Juanita McMahon
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English
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"Costa Book Award Finalist and the Waterstones (UK) Book of the Year 2016." "I loved this book. At once numinous, intimate and wise, The Essex Serpent is a marvelous novel about the workings of life, love and belief, about science and religion, secrets, mysteries, and the complicated and unexpected shifts of the human heart--and it contains some of the most beautiful evocations of place and landscape I've ever read. It is so good its pages seem lit...
2) Fingersmith
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English
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Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby's household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves-fingersmiths-for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home. One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives-Gentleman, a somewhat elegant con man, who carries with...
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English
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When New York designer Beatrice gets a frantic call in the middle of Sunday lunch telling her that her younger sister, art student 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 about her sister's life -- and how unprepared she is for the terrifying truths she must now face. Beatrice and Tess have...
4) Affinity
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English
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“Gothic tale, psychological study, puzzle narrative…This is gripping, astute fiction that feeds the mind and senses.”—The Seattle Times
An upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting the women’s ward of Millbank prison, Victorian London’s grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Amongst Millbank’s murderers and common thieves,...
An upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting the women’s ward of Millbank prison, Victorian London’s grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Amongst Millbank’s murderers and common thieves,...
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English
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“[A] wonderful novel…Waters is almost Dickensian in her wealth of description and depth of character.”—Chicago Tribune
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners—three women and a young man with a past—whose lives, and those of their...
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners—three women and a young man with a past—whose lives, and those of their...
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"Detective Manon Bradshaw is 39, single, and miserable as sin. She has endured some of the worst dates in internet history. But she loves her job and performs it brilliantly; all she needs to rise up in the ranks is a big break. Edith Hind is a gorgeous, intrepid graduate student at Cambridge University who seems to have it all: a doting boyfriend, a devoted friend named Helena, a loving mother and a father who is a surgeon to the Royal Family. When...
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“Erotic and absorbing…Written with startling power.”—The New York Times Book Review
Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for...
Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for...
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English
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"Newly married and navigating life with a toddler as well as her adopted adolescent son, Fly Dent, Manon Bradshaw is happy to be working part-time in the cold cases department of the Cambridgeshire police force, a job which allows her to "potter in, coffee in hand and log on for a spot of internet shopping--precisely what she had in mind when she thought of work-life balance." But beneath the surface Manon is struggling with the day-to-day realities...
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"Detective Manon Bradshaw is five months pregnant and has officially given up on finding romantic love. Instead, she is in hot-pursuit of the work-life balance and parked in a cold case corridor--the price she's had to pay for a transfer back to Cambridgeshire. This is fine, she tells herself. She can devote herself to bringing up her motley collection of children--the new baby, and her adopted 12-year-old son Fly Dent. He needed a fresh start--he...
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Ever since legwarmers were cool, best friends Tara, Katherine, and Fintan have survived small-town ennui, big-city heartbreak, and endless giddy nights out on the town. But now that they've graduated to their slightly more serious thirties, only Fintan has what can honestly be called a "love life." With Tara struggling daily with her eternal diet-and her dreadful, penny-pinching boyfriend-and Katherine keeping her single existence as organized as...
11) The London train
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English
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After the death of his mother, Paul abandons his family to live life on the edge with his daughter from a previous marriage who is pregnant and living in a run-down council flat, while Cora rebels against her marriage and society.
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English
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Secrets threaten to tear a marriage apart in this compelling British mystery from the author of The Cornish Retribution. When the opportunity arises, Doctor Tristan Ainsworth jumps at the chance to move back to the idyllic Cornish village where he grew up. He hopes the change of scenery will lift his agoraphobic wife Karen out of the dark moods that have kept her withdrawn. Karen Ainsworth's past has always hung over her like a dark cloud. A chance...
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Rocco de Marco. Legendary financier and billionaire. The most important man in the room. And he'd just witnessed her filching canapés from the buffet... If waitress Gracie O'Brien's first meeting with Rocco is memorable, the second is unforgettable. For when he finds her breaking in to his office he doesn't believe her innocence - so he'll keep her close until he finds the truth. Yet it's impossible for Rocco to stay angry with the sparky redhead...
14) Roxana
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English
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Beginning with an account of her first marriage to a man she describes as a "fool," Roxana tells the tale of her unusual life in a poignant first-person narrative. As her respect for her husband's intelligence and character decline, Roxana and her husband grow apart, and he eventually abandons her to fend for herself. As a result, Roxana forsakes her virtue and turns to a life of prostitution. At first she does this only to ensure her survival, but...
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Sophie Mills has worked her Manolo Blahniks off to reach the near-top of her profession. And she's very happy with her priorities in life - her job, her neurotic cat Artemis and her passion for shoes. After all, relationships only get in the way. And as for children? She hasn't even begun to think about them yet. Until one day an unexpected visitor brings news of a strange inheritance and Sophie is suddenly, out of the blue, in sole charge of two...
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'Death is a hollow drum whose beat has measured out my adult life.' So writes Jay Macallan Stewart in her latest volume of memoirs. But nobody has ever asked whether that has been by accident or design. Nobody, that is, until Jay turns her sights on newly-wed and freshly-widowed Magda Newsam. For Magda's mother Corinna is an Oxford don who knows enough of Jay's history to be very afraid indeed. Determined to protect her daughter, Corinna turns to...
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November, 1957: Six teenage girls walk in the churning Derbyshire mists, the first chills of winter in the air. Their voices carrying across the fields, they follow the old train tracks into the dark tunnel of the Cutting. Only five appear on the other side. October, 2014: a dying mother, feverishly fixated on a friend from her childhood, makes a plea: 'Find Valerie.' Mina's elderly mother had never discussed her childhood with her daughter before....
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Six months ago, city girl Sophie Mills gave up everything to move to Cornwall. All to be with the man she thinks she loves, and his two daughters who she knows she loves. But adjusting to life as a semi-permanent mother in the countryside isn't quite as easy as Sophie imagined it would be. Designer shoes aren't nearly so readily available - not that she ever has any occasion to wear them - and her best pair of vintage Manolo's have already found their...
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Willow and Holly are identical twins. They're alike in every way, except one – Willow is afraid on the inside. For a long time Willow has felt separated from Holly by one terrible moment in time – a moment that meant Willow's life was never the same again. And when the past catches up with her, Willow realizes it's finally time for her to face her fears, and learn to laugh again.
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Teresa Lupo always envied her Aunt Sofia, whose adventurous life is in stark contrast to Teresa's by-the-book career as a police pathologist. But when Sofia vanishes in Venice on the eve of Carnival, thoughtful, methodical Teresa is the only person with a prayer of tracking her down. The only clues to Sofia's whereabouts are a mysterious letter, a bouquet of flowers, and a series of short stories by an unknown author, stories in which Sofia and Teresa...