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

It is 1921 and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer and his steely wife Lesley a society hostess. Their lives are invigorated when Willie, an old friend of Robert's, comes to stay. Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of his day. But he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write. The more Lesley's friendship with Willie grows, the more clearly she see him as he is—a man who has no choice but to mask his true self.

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. 

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr Byrne, her best friend James helps her devise a plan to seduce him. But what begins as a harmless crush soon pushes their friendship to its limits. Over the course of a year they will find their lives ever more entwined with the Byrnes' and be faced with impossible choices and a lie that can't be taken back...

Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the light of Roos' life. That is, until the wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop visits one of Roos' backroom seances, and the two strike up a connection.

Girlie, a thirty-something Filipinx-American, works a day job at a social-media moderation centre, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She's good at it, too - dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to cauterise all her emotions when...

Misha is a jaded scriptwriter who has been working in Hollywood for decades, and has just been nominated for his first Oscar. But when he's pressured by his producers to kill off a gay character in the upcoming season finale—"for the algorithm"—Misha discovers that it's not that simple. As he is haunted by his past, and past mistakes, Misha must risk everything to find a way to do what's right—before it's too late.

Brian, an aimless slacker, works doubles at his shift job, forgets to clean his room and lays about with his friends Nik and Darby. He's been struggling to manage his transition to adulthood almost as much as his monthly transitions to a werewolf. Really, he is not great at the whole werewolf thing, and his recent murderous slip-ups have caught the attention of Tyler, a Millennial were-mentor determined to take the mythological world by storm.

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.

From rising horror star and award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke comes a nightmarish, haunting, tech-Gothic thrill ride about sorrow, memory, and the unabashed complexity of love as a transgressive act. After his husband dies, Simeon Link finds himself overcome by...

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.

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.

After Sappho is Selby Wynn Schwartz's joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th century as they battle for control over their lives; for liberation and for justice. Sarah Bernhard—Colette—Eleanora Duse—Lina Poletti—Josephine Baker—Virginia Woolf... these are just a few of the women (some famous, others hitherto unsung) sharing the minutes of a novel as fierce as it is luminous—lush and poetic; furious and funny.

When 45-year-old Adam inherits a rundown farmhouse and castle in Tuscany from a great uncle he didn’t know existed, he quits his job in Manchester to renovate the property. He’s thrilled his boyfriend of two years, newly divorced and out-of-the-closet Theo, is joining him. But Theo’s...

In West Berlin in 1989, 18-year-old Ralf has just left school and is living a final golden summer with his three best friends. They spend their days swimming, smoking and daydreaming about the future, oblivious to the storm gathering on the other side of the Berlin Wall. But an unsettling discovery about his family and a meeting with the mysterious Oz shatters everything Ralf thought he knew about love and loyalty.

Enid is many things: lesbian, serial dater, deaf in one ear, space obsessive, true crime fanatic. When she's not listening to grizzly murder podcasts, she's managing her crippling phobia of bald people and trying hard not to think about her mortifying teenage years—which is hard, when she's lost the password to her old YouTube account and the (many) vlogs that her teen self once uploaded. She's worried about herself, her depressive mother, and what the deal is with gender reveal parties.

Mickey Donnelly is smart, which isn't a good thing in his part of town. Despite having a dog called Killer and being in love with the girl next door, everyone calls him gay. He dreams of going to America, taking Wee Maggie and Ma with him to get them away from Belfast and Da. Mickey realises it's all down to him. He has to protect Ma from herself. And sometimes, you have to be a bad boy to be a good son.

When Julia flees her unhappy marriage for the handsome tailor Eve Perret, she expects her life from now on will be a challenge, not least because the year is 1911. They leave everything behind to settle in Vienna, but their happiness is increasingly diminished by Julia's longing for a child. Ada Bauer's wealthy industrialist family have sent her to Dr Freud in the hope that he can fix her mutism and do so without a scandal. But help will soon come for Ada from an unexpected quarter and change many lives irrevocably.

A statistics professor tries to survive a series of gruesome and impossibly unlikely disasters linked to a supernaturally lucky Vegas casino, while dealing with her own erasure as a bisexual, in this chilling and quick-witted horror novel. What’s happening in Vegas isn’t staying there...

Bram Stoker Award–nominee and USA Today bestseller Johanna van Veen unveils a sapphic folk-horror tour de force?perfect for fans of The VVitch and The Salt Grows Heavy. A skull’s grin is eternal… The year is 1635. Sister Ursula, a young nun fleeing the ruins of her convent, and Elsebeth, a...

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.