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The long-awaited new novel from Salley Vickers, bestselling and much-loved author of Miss Garnet's Angel and The Other Side of You.Violet Hetherington has taken the rash step of joining a transatlantic cruise ship to New York to visit Edwin, an old friend. As she makes the six day crossing, she relives the traumatic events that led to her losing Edwin's friendship, and abandoning her career as a poet, for the safety of marriage and domesticity.Despite her natural reserve, she meets a rich variety of passengers travelling with her, who affect her understanding of her own past. Most significantly, she meets Dino, the dance host, whose motives in befriending Vi are shady, but who teaches her to ballroom dance – and inadvertently helps her to recover from her past.Moving between the late sixties and the present day, Dancing Backwards is written with the lightness of touch and psychological insight which characterise Salley Vickers' acclaimed work. This bittersweet novel is subtle, poignant and wonderfully entertaining.

Two travellers arrive in an unknown city: Ulya and Nicolas are asylum seekers, hoping for safety and a better life, but instead they find a haunted metropolis whose people live in fear of the monsters in the shadows. When her brother disappears, Ulya learns how easily anyone can fall into the city’s underworld.Communion Town maps this imaginary city, and explores the ways in which it invents itself by creating outcasts and scapegoats. As the novel unfolds in different parts of the city, we encounter a lovelorn folk-singer, an introverted child, a repressed detective, a slaughterhouse worker, a lost tourist, a ghost and a gigolo. From their lonely voices we gather the many-faceted story of the city: a place imagined differently by each citizen as he or she searches for connection, transformation or escape.Mixing the everyday with the gothic and the fantastic, Communion Town is a novel that deals in the uncanny: in doubles and repetitions; in things half-glimpsed; in desires half-acknowledged. It is a virtuosic piece of writing from a young writer of true talent.

A new novel from one of Britain’s best-loved writer, Brian Aldiss OBE, set in and around his home-town of Oxford.Set in contemporary Oxford, this incisive novel charts the breakdown of a community.A new mosque is to be built – on the site of a derelict pub – and gradually, half-hidden prejudices begin to surface, and relationships between the residents start to sour.Drawing closely on current affairs, this novel investigates what it means to live in a post 7/7 world, where paranoia, prejudice and fear compete with tolerance and diversity.

For the first time all of Carol Shields’ remarkable short stories – some previously unpublished – are gathered together in one volume.‘Carol Shields’ stories have given me happiness, not just pleasure’ Alice MunroIn the Collected Stories we bring together Carol Shields’ original short-story volumes, Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival, as well as many stories not previously published in the UK, including ‘Segue’, her last work.In these stories the author combines the dazzling virtuosity and wise maturity that won so many readers to her prize-winning novels such as The Stone Diaries and Unless.

A deeply moving and resonant novel about the power of love and family feeling in the face of suffering and change.A beloved only child, Sarah was brought up on a wild island, where the people were as one with the landscape and where her father, George, farmed geese. After her mother died of cancer, he brought her up alone, but their lives were further twisted by trouble after Sarah was jilted by Zeke, an island boy, who left her pregnant and devastated. Shortly afterwards, Zeke was killed in a car crash, and Sarah fled the island for a new life on the mainland, leaving her father feeling rejected and angry.Now, fourteen years later, Sarah, making a living through her quilting business called Cloud Nine, is herself recovering from cancer. The illness threatened more than her life – the trauma brought to a head her difficult relationship with her son, Mike, who finally left her to go and live with his grandfather.It is at this point that their lives elide with another tragic family. Will Burke, the pilot she charters to visit Mike, has never recovered from the death of his own teenage son, which wrecked his marriage and has left his daughter Susan like a piece of flotsam drifting between Will, her mother and her mother’s ghastly new husband. In the tense, emotive story that unfolds, all their lives are changed as love, hope and endurance eventually find a way to transcend suffering.

A festive collection of short stories by No. 1 bestseller, Cathy Kelly, the natural heir to Maeve Binchy.Lose yourself in this warm and wonderful collection of short stories from bestselling Irish storyteller Cathy Kelly.From weddings and summer holidays to Christmas with uninvited family or long-lost friends returning, this anthology captures the hopes, tears, laughter and loves of all kinds of women and their families and friends with Cathy’ s inimitable warmth.The holiday season comes but once a year, so curl up by a roaring fire and let the magic reel you in…

An incredible debut novel: a coming of age tale set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, ‘full of daring, authenticity and wit’ (Rachel Cusk).LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE‘The milkman found her. On Prince Philip Playing Fields. He crossed the dew-soaked grass toward what he took to be a bundle of clothes, but then he came across a discarded shoe, and then t’ mutilated body. her name wor Wilma McCann.’Leeds, late 1975 and a body has been found on Prince Philip Playing Fields. Ricky, teenage delivery van boy for Corona pop, will be late for The Matterhorn Man. In the years that follow until his capture, the Yorkshire Ripper and Rick’s own life draw ever closer with unforeseen consequences. Set in a time in England's history of upheaval and change – both personal and social – this is a story told in an unforgettable voice.

The gripping new novel featuring unorthodox Edinburgh lawyer Brodie McClennan, who must investigate a ritualistic murder in the Highlands in order to clear her name.A woman is lured to a lonely ruin in the Scottish Highlands and strangled almost to the point of death. As she prays for mercy, her hopes are shattered when her unseen assailant begins to carve her face, and she is left alone to bleed her life's blood into a shallow grave.In Edinburgh, 29–year–old lawyer Brodie McLennan is coming to terms with the discovery of the family she never knew she had. She must also fight the increasing resentment of the Edinburgh Bar. As the complaints to the Law Society about Brodie pile up, her grandfather and legal legend Lord MacGregor fears that Brodie is in danger and advises that to protect her reputation, she should become a crown prosecutor-accept 'silk'–something that rankles with Brodie's natural inclination to protect the underdog. When Lord McGregor's prophecy is fulfilled and Brodie is implicated in the disappearance of a fellow lawyer, she realises he is right–she is now a marked woman.Then the missing woman is found in a remote mental hospital, the walls of her cell smeared in blood, the name 'Brodie' written over and over…Back in Edinburgh, a knife is found with Brodie's fingerprints. It seems that someone is out to stop Brodie's rise to the top–at any cost…

A stunning and sumptuous tale of the boundaries between love and hate, truth and deception, set against the anticipation for the Kumbh Mela: the biggest festival in India.When Mia, acutely depressed by the suicide of her artist father, meets Karna, a young and mesmeric guru who bears a startling resemblance to a figure in her father’s painting, she feels compelled to follow him all the way from London to India. And if marrying Vik, the suave businessman her mother so approves of, is the way to get there, so be it.Once in India, Mia learns about Vik’s mother, Indi. She is a figure of great power, inordinately beautiful and gifted, but blind. Her rage ensnares and yet rejects anyone who tries to come close. Mia must travel to the Kumbh Mela, the festival on the banks of the Ganges, to make sense of everything: her own confused love for two men, Indi’s anguish, her own family’s history. And yet when she arrives, nothing is as she thought it would be; through a change in perspective, she comes to realise the limitations of vision…This is a remarkable tale of hope, destruction and ultimately of rebirth, as one young woman explores the shifting sands of illusion and truth.

This is the story of women when they were wimmin: of that blossoming in seventies England of hope, freedom, equality and sisterhood; and of what happened next…Big Women is the tale of Medusa, a feminist publishing house founded one balmy evening at sedate Chalcot Crescent in a flurry of argument, peace-making and naked dancing.The novel is everything and more we expect from Fay Weldon, not just a work of literature but an energising drop into the pool of social complacency – a feisty, no-holds-barred portrait of four women’s attempts and failures to create a new life. There’s Layla, noisy, darlingish, high-profile. Alice, the academic, the philosopher, the – eventually – Glastonbury witch. Nancy: boring, sensible Nancy, the only one with any business nous. And Stephanie, the one who leaves her husband and children to embrace politics, men, other women… Their stories are intertwined with twenty years of all our lives – blissful, rage-filled, treacherous, redemptive.