They wanted a honeymoon adventure. They found a place of nightmares.

Arriving in the Scottish highlands, Martin and Sue decide to escape their luxury hotel, heading out for a night of back-to-basics living in an abandoned shack. When a storm strikes, they find themselves stranded in the simple hut, miles from anywhere and completely isolated. As gentle bickering leads to violent arguments, Sue starts to sense they are not truly alone – especially when a deep, dark presence seems to takes hold of the pair.

With no way to escape, Sue and Martin must try to hold on to their sanity as the shelter quickly becomes a prison – and their thoughts begin to turn murderous…

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011, Snowdrops is the debut of 2011: A stunning novel of moral ambiguity, uncertainty and corruption.

Snowdrops. That’s what the Russians call them – the bodies that float up into the light in the thaw. Drunks, most of them, and homeless people who just give up and lie down into the whiteness, and murder victims hidden in the drifts by their killers.

Nick has a confession. When he worked as a high-flying British lawyer in Moscow, he was seduced by Masha, an enigmatic woman who led him through her city: the electric nightclubs and intimate dachas, the human kindnesses and state-wide corruption. Yet as Nick fell for Masha, he found that he fell away from himself; he knew that she was dangerous, but life in Russia was addictive, and it was too easy to bury secrets – and corpses – in the winter snows…

A legendary ruin. An ancient mystery. Will unveiling the past transform the future?

San Francisco, 2007. Madeline Moretti is grieving for her fiancé. Nothing brings her joy any more, and Maddie’s grandmother, a fiery Italian, sends her to Tuscany to heal. Here, Maddie is immersed in the mystery of a ruined villa. Destroyed centuries ago in a legendary storm on the Eve of St Agnes, it has been known ever since as the Casa al Vento – the House of the Wind.

Tuscany, 1347. Mia hasn’t spoken since her mother’s death, and lives in silence with her beloved aunt. One dark night, a couple seek refuge in their villa. Used to welcoming passing pilgrims, Mia is entranced by the young bride’s radiance and compassion, but mystified by her reluctance to reveal even her name. Where has she come from, and why must her presence be a secret?

Centuries apart, each searching for a way to step into her future, Mia and Maddie will be haunted by the myth of the woman who walked unscathed from the ruins of the House of the Wind.

The Great War robbed a generation of friends, lovers and their gilded youth. In Freddie Watson’s case, it took his beloved brother and at times, his peace of mind. Haunted by his loss and fearing for his sanity, he still seeks some sort of resolution.

In the winter of 1928, Freddie is travelling through southern France – which has also seen too much bloodshed over the years – when his car spins off the road during a storm. Shaken, he stumbles into the woods and takes refuge in an isolated village. There he meets Fabrissa, a beautiful young woman also mourning a lost generation.

Over the course of a single night, Fabrissa and Freddie share their stories. And by the time dawn breaks, he finds himself holding the key to a heartbreaking mystery.

By turns thrilling, poignant and haunting, The Winter Ghosts is a story of lives touched by war, transformed by courage and redeemed by love.

It was less an interview than an amiable conversation over a walk in the park.  George Smiley had been sent to speak to a high-ranking civil servant after an anonymous tip-off that he was a security risk.  It was a formality – and the two men liked each other.  Why then did it apparently drive the poor man to despair?  And why was he found dead the next day, the victim of an apparent suicide?

Call For The Dead launched John le Carre’s unparalleled career as a novelist, and introduces one of fiction’s most famous spies – George Smiley, who is both brilliant and unremarkable.

John Huffam was to learn a great many things before he got very old: he would know why humans toiled under inhuman conditions, why the poor scavenged in rotting sewers and why both the sane and the mad starved in asylums. Yet he did not know why an unnamed menace had haunted his childhood, hounded his mother and now threatened his own life.

 The answer lay in a document written half a century before, a document that had provoked avarice, hatred, murder and lunacy, that had determined the fates of five families and had set the pattern of John’s own life. A pattern that was woven around, and would be unravelled within, the mysterious symbol of five – the Quincunx.

For the first time in six years, Jordan returns from California to Utah, to visit his mother – in jail.  As a young boy he was expelled from his family’s secretive polygamous Mormon sect.  Now his father has been found shot dead in front of his computer, and one of his many wives – Jordan’s mother – is accused of the crime.

Over a century earlier, Ann Eliza Young, nineteenth wife of Brigham Young, second Prophet of the Mormon Church, tells the sensational story of how she battled for her freedom from her powerful husband, to lead a crusade to end polygamy in the United States.  Bold, shocking and gripping, The 19th Wife expertly weaves together these two narratives in an enthralling epic of love, family, murder and faith.

protect the diamonds
survive the clubs
dig deep through the spades
feel the hearts

Ed Kennedy is an underage cabdriver without much of a future. He’s pathetic at playing cards, hopelessly in love with his best friend, Audrey, and utterly devoted to his coffee-drinking dog, the Doorman. His life is one of peaceful routine and incompetence until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery.

That’s when the first ace arrives in the mail.

That’s when Ed becomes the messenger.

Chosen to care, he makes his way through town helping and hurting (when necessary) until only one question remains: Who’s behind Ed’s mission?

A 2005 Michael L. Printz Honor Book and recipient of five starred reviews, I Am the Messenger is a cryptic journey filled with laughter, fists, and love.

There are pugs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

Hope McNeill has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for years, but this is the first time she’s been able to bring along her pug, Max. (Officially at least. Previously she’s had to smuggle him in inside her tote bag.)

The occasion: a special “Pug Night” party in honor of a deep-pocketed donor. Max and his friends are having a ball stalking the hors d’oeuvres and getting rambunctious, and making Hope wonder if this is also the last time she gets to bring Max to the museum.

But when a prized painting goes missing, the Met needs Hope’s–and Max’s–help. In her quest for the culprit, Hope searches for answers with an enigmatic detective, a larger-than-life society heiress, a lady with a shih tzu in a stroller, and her arguably intuitive canine. With luck, she’ll find some inspiration on her trips to Pug Hill before the investigation starts going downhill…

Libby has a nice life with a gorgeous husband and a big home by the sea. But over time she is becoming more unsure if Jack has ever loved her, and if he is over the death of Eve, his first wife.

When fate intervenes in their relationship, Libby decides to find out all she can about the man she hastily married and the seemingly perfect Eve. Eventually Libby stumbles across some startling truths about Eve, and is soon unearthing more and more devastating family secrets. Frightened by what she finds and the damage it could cause, Libby starts to worry that she too will end up like the first woman Jack loved…

Tense and moving, The Woman He Loved Before explores if the love you want is always the love you need or deserve.

Fresh out of university and in disgrace, Lexie Sinclair is waiting for life to begin. When the bohemian, sophisticated Innes Kent turns up by chance on her doorstep in rural Devon, she realises that she can wait no longer, and leaves for London. There, at the heart of the 1950s Soho art scene, Lexie carves out a new life for herself with Innes at her side.

In the present day, Elina and Ted are reeling from the difficult birth of their first child. As Elina struggles to reconcile the demands of motherhood with her sense of herself as an artist, Ted is disturbed by memories of his own childhood – memories that don’t tally with his parents’ version of events.

As Ted begins to search for answers, so an extraordinary portrait of two women is revealed. Separated by fifty years, Lexie and Elina are connected in ways that neither of them could ever have expected?

Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder – and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family.

He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet’s disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vangers are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves.

“My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from out neighbourhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertiliser.”

This is Susie Salmon, speaking from heaven – which looks a lot like her school playground, with the good kind of swing sets, councellors to help newcomers adjust, and friends to room with. Everything Susie wants appears as soon as she thinks of it – except the one thing she wants most: to be back with the people she loved on earth.

Nothing can break the bond between sisters…

When Beatrice gets a frantic call in the middle of Sunday lunch to say that her younger sister, Tess, is missing, she boards the first flight home to London. But as she learns about the circumstances surrounding her sister’s disappearance, she is stunned to discover how little she actually knows of her sister’s life – and unprepared for the terrifying truths she must now face. The police, Beatrice’s fiance and even their mother accept they have lost Tess, but Beatrice refuses to give up on her. So she embarks on a dangerous journey to discover the truth, no matter the cost.