Devotion

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort - a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other 'Bunny' and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one.

Edie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, she is sleeping with all the wrong men and she has failed at the only thing that meant anything to her: painting. No one seems to care that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing with her life beyond looking for her next hook-up. And then she meets Eric, a white, middle-aged archivist with a suburban family, including a wife who has sort-of-agreed to an open marriage and an adopted black daughter who doesn’t have a single person in her life who can show her how to do her hair.

A friendship to die for. A Ripley story for the Instagram age set in contemporary New York: a world at once sophisticated and sordid, irresistible and irresponsible, unforgettable yet unattainable. Louise is struggling to survive in New York; juggling a series of poorly paid jobs, renting a shabby flat, being catcalled by her creepy neighbour, she dreams of being a writer. And then one day she meets Lavinia. Lavinia who has everything - looks, money, clothes, friends, an amazing apartment...

After meeting through mutual friends, the 'Russian heiress' Anna Delvey and Rachel DeLoache Williams soon became inseparable. Theirs was an intoxicating world of endless excess: high dining, personal trainer sessions, a luxury holiday and Anna footed almost every bill. But after Anna's debit card was declined in a Moroccan medina whilst on holiday in a five-star luxury resort, Rachel began to suspect that her increasingly mysterious friend was not all she seemed.    

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman, trapped between her role as her alcoholic father's carer and her day job as a secretary at the prison. When the charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship.

Marin used to have it all. Married to the love of her life, she owns a chain of upscale hair salons, and Derek runs his own company. They're admired in their community and are a loving family - until their world falls apart the day their son Sebastian is taken. A year later, Marin is a shadow of herself. The FBI search has gone cold. The publicity has faded. She and her husband rarely speak. With her sanity ebbing, Marin hires a Private Investigator to pick up where the police left off. 

Samuel, the day we met I knew I’d finally found what I’ve been waiting for. You. Happiness, at last. Then you left me. And now I am alone. Everyone I love leaves in the end. But not this time. I’m not giving up on us. I’m not giving up on you. When you love someone, you never let them go. That’s why for me, this is just beginning.

Carrie's best friend has an accident and can no longer make the round-the-world trip they'd planned together, so Carrie decides to go it alone. Violet is also travelling alone, after splitting up with her boyfriend in Thailand. She is desperate for a ticket on the Trans-Siberian Express, but there is nothing available. When the two women meet in a Beijing Hotel, Carrie makes the impulsive decision to invite Violet to take her best friend's place. Thrown together in a strange country, and the cramped cabin of the train, the women soon form a bond

In her first weeks at Hawthorne College, Malin is swept up into a tight-knit circle that will stick together through all four years. There's Gemma, an insecure theater major from London; John, a tall, handsome, and wealthy New Englander; Max, John's cousin and a shy pre-med major; Khaled, a wise-cracking prince from Abu Dhabi; and Ruby, a beautiful art history major. But Malin isn't quite like the rest of her friends.

The dancer. The mother. The cop. The artist. The wife. These women live by countless unspoken rules. How to dress; who to trust; and which streets are safe and which are not. The rules grow out of a kaleidoscope of fear, anguish, power, loss and hope. Maybe it is only these rules which keep them alive. When their neighbourhood is rocked by two murders, the careful existence these women have built for themselves begins to crumble. 

Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle. Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina's relationship with her obsessive best friend and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention.... 

Twenty-nine year old Roberta has spent her whole life hungry - until the day she invents Supper Club. Supper Club is a secret society for hungry women. Women who are sick of bad men and bad sex, of hinted expectations to talk less, take less, be less. So they gather after dark and feast until they are sick. They drink and dance and roar. And, month by month, their bodies expand. At the centre of the Supper Club stands Roberta - cynical yet anxious, precocious and lost. She is seeking the answer to a simple question: if you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into?

When the eight-year-old daughter of an Oxford College Master vanishes in the middle of the night, police turn to the Scottish nanny, Dee, for answers. As Dee looks back over her time in the Master's Lodging - an eerie and ancient house - a picture of a high achieving but dysfunctional family emerges: Nick, the fiercely intelligent and powerful father; his beautiful Danish wife Mariah, pregnant with their child; and the lost little girl, Felicity, almost mute, seeing ghosts, grieving her dead mother. 

A story of love and redemption, faith and forgiveness, Ask Again, Yes reveals the way childhood memories change when viewed from the distance of adulthood - villains lose their menace, and those who appeared innocent seem less so. A story of how, if we're lucky, the violence lurking beneath everyday life can be vanquished by the power of love.

He's been looking in the windows again. Messing with cameras. Leaving notes. Supposed to be a refuge. But death got inside. When Katie Straw's body is pulled from the waters of the local suicide spot, the police decide it's an open-and-shut case. A standard-issue female suicide. But the residents of Widringham women's refuge where Katie worked don't agree. They say it's murder. Will you listen to them? An addictive literary page-turner about a crime as shocking as it is commonplace, Keeper will leave you reeling.