What’s New in Week 2? Fresh Publications are here
Five Little Words
by Jackie Walsh
Description
...Can destroy your life
When new mother, Laura Caldwell, opens the card dropped through her letterbox, she expected to see a heartfelt note, congratulating her on the birth of baby Shay.
Instead, she sees a message that makes her blood run cold. 'Your husband is a murderer.' It couldn’t be true, could it? Not Conor, her adoring husband. He couldn’t be behind the brutal killing of local barmaid, Vicky. Not him.
But while Laura fights to discover the truth about her husband, she’s also holding dark secrets of her own; secrets she’s spent years trying to hide. Could the card be a desperate attempt at revenge – or could her husband really be a murderer? There’s a tangled web between this perfect couple – and the truth might just destroy them...
Myface
by Kevin Landt
Description
Myface is the perfect read for fans of Chuck Palahniuk and Bret Easton Ellis, less so for social media giants (who definitely won't want you to read this!).
With more than half the global population now on social media, this YA/NA contemporary fiction novella explores its negative side.
Catfishing can be a deadly business, especially when social media mega-influencer Angela Fox has you in her sights. When Angela Fox’s Myface account is selected as Hottest User of the Month, there’s only one problem: she isn’t real. As the fake Angela takes the world by storm, a group of strangers struggle to escape a twisted web of narcissism, deceit, and revenge.
L.A. hotshot Sebastian Shafer is so desperate to get a job, he creates an elaborate plan to convince his future employer that, if hired, Sebastian’s association with “Hollywood socialite” Angela Fox will bring in the sales. The only issue is he needs to convince the world that she actually exists.
Angela draws more attention than Sebastian anticipated when her profile gains millions of followers and fame seekers desperately try to catch her attention. But things really get out of control when a handsome young stage-play director winds up dead. The question is who pulled the trigger?
Available internationally from 8th October. £5.59 paperback in the UK.
Snow
by John Banville
Description
The incomparable Booker Prize winner’s next great crime novel—the story of a family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their ancestral home
Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family.
The year is 1957 and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford—flinty, visibly Protestant and determined to identify the murderer—faces obstruction at every turn, from the heavily accumulating snow to the culture of silence in the tight-knit community he begins to investigate.
As he delves further, he learns the Osbornes are not at all what they seem. And when his own deputy goes missing, Strafford must work to unravel the ever-expanding mystery before the community’s secrets, like the snowfall itself, threaten to obliterate everything.
Beautifully crafted, darkly evocative and pulsing with suspense, Snow is “the Irish master” (New Yorker) John Banville at his page-turning best.
Advance Praise
“[A] deceptively complex mystery with literary flourishes…[A] brilliant mix of old tropes and sadly modern evil.”
—Booklist, STARRED review
"All the trimmings of a classic mystery, elevated by Banville's immaculate, penetrating prose."
—Peter Swanson
Be Scared of Everything
by Peter Counter
Description
Horror essays that read like Chuck Klosterman filtered through H. P. Lovecraft.
Slinging ectoplasm, tombstones, and chainsaws with aplomb, Be Scared of Everything is a frighteningly smart celebration of horror culture that will appeal to both horror aficionados and casual fans. Combining pop culture criticism and narrative memoir, Counter’s essays consider and deconstruct film, TV, video games andtrue crime to find importance in the occult, pathos in Ouija boards, poetry in madness, and beauty in annihilation.
Comprehensive in scope, these essays examine popular horror media including Silent Hill, Hannibal, Hereditary, the Alien films, Jaws, The X-Files, The Terror, The Southern Reach Trilogy, Interview withthe Vampire, Misery, Gerald’s Game, The Sixth Sense, Scream, Halloween, The Blair Witch Project, The Babadook, the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Slenderman stories, alongside topics like nuclear physics, cannibalism, blood, Metallica, ritual magic, nightmares, and animatronic haunted houses.
This is a book that shows us everything is terrifying—from Pokémon to PTSD—and that horror can be just as honest, vulnerable, and funny as it is scary.
Advance Praise
“Be Scared of Everything is a command directed at everyone: punks, normies, horror film fans, UFO abductees, telemarketers, pet necromancers, you, no one will leave this book in their current form who permits the devious, curious, always-illuminating Peter Counter over their mental threshold.”—Meredith Graves
“Peter Counter’s Be Scared of Everything is a heady mix of memoir and critical essays. Discerning, unafraid to examine larger questions without easy answers, the collection is also warm and entertaining. The link between the essays and personal reflections on horror is empathy, which is why so many of us continue to be drawn to the genre.”—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World
“Peter Counter’s writing on horror is thoughtful, lively, and strangely touching. From classic movie monsters, to personal demons, to a genuinely surprising (and funny) analysis of Frasier, Be Scared of Everything faces horror’s thrills, problems and paradoxes, with shades of Noel Carroll, Eugene Thacker, and Stephen King circa Danse Macabre.”—John Semley, author of Hater: On the Virtues of Utter Disagreeability
Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters
by Emily Carpenter
Description
The bestselling author of Burying the Honeysuckle Girls returns to uncover a faith healer’s elusive and haunted past.
Dove Jarrod was a renowned evangelist and faith healer. Only her granddaughter, Eve Candler, knows that Dove was a con artist. In the eight years since Dove’s death, Eve has maintained Dove’s charitable foundation—and her lies. But just as a documentary team wraps up a shoot about the miracle worker, Eve is assaulted by a vengeful stranger intent on exposing what could be Dove’s darkest secret: murder…
Tuscaloosa, 1934: a wily young orphan escapes the psychiatric hospital where she was born. When she joins the itinerant inspirational duo the Hawthorn Sisters, the road ahead is one of stirring new possibilities. And with an obsessive predator on her trail, one of untold dangers. For a young girl to survive, desperate choices must be made.
Now, to protect her family, Eve will join forces with the investigative filmmaker and one of Dove’s friends, risking everything to unravel the truth behind the accusations against her grandmother. But will the truth set her free or set her world on fire?
A Note From the Publisher
Emily Carpenter is the bestselling author of four thrillers: Until the Day I Die, Every Single Secret, The Weight of Lies, and Burying the Honeysuckle Girls. A graduate of Auburn University, Emily has worked as an actor, producer, screenwriter, and behind-the-scenes soap opera assistant for CBS television. Raised in Birmingham, Alabama, she moved to New York City before returning to the South, where she now lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her family. Visit Emily at www.emilycarpenterauthor.com.
Advance Praise
“Prepare to be up late with this one; Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters is simply riveting. This is the kind of book where the past has a pulse—and teeth. It’s a page-turner for sure, with well-drawn, complicated characters whose choices linger long after the last page is turned.” —Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Never Have I Ever
“Emily Carpenter is the reigning queen of Southern Gothic, and Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters is a triumph. Moody, suspenseful, and gorgeously written, this novel takes readers into the seedy, sometimes savage world of Depression-era religious revivals, where believers make easy prey and grifters cloak themselves in the Word. Carpenter’s latest is a riveting tale of class, sex, spirituality, and the heavy burden of family history that lingers long after the final pages. I loved it.” —Julia Dahl, author of Invisible City