Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn

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Gone Girl - Gillian FlynnGone Girl
Gillian Flynn

‘What are you thinking, Amy?’

The question I’ve asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: ‘What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?’

Just how well can you ever know the person you love? This is the question that Nick Dunne must ask himself on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police immediately suspect Nick. Amy’s friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn’t true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they aren’t his. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone. So what really did happen to Nick’s beautiful wife? And what was in that half-wrapped box left so casually on their marital bed?

In this novel, marriage truly is the art of war…

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The Forgotten Garden – Kate Morton

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The Forgotten Garden - Kate MortonThe Forgotten Garden
Kate Morton

1913. On the eve of the First World War, a little girl is found abandoned after a gruelling ocean voyage from England to Australia. All she can remember of the journey is that a mysterious woman she calls the Authoress had promised to look after her. But the Authoress has vanished without a trace.

1975. Now an old lady, Nell travels to England to discover the truth about her parentage. Her quest leads her to Cornwall, and to a beautiful estate called Blackhurst Manor, which had been owned by the Mountrachet family. What has prompted Nell’s journey after all these years?

2005. On Nell’s death, her granddaughter, Cassandra, comes into a surprise inheritance. Cliff Cottage, in the grounds of Blackhurst Manor, is notorious amongst the locals for the secrets it holds – secrets about the doomed Mountrachet family. But it is at Cliff Cottage, abandoned for years, and in its forgotten garden, that Cassandra will uncover the truth about the family and why the young Nell was abandoned all those decades before.

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Tuesdays with Morrie – Mitch Albom

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Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch AlbomTuesdays With Morrie
Mitch Albom

Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, and gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it. For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago.

Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded. Wouldn’t you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you? Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man’s life. Knowing he was dying of ALS – or motor neurone disease – Mitch visited Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final ‘class’: lessons in how to live.

Tuesdays with Morrie is a magical chronicle of their time together, through which Mitch shares Morrie’s lasting gift with the world.

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Don’t Look Now and Other Stories – Daphne Du Maurier

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Don't Look Now and Other Stories - Daphne Du MaurierDon’t Look Now and Other Stories
Daphne du Maurier

John and Laura have come to Venice to try and escape the pain of their young daughter’s death. But when they encounter two old women who claim to have second sight, they find that instead of laying their ghosts to rest they become caught up in a train of increasingly strange and violent events. Adapted into a terrifying film starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.

The four other haunting, evocative stories in this volume also explore deep fears and longings, secrets and desires: ‘Not After Midnight’, in which a lonely teacher investigates a mysterious American couple; ‘A Border Line Case’, in which a young woman confronts her father’s past and his associations with the IRA; ‘The Way of the Cross’, in which a party of pilgrims to Jerusalem encounter strange phenomena in the Garden of Gethsemane; and ‘The Breakthrough’, in which a scientist claims to be able to trap the soul at the point of death…

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Wicked – Gregory Maguire

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Wicked - Gregory MaguireWicked
Gregory Maguire

When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in the classic novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, we heard only one side of the story. But what of her arch-nemesis, the mysterious witch?

Long before Dorothy drops in, a girl is born in Oz with emerald-green skin. Elphaba, who will grow up to become the infamous witch, is a smart, prickly and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived ideas about the nature of good and evil.

Taking readers past the yellow brick road and into a phantasmagoric world, Gregory Maguire’s novel is a rich and triumphant feat of imagination and allegory.

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Elijah’s Mermaid – Essie Fox

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Elijah's Mermaid - Essie FoxElijah’s Mermaid
Essie Fox

Since she was found as a baby, floating in the Thames one foggy night, web toed Pearl has been brought up in a brothel known as the House of Mermaids. Cosseted and pampered there, it is only when her fourteenth birthday approaches that Pearl realises she is to be sold to the highest bidder.

Meanwhile, orphaned twins, Lily and Elijah, have shared an idyllic childhood, raised in a secluded country house with their grandfather, Augustus Lamb. But when Lily and Elijah visit London, a chance meeting with Pearl will have repercussions for all of them, binding their fates together in a dark and dangerous way…

In this bewitching, sensual novel, Essie Fox has written a tale of obsessive love and betrayal, moving from the respectable worlds of Victorian art and literature, and into the shadowy demi-monde of brothels, asylums and freak show tents – a world in which nothing and no one is quite what they seem to be.

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The Somnambulist – Essie Fox

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The Somnambulist - Essie FoxThe Somnambulist
Essie Fox

Every heart holds a secret. But some secrets are best left buried…

When she spots an enigmatic stranger in the audience one night at Wilton’s Music Hall, seventeen-year-old Phoebe Turner doesn’t realise her lie is about to change. Mr Samuels offers her the job of companion to his reclusive wife at Dinwood Court – a grand country house that may well be haunted and which holds the darkest of secrets.

Leaving the hustle of London’s East End, Phoebe finds herself disturbed by her new surroundings. She awakes to hear sobbing in the night and it soon becomes clear that she has not been chosen to work there by chance…

A spellbinding tale of lost love, grief, murder and madness in Victorian England.

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