Treat your ears with these brand-new audiobooks on our BorrowBox service, free to listen to with your library card! Includes titles by Ann Cleeves, Matt Haig, and Phil Rickman.
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Flashlight
Susan Choi
One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned.
The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels.
Flashlight is a masterpiece that moves between the post-war Korean immigrant community in Japan, to suburban America, and the North Korean regime, to tell the astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of twentieth century.
The Mill on the Shore
Ann Cleeves
Meg Morrissey refuses to believe that her husband James committed suicide.
James was in high spirits because he’d finally completed his long awaited autobiography. He didn’t leave a suicide note. But even more suspiciously the record of his life’s environmental achievement, his magnum opus, has gone missing. Troubled, Meg calls in amateur sleuths George and Molly Palmer-Jones to investigate.
They soon uncover that life in the Morrissey family is not as idyllic as it seems – relations with ex-wife Cathy are not as friendly as Meg makes out and James appears to have fallen for another women. But the disappearance of his autobiography is most puzzling of all, did he uncover a secret so damaging someone was prepared to kill for it?
George and Molly must try to fit together the missing pieces of information to reveal who could have wanted James dead…
Here One Moment
Liane Moriarty
All strangers. All unsuspecting. Each with a life heading in a particular direction – or so they imagine.
Because an elderly woman is about to step into each of their paths. In just a few words, she will make a prediction, tying herself to all of them. And, in being bound to her, these disparate strangers will all face similar existential dilemmas…
Who is this woman? Is she a genuine clairvoyant? A charlatan? The answer to prayers, or a harbinger of nightmares?
What she will prove to be is an agent of chaos, fraying relationships, putting entire futures into doubt and causing the most ordered of lives to unravel in the most unexpected of ways…
Midwinter of the Spirit
Phil Rickman
Diocesan Exorcist – a job viewed by the Church of England with such extreme suspicion that they changed the name. It’s Deliverance Consultant now. Still, it seems no job for a woman.
But when the Bishop offers it to Merrily Watkins – parish priest and single mum – she’s in no position to refuse.
It starts badly for Merrily and gets no easier. As an early winter slices through the old city of Hereford, a body is found in the River Wye, an ancient church is desecrated and signs of evil appear in the cathedral itself, where the tomb of a medieval saint lies in pieces.
The Life Impossible
Matt Haig
When retired Maths teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.
Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the Balearics Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended.
What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.
Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.
Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language
Adam Aleksic
From the rise of leetspeak and words such as “unalive” to the trend of adding “-core” to different influencer aesthetics, the internet has ushered in an unprecedented linguistic upheaval.
We’re entering an entirely new era of etymology, heralded by the invisible forces driving social media algorithms. And with over 7 billion internet users uploading over 2.5 quintillion bytes of media every day, the sheer volume of potential new words is astounding.
In Algospeak, online etymologist Adam Aleksic shines a light on the roots of words that we don’t realise have come from unexpected places – from incel culture, from the innovation of users trying to get around content moderation algorithms, from the marketing speak that has invaded our personal lives. New slang emerges and goes viral overnight. Accents are shaped or erased on YouTube. Grammatical rules, loopholes, and patterns surface and transform our interactions, social norms and habits.
Algospeak tells, through words, the bigger social story of how language shapes us, just as much as we shape it.