Mother’s Mystery Books

Young, divinely beautiful and tired of living a lie, Anthony Malone trades life as a seemingly straight, small town lawyer for the disco-lit decadence of New York's 1970's gay scene.

Joining an unbridled world of dance parties, saunas, deserted parks and orgies - at its centre Malone befriends the flamboyant queen, Sutherland, who takes this new arrival under his preened wing. But for Malone, the endless city nights and Fire Island days, are close to burning out. It is love that Malone is longing for, and soon he will have to set himself free.

First published in 1978, Dancer from the Dance is widely considered the greatest, most exciting novel of the post-Stonewall generation. Told with wit, eroticism and unashamed lyricism, it remains a heart-breaking love letter to New York's hedonistic past, and a testament to the brilliance of our passions as they burn brightest.

Can a planet have legal rights? Could it be defended in a court of law? How do we redefine a 'right to life'? A revolution is taking place. Around the world, ordinary people are turning to courts, seeking justice for environmental wrongs. At the forefront of this movement, pioneering barrister Monica Feria-Tinta advocates not only for people, but also for those who have no voice: for rivers, forests and endangered species.

In A Barrister for the Earth, Feria-Tinta takes us behind the scenes of ten real cases as she argues against the destruction of cloud forests and for sovereign states to account for inaction. Each of these are landmarks signalling that we are at an important juncture, in which the law can be a powerful tool for the lasting change.

Dryness, paleness, waking, sighing, despair, frenzy, death: love's repercussions can be dire indeed. Perhaps that is why Robert Burton devoted the largest part of his pioneering 17th-century psychological work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, to this supreme passion. Edited to offer the modern reader easier access to this classic text, this abridged version preserves all the fantastic variety of the original, as Burton knits together stories and quotations drawn from millennia of European literature in order to understand love's causes, consequences, and cures.

We encounter gods and goddesses, ancient kings and queens, lascivious monks and pure-hearted shepherds, marriages happy and unhappy, allurements natural and unnatural, and, most importantly, many cures for love-melancholy, from the obvious to the arcane.

Intricate yet commonsensical, learned yet earthy, and twinkling throughout with ironic warmth, Burton's masterpiece speaks to the deepest concerns of the human heart as well today as it did four centuries ago.

When Xiao Hai turned fifteen, his family paid a vocational-school teacher 1,200 yuan to find him a factory job in Shenzhen. So began fifteen years spent moving between the garment mills and electronics factories of China's fast-growing southern cities. Adrift in the South is a memoir of life as a migrant labourer in the twenty-first century, making iPhones and baby clothes, hand-stitching football shirts and cutting plastic into radios.

Here, Xiao Hai reveals the alienation and tedium of factory life, the small indignities and indifference of the larger system. And he tells the story of how poetry led him somewhere unexpected: to join a small community of artists living, working, and studying together on the outskirts of Beijing. This memoir is a landmark text from China's migrant worker literature movement, a grassroots group of writers providing an unvarnished account of what life is like for the 300 million migrant workers powering the world's second-biggest economy.

A powerful debut compelled by questions of borders and displacement. In one story I stay in that city forever,in one I board, and in another I am still waiting. I am daybreak; I am everywhere.

In The Tree Is Missing, Shannon Kuta Kelly explores the poetics of the border. The collection crosses through non-places, moving between the unnamed and unmapped spaces on the edges of the European city. With remarkable poise and restraint, these itinerant poems experiment with oral history and translation, traversing the borderlines of nation, language and time.

They draw on folklore to evoke a world that feels current and present, but which can only be reached through storytelling. In doing so, Kuta Kelly explores the loss and displacement - the fracture of identity - necessitated by personal and political turmoil. She writes with a restless immediacy from within the histories that continue to shape us.

On a chilly day in March of 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, Belle Burden’s husband of twenty years announced, with no prior warning, that he was leaving her.

His decision shocked Belle to her core: she believed he was a happy man, a committed partner, and a devoted father to their three children. She thought he was a man who had settled into the life he had always wanted: a successful career, summers spent at their beloved home on Martha’s Vineyard, lots of tennis. Overnight, he transformed from her steady companion into a stranger.

As she pieces her life together in the wake of a loss she had never imagined coming, she finds she is much stronger than she ever expected. Exploring the transformation of a shy, quiet girl, nicknamed ‘Belle the Good’ to a powerful, brave, determined woman who has learned to use her voice to expose the patriarchal structures that have forced women to be discreet and compliant for far too long, Strangers is a must-read memoir of self-discovery.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025

An unforgettable debut novel about the journey of three women and one extremely endangered snail through contemporary Ukraine.

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who scours the country's forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to settle down and start a family of her own. What they don't know: Yeva already dates plenty of men-not for love, but to fund her work-entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they'll find docile brides untainted by feminism.

Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime across a country on the brink of war: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.

Join a plucky little penguin on the journey of a lifetime, in this fabulous new picture book from superstar author and illustrator Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler.

Jonty the little gentoo penguin longs to find his true home at the South Pole. One night, he sneaks out of the zoo and sets off on an amazing adventure, all the way to Antarctica (with an accidental detour to the North Pole!) Children will be cheering Jonty on as he finally finds his way, in this captivating story of bravery, friendship, and finding your place in the world.

Perfect read-aloud rhyming text and stunning pictures on every page Fantastic illustrations of the natural world, with lots of details to spot, including seals, polar bears… and lots and lots of penguins!

From award-winning writer Nigel Slater, comes a new and exquisitely written collection of notes, memoir, stories and small moments of joy. For years, Nigel Slater has kept notebooks of curiosities and wonderings, penned while at his kitchen table, soaked in a fisherman’s hut in Reykjavik, sitting calmly in a moss garden in Japan or sheltering from a blizzard in a Vienna Konditorei. These are the small moments, events and happenings that gave pleasure before they disappeared.

Miso soup for breakfast, packing a suitcase for a trip and watching a butterfly settle on a carpet, hiding in plain sight. He gives short stories of feasts such as a mango eaten in monsoon rain or a dish of restorative macaroni cheese and homes in on the scent of freshly picked sweet peas and the sound of water breathing at night in Japan. This funny and sharply observed collection of the good bits of life, often things that pass many of us by, is utter joy from beginning to end.

The Fortnight in September embodies the kind of mundane normality the men in the dug-out longed for – domestic life at 22 Corunna Road in Dulwich, the train journey via Clapham Junction to the south coast, the two weeks living in lodgings and going to the beach every day. The family’s only regret is leaving their garden where, we can imagine, because it is September the dahlias are at their fiery best: as they flash past in the train they get a glimpse of their back garden, where ‘a shaft of sunlight fell through the side passage and lit up the clump of white asters by the apple tree.’ This was what the First World War soldiers longed for; this, he imagined, was what he was fighting for and would return to (as in fact Sherriff did).

He had had the idea for his novel at Bognor Regis: watching the crowds go by, and wondering what their lives were like at home, he ‘began to feel the itch to take one of those families at random and build up an imaginary story of their annual holiday by the sea...I wanted to write about simple, uncomplicated people doing normal things.’

Deep in the bog, in a thicket of thorns, where shadows would linger long after the dawn, in twists of old iron, with fists full of rubbish... Goblin was searching for gadgets and gubbish.

Goblin has everything.

Trinkets and treasures, nick-nacks and stuff - he has it all… and yet, it's never enough. So, when a band of unlikely companions turn up and Goblin actually FEELS something, things start to shift. Could it be that friendship, not possessions, is what Goblin really needs?

The follow up to Times' Children's Book of the Week, Troll, Goblin is a wonderfully funny and powerful story about the magic of human connection.

Plans for the expansion of the Capmeadow Business Park are in full swing - its mission is to become the greatest business park in the region. Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee, loses his daughter at 'bring your daughter to work day'. He raises the alarm, and his colleagues rush to help him find her.

Eventually, after no sign of her is found, it transpires she was never there. And yet, as time goes on, Tom still cannot reconcile that she is really at home. Refusing to accept that she is safe, Tom continues to search for her in the maze of corridors and impossible multi-dimensional spaces that make up his place of work...

Because Capmeadow is expanding in unexpected ways, a Liaison Officer becomes the central focus for complaints about how the expansion is impacting the lives of the employees - unexpected buildings, years-long business days, cursed farmers' markets, and corridors of the mind are draining the life from Tom and everyone he works with. Years pass, and Tom remains at the company, convinced he is in the presence of his now adult daughter. But has he judged it correctly? And can anything go back to the way it was??

A propulsive, electrifying and enraging retelling in verse of the life of Greek goddess Hekate, child of war turned all-powerful goddess of witchcraft and necromancy, by internationally bestselling poet Nikita Gill.

Born into a world on fire, Godling Hekate has never known safety. After her parents find themselves on the losing side of the war between the ruling Titans and the new Olympian Gods, Hekate is taken by her mother Asteria to the Underworld, where Styx and Hades agree to raise her. Meanwhile, Asteria is pursued across the world by Zeus and Poseidon and, to escape their clutches, transforms herself into an island in a stormy sea.

Orphaned and alone, Hekate grows up amongst the horrors and beauties of the Underworld, desperate to find her divine purpose and a sense of belonging in the land of the dead. When she finally uncovers her powers and ascends to Goddess status, she realises that even the most powerful Olympians are terrified of her. But when immortal war breaks out again, threatening to destroy everything from Mount Olympus to the Underworld itself, the Goddess of witchcraft and necromancy is the only one who can bring the deadly conflict to an end...

Welcome to the world of Weirdosaurus...

Meet a dinosaur with a built-in megaphone. Spot the one with metre-long, sword-like claws. Say hello to a flying carnivore as tall as a giraffe! This book is bursting with the strangest, silliest and downright weirdest dinosaurs that ever stomped the Earth.

From frilly heads to feathery tails, toothy grins to enormous claws, every creature inside is wonderfully odd in its own way. Travel back in time and meet over 80 prehistoric peculiarities, each with its own vital stats, dino scale diagram, Latin name (and how to say it) and some seriously strange features. With Philip Bunting’s hilarious illustrations, cheeky jokes and eye-popping facts, every page is packed with surprises. With well-known favourites and dinosaurs you’ve never heard of, Weirdosaurus is the perfect book for dino-mad kids who love the weird and wonderful.

If you thought you knew dinosaurs... think again! 

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2025.

From one of our leading biographers and critics comes an exhilarating, landmark new look at Muriel Spark. The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is ‘puzzling’. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books.

She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as ‘Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes’. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.

Electric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. We return to her early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.

Evolution as you've never seen it before! An incredible pick-your-own-path adventure through the story of life on Earth. Think of an animal, any animal at all. It could be a shark, a squid, a snail, or even a human like you! Every single animal has a secret history.

A death-defying adventure that has happened across millions of years, called evolution. On every page, you will discover a new animal with its own exciting story to tell. It's up to YOU to make the decisions that will lead to their next evolutionary step.

Can you survive to the present-day or will you face extinction along the way? Will you grow a backbone, take to the skies, or dive deeper for your dinner? For the first time ever, the journey is in your hands . . .

This unique book features ferociously funny and brilliantly accessible science from zoologist, author and TV presenter Jules Howard. Meet chimpanzees and chickens, Tyrannosaurus rexes and tigers, with over 50 different animal endings to discover. The perfect introduction to the awe-inspiring story of life on Earth.

A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed.

Beginning with Johannes’s father’s thoughts as his wife goes into labour, and ending with Johannes's own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.

A scientist desperately searches for a cure to a zombie virus while also hiding a monumental secret – her undead husband. This Leigh Radford debut is full of heartbreak, revulsion and black humour. Kesta’s husband Tim was the last person to be bitten in a zombie pandemic.

The country is now in a period of respite, the government seemingly having rounded up and disposed of all the infected. But Kesta has a secret…

…Tim may have been bitten, but he’s not quite dead yet. In fact, he’s tied to a bed in her spare room.

And she’s made him a promise: find a cure, bring him back. A scientist by day, Kesta juggles intensive work under the microscope alongside Tim’s care, slipping him stolen drugs to keep him docile, knowing she is hiding the only zombie left. But Kesta is running out of drugs – and time.

Can she save her husband before he is discovered? Or worse… will they trigger another outbreak?

A visionary tale inspired by the life of the 20th century film director G.W. Pabst, who left Europe for Hollywood to resist the Nazis and then returned to his homeland with his wife and young son and began making films for the German Reich. An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody.

Not even Greta Garbo, who he made famous, can help him. And thus, almost through no fault of his own, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. The returning family is confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime.

But Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin, wants the film genius, he won't take no for an answer and makes big promises. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.

‘It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate’

Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice, drawn from Baldwin's early life in Harlem and his experience as a prominent cultural figure of the civil rights movement.

AI is here, bringing a seismic shift in the way our society operates. Might this mean a future reimagined on equitable terms for women and marginalised groups everywhere? Not unless we fight for it.

At present, power remains largely in the hands of a few rich, white men. New AI-driven technologies, with misogyny baked into their design, are putting women in danger, their rights and safety sacrificed at the altar of profitability and reckless speed. In The New Age of Sexism, Sunday Times bestselling author and campaigner Laura Bates takes us deep into the heart of this rapidly evolving world.

She explores the metaverse, confronts deepfake pornography, travels to cyber brothels, tests chatbots, and hears from schools in the grip of online sexual abuse, showing how our lives – from education to work, sex to entertainment – are being infiltrated by easily accessible technologies that are changing the way we live and love. What she finds is a wild west where existing forms of discrimination, inequality and harassment are being coded into the future we will all have little choice about living in – unless we seize this moment to demand change. Gripping, courageous and eye-opening, The New Age of Sexism exposes a phenomenon we can’t afford to ignore any longer. Our future is on the line.

On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated, but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men, not changing them for the better, its operations are winding down. But in the prison’s waning days, a new horror is unleashed: every full-moon night, the inmates are released, the warden is armed with rifles, and the hunt begins.

Every man plans his escape, not knowing if his end will come at the hands of a familiar face, or from the unknown dangers beyond the prison walls. Ana Paula Maia has once again delivered a bracing vision of our potential for violence, and our collective failure to account for the consequences of our social and political action, or inaction. No crime is committed out of view for this novelist, and her raw, brutal power enlists us all as witness.

Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa’s trade as a shanker.

He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach to scrape for shrimp; spending the rest of the day selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyeth down the street and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but it remains a private dream. When a striking visitor turns up, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour, Thomas is shaken from the drudgery of his days and begins to see a different future.

But how much of what the American claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas?Haunting and timeless, this is the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows.

Vladimir Nabokov's early novel is the dazzling story of the coarse, strange yet oddly endearing chess-playing genius Luzhin.

Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion for chess that renders the real world a phantom. As he confronts the fiery, swift-swooping Italian Grandmaster Turati, he brings into play his carefully devised defence.

Making masterly play of metaphor and imagery, The Defense is the book that, of his early works, Nabokov felt 'contains and diffuses the greatest warmth'.

MORNING, AFTERNOON, NIGHT. THE MOTHERS ARE ALWAYS WATCHING…

England, 1979.

Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining residents of a secluded New Forest home, part of the government's Sycamore Scheme. Every day, the triplets do their chores, play their games and take their medicine, under the watchful eyes of three mothers: Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night.

Their nightmares are recorded in The Book of Dreams. Their lessons are taken from The Book of Knowledge. And their sins are reported in The Book of Guilt.

All the boys want is to be sent to the Big House in Margate, where they imagine a life of sun, sea and fairground rides. But, as the government looks to shut down the Sycamore Homes, the triplets begin to question everything they have been told. Gradually surrendering its dark secrets, The Book of Guilt is a profoundly unnerving exploration of belonging in a world where some lives are valued less than others.

1960s, Tennessee.

Lester Ballard is a violent, solitary and introverted young backwoodsman, dispossessed on his ancestral land. Homeless, indulging in voyeurism, he is accused of rape. When he is released from jail, he begins to haunt the hilly landscape – preying upon its population, unleashing his impulse for sexualised violence.

Commonplace humanity becomes grotesque and, as the story hurtles toward its unforgettable conclusion, McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with empathy and lyricism.

Both devastating and funny, The Lonely Londoners is an unforgettable account of immigrant experience - and one of the great twentieth-century London novels. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Susheila Nasta. At Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London.

There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver and shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold and foggy city where the natives can be less than friendly at the sight of a black face, has Galahad met his Waterloo? But the irrepressible newcomer cannot be cast down. He and all the other lonely new Londoners - from shiftless Cap to Tolroy, whose family has descended on him from Jamaica - must try to create a new life for themselves.

As pessimistic 'old veteran' Moses watches their attempts, they gradually learn to survive and come to love the heady excitements of London.

In PASTORALIA elements of contemporary life are twisted, merged and amplified into a slightly skewed version of modern America. A couple live and work in a caveman theme-park, where speaking is an instantly punishable offence. A born loser attends a self-help seminar where he is encouraged to rid himself of all the people who are ‘crapping in your oatmeal'.

And a male exotic dancer and his family are terrorised by their decomposing aunt who visits them with a solemn message from beyond the grave. With an uncanny combination of deadpan naturalism and uproarious humour, George Saunders creates a world that is both indelibly original and yet hauntingly familiar.