Looking for something new to read? Browse our fiction picks for September! Includes books by Richard Osman, Dan Brown, Janice Hallett and more.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
The Impossible Fortune
Richard Osman
It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favourite criminal.
But when Elizabeth meets a wedding guest who fears for their life, the thrill of the chase is ignited once again. A villain wants access to an uncrackable code and will stop at nothing to get it. Plunged back into their most explosive investigation yet, can the gang solve the puzzle and a murder in time?
Clown Town
Mick Herron
Chief of the intelligence service, Diana Taverner, doesn’t appreciate threats. So, when a team involved in a double-agent operation during the height of the Troubles are threatening to expose the truth and lay bare the dark side of state security, Taverner turns this blackmail into an opportunity. Slow horse, River Cartwright, is out in the cold waiting to be passed fit for work. To kill time, and with his grandfather – a former head spy – long dead, River investigates the secrets of his private library where a book has gone missing. Or perhaps it never existed.
Back at Slough House, the repository for failed spies, Louisa Guy is pondering her future. Shirley Dander is wondering if the new kid, Ash Khan, is as annoying as she seems. Roddy Ho wants the team to know that his tattoo is a hummingbird, and not, as Lech Wicinski claims, a platypus.
The Two Roberts
Damian Barr
Scotland, 1933. Bobby MacBryde is on his way. After years grafting at Lees Boot Factory, he’s off to the Glasgow School of Art, to his future. On his first day he will meet another Robert, a quiet man with loose dark curls – and never leave his side. Together they will spend every penny and every minute devouring Glasgow – its botanical gardens, the Barras market, a whole hidden city – all the while loving each other behind closed doors. With the world on the brink of war, their unrivalled talent will take them to Paris, Rome, London. They will become stars as the bombs fall, hosting wild parties with the likes of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Elizabeth Smart. But the brightest stars burn fastest.
Cursed Daughters
Oyinkan Braithwaite
No man will call your house his home. And if they try, they will not have peace. So goes the family curse, long handed down from generation to generation, ruining families and breaking hearts. And now it’s Eniiyi’s turn – who, due to her uncanny resemblance to her dead aunt, Monife, is already used to her family’s strange beliefs, as well as their insistence that she is a reincarnation.
Still, when she falls in love with the handsome boy she saves from drowning, she can no longer run from her family’s history. Is she destined to live out the habitual story of love and heartbreak, or can she escape the family curse and the mysterious fate that befell her aunt?
The Killer Question
Janice Hallett
Mal and Sue Eastwood were once the kindly landlords of a local village pub, The Case is Altered. They ran a weekly pub quiz and were well liked by their customers and colleagues alike, always happy to lend a helping hand. But now The Case stands empty, its windows boarded up. What could have happened to Mal and Sue? Did The Case close because it was failing? Was it because of the body pulled from the nearby river? Or perhaps it had something to do with the quiz?
It had always been a quiet affair, five teams of locals battling it out for a small prize pot. Until one day a mysterious new team of outsiders arrived, and started winning every round. Only by sifting through the quiz sheets, the WhatsApps, and Mal and Sue’s hidden past may the truth be revealed. Someone’s not playing fair, so get the drinks in and see if you can get a perfect score.
The Elements
John Boyne
Human life is governed by the elements – water, earth, fire and air. They are fundamental to our existence. They sustain us, but they also challenge us. In ‘The Elements’, John Boyne has created a vivid kaleidoscope to reflect that contradiction: a quartet of intertwined narratives, each providing a different perspective on cause and effect from the points of view of the enabler, the accomplice, the perpetrator and the victim.
From a mother on the run from her past, to a young football star on trial, a successful surgeon grappling with childhood trauma, and finally a father on a transformative journey with his son, the four strands weave together to form a tapestry of intersecting lives.
No Friend to This House
Natalie Haynes
Jason and his Argonauts set sail to find the Golden Fleece. The journey is filled with danger, for him and everyone he meets. But if he ever reaches the distant land he seeks, he faces almost certain death. Medea – priestess, witch, and daughter of a brutal king – has the power to save the life of a stranger. Will she betray her family and her home, and what will she demand in return?
Medea and Jason seize their one chance of a life together, as the gods intend. But their love is steeped in vengeance from the beginning, and no one – not even those closest to them – will be safe.
The Secret of Secrets
Dan Brown
Accompanying celebrated academic, Katherine Solomon, to a lecture she’s been invited to give in Prague, Robert Langdon’s world spirals out of control when she disappears without trace from their hotel room. Far from home and well out of his comfort zone, Langdon must pit his wits against forces unknown to recover the woman he loves.
But Prague is an old and dangerous city, steeped in folklore and mystery. For over two thousand years, the tides of history have washed back and forth over it, leaving behind echoes of everything that has gone before. Little can Langdon know that he is being stalked by a spectre from that dark past. He must use all of his arcane knowledge to decipher the world around him before he too is consumed by the rings of treachery and deception that have swallowed Katherine.
The Predicament
William Boyd
Gabriel Dax, travel writer and accidental spy, has found himself back in the shadows. Unable to resist the allure of his MI6 handler, Faith Green, he has returned to the that life of secrets and subterfuge, to that life of espionage. Under the guise of covering a knife edge presential election, Dax is sent to Guatemala, where he quickly finds himself tangled a web of intrigue involving a planned coup, the CIA, and the Mafia.
As political turmoil erupts, Gabriel’s reluctant involvement deepens, leading him to West Berlin, where he faces a chilling realization: there is a plot to assassinate magnetic young President John F. Kennedy. In a race against time, Gabriel must navigate deceit and danger, knowing that the stakes have never been higher.
A Long Winter
Colm Tóibín
One snowy morning, after arguing with her husband, Miquel’s mother walks out from their home high up in the Pyrenees and does not return. With his younger brother stationed far away on military service and his father cast out by the people of the town, Miquel and his father are left to fend for themselves. Together they will be forced to battle the elements, and their resentment of each other, through the long winter. Miquel’s desperate searching for his mother is only interrupted when Manolo, an orphaned servant boy from the next village, arrives to help out in the house.
As Miquel is forced to confront the reality of his mother’s absence, Manolo, with his silences and longing gaze, offers the promise of new love, and another kind of life.
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