Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Genre Fiction

Jonathan Lewis-Adey was nine when his mother, Sid, vanished entirely from his life. It’s not until he’s a grown man that Jonathan finally reconnects with his beloved lost parent, only to find, to his shock and dismay, that the woman he knew as 'Sid' in Toronto has become an elegant man named Sydney living in his native Trinidad. For nine years, Jonathan has paid regular visits to Sydney, trying with quiet desperation to rediscover the parent he adored inside this familiar stranger. 

Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant, wise-cracking local character, Barrington is a husband, father and grandfather - but he is also secretly lovers with his great childhood friend, Morris. When his marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away?

January 1965. The orphaned O'Leary siblings—Tom, Jack, Anna and Peggy—arrive in the village of Ballycrea, tight-lipped about their troubled past and desperate for a fresh start. After being met with suspicion from most of the locals, the family are thrilled when they're taken under the wing of their well-respected neighbours, Bill and Betty Nevan, who offer them work, companionship and an opportunity to fit in.

It's summer, 1984, in blue-collar Swaffham, Massachusetts. Mel is thirteen, drinking a Slush Puppie at the drugstore, when she hears a voice, ‘deep and movie-star dramatic, like Lauren Bacall': Sylvia. What follows is a story of transgender awakening. Sylvia's shameless swagger and tough-girl trans femininity is an affront to the Swaffham locals, and her presence triggers hatred and, ultimately, violence. But it is also a catalyst for Mel. Through her friendship with Sylvia, Mel comes to realize that not only is there a world beyond Swaffham, there are other ways of being.

Luke, Connor, Thea, and Violet spend their first holiday together alone in their father's house in France. The boys don't really know him—he left their mother when she was still pregnant with Connor, getting together with the girls' mother soon afterwards—and they don't really know their half-sisters, either.

Meet Sofie. The history of her sexuality begins when she loses her virginity to Walter the recruitment consultant. So, naturally, she thought that things could only improve from there. But she was wrong. It seems Sofie's been wrong about a lot of things. First, she thought she was into men: wrong. Then she met Frida and thought she was set for life: wrong again. Turns out, facing up to everything she thought she knew about herself requires a lot of trial and error.

Nerdy and shy, scholarship student Daniel de La Luna arrives at college nervous to meet his golden-haired, athletic roommate, whose Facebook photos depict a boy just like those who made Daniel's school years hell. Sam Morris is not what he had imagined, though. As the two settle into college life they drink tequila under the stars, go on long runs through snow-covered hills, explore freshman nightlife, and inch closer until they find themselves in love.

After inexperienced seventeen-year-old Isaac loses his virginity through a dating app—a disappointing yet addictive experience—he spends his final months before university escaping into a dizzying new world of casual sex with forgettable men. This all changes when he meets twenty-eight-year-old Harrison at a party. Isaac is immediately infatuated by the handsome, charismatic artist, but while they grow closer, his sense of self becomes increasingly hazy

Tom has always known exactly the person he is going to be. A successful soccer player. A man others look up to. Now, though, the bright future he imagined for himself is threatened. The Premier League academy of his boyhood has let him go. At nineteen, Tom finds himself playing for a tiny club in a town he has never heard of. But as he navigates his isolation and his desperate need for recognition, a sudden and thrilling encounter offers him the promise of an escape

Cana, Massachusetts, 1730. To the outside world, Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield and his family stand as godly pillars of their small-town community, drawing Christians from across the New World into their fold. One such Christian, physician Arthur Lyman, discovers in the minister's words a love so captivating it transcends language. As the bond between these two men grows more and more passionate, their families must contend with a tangled web of secrets, lies and judgments which threaten to destroy them in this world and the next

During a grocery run to her local shopping center, Shell Pine sees a ‘HELP NEEDED’ sign in a flower shop window. She’s just left her fiancé, lost her job, and moved home to her parents’ house. She has to make a change and bring some good into her life, so she goes inside and takes a chance. Shell realizes right away that flowers are just the good thing she's been looking for, as is Neve, the beautiful florist who wrote the sign asking for help. The thing is, Neve needs help more than Shell could possibly imagine.

London, England, 1887: At the abandoned apartment of a missing young woman, a dossier of evidence is collected and sent to the Chief Inspector of the London Police for review. It contains a curious correspondence between an inquisitive journalist, Miss Emily Gibson, and the woman Gibson thinks may be the infamous Mrs. Lovett—Sweeney Todd’s accomplice, who baked men into pies and sold them in her pie shop on Fleet Street.

Newcastle, Australia, 1972. On a sticky summer night, a choice must be made: To give in to queer desire or suppress it? To venture into the unknown or stay the course? In alternating chapters, we trace the two versions of a life that follow. In one, a teenage girl is caught kissing her neighbor and is kicked out from her home. She lands at a queer communal home in Sydney called Uranian House, where she meets the people who will forever become her family. 

The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit's best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for a quick, idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They'll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into the local dive bar like old times. But it's soon clear that this getaway only gets Kit closer to something dire and unfathomable that's been building inside her for years, ever since her sister Julie died.

Joyful, defiant and dazzling, this is the story of Rafi Aziz—a Northern boy dreaming of his name up in lights. It's 1981 in the suburbs of Blackburn and, as Rafi's mother reminds him daily, the family moved here from Pakistan to give him the best opportunities. But Rafi longs to follow his own path. Flamboyant, dramatic and musically gifted, he wants to be a Bollywood star.

The almost daughter is almost normal, because she knows how to know and also not know. She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows—almost—about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a woman: on training her body and dreaming only of escape. Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all.

Newlywed Rosie has grown disenchanted with NYC. Inspired by Instagram ads, she starts thirsting for a rural life upstate–one full of beauty and simplicity. Willing to do anything for Rosie's happiness, her tech-bro husband, Jordan, acquiesces to her vision for the future, and they offer–well above asking price–on a beautiful, historic fixer-upper in the Hudson Valley. But when Jordan suddenly loses his job on the day they close the deal, the couple is forced to rent out the property's dilapidated outbuilding.