the author of This is Salvaged, named a notable book of 2023 by Publisher’s Weekly, The New Yorker and others, and The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is also a journalist, writing for Wired and others, and an editor, most recently at The New York Times Magazine. She teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project and is the secretary of the mentorship collective Periplus.