BOOKSIMO

  Description On a bright morning in the London suburbs, a family moves into the house they’ve just bought on Trinity Avenue. Nothing strange about that. Except it's your house. And you didn’t sell it. 'If 2018 brings a better book than  Our House  I will eat my hat.  Addictive, twisty and oh so terrifyingly possible’  Clare Mackintosh, author of  I See You   ‘Property-porn looks set to become a staple of crime fiction and  Our House  is an excellent example of this burgeoning subgenre. Husband and wife pass the narrative baton between them in this  masterfully plotted, compulsive page-turner' Laura Wilson,  Guardian 'Whip-smart, knowing and brilliantly plotted'  India Knight 'Taps deep into the British obsession with property'  Metro ‘I loved the wonderful hook of  Our House , which plays with our modern obsession with property - and the vulnerability that exposes. Louise Candlish is a great writer;  s...

  Description 'A powerful and moving novel of family, trauma, and the defining moments in people's lives from a writer of extraordinary depth, feeling and wit. Readers will love this book, as I did'   Meg Wolitzer, bestselling author of The Female Persuasion and The Wife _____________ A gripping and compassionate family drama set between neighbours in suburban New York Gillam, upstate New York: a town of ordinary, big-lawned suburban houses. The Gleesons have recently moved there and soon welcome the Stanhopes as their new neighbours. Lonely Lena Gleeson wants a friend but Anne Stanhope - cold, elegant, unstable - wants to be left alone. It's left to their children - Lena's youngest, Kate, and Anne's only child, Peter - to find their way to one another. To form a friendship whose resilience and love will be almost broken by the fault line dividing both families, and by the terrible tragedy that will engulf them all. A tragedy whose true origins only become clear...

  Description Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word  bondmaid  flutter to the floor, unclaimed. Esme seizes the word and hides it in an old wooden trunk that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world. Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings related to women's experiences often go unrecorded. She begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. Set when the women's...

Description FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF  ESSENTIALISM  COMES A GUIDE TO MAKING THE MOST IMPORTANT TASKS EFFORTLESS The intricacy of modern life has created a false dichotomy between things that are 'hard and important,' and those that are 'easy and trivial.' Everything has become so much harder than it ought to be. But, Greg McKeown, bestselling author of  Essentialism , says, there is a third alternative. In  Effortless , he offers practical strategies for making the most vital tasks the easiest ones. Honed over the better part of a decade, these strategies include: · Asking 'What Step Can I Remove?' (accomplish more, in fewer steps) · Having the Courage to Be Rubbish (prioritize progress over perfection) · Deciding What 'Done' Looks Like (don't keep running after you pass the finish line) McKeown's philosophy of essentialism has helped thousands to eliminate nonessential activities and focus on the few that really matter. Wor...

DESCRIPTION These are people you know, but not as you know them. Peel back the mask and see. CAN  YOU  FIND THE FAMOUS PERSON HIDDEN IN EVERY STORY? Dreamers, singers, heroes and killers, they can dazzle with their beauty or their talent or their unmitigated evil, yet inside themselves, they are as frail and desperate as the rest of us. But can you see them? Can you unravel the truth? ‘Oh, how I enjoyed these stories. A highly original and beautifully crafted collection that explodes into the reader’s consciousness like fireworks’ - Kate Horsley, award-winning author of The American Girl. ‘Tightly written, technically accomplished, light-footed, wryly ironic and genuinely affecting. Excellent stuff’ - Professor Graham Mort, Director of The Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research and winner of both the Bridport Prize and The Edge Hill Prize. This book is dedicated to the victims of violent crime, the struggle against discrimination in all its forms and making the world a ...

  Description Kate MacDougall always knew her heart wasn't really in her job at Sotheby's. All around her, friends were finding their dream jobs and whooshing up career ladders. After yet another breakage, this time of two precious porcelain pigeons, she had enough, and walked out of her snoozy, back office existence into the unknown world of the then-nascent gig economy. London's No. 1 Dog-Walking Agency is the story of her next 9 years and the dogs (and people) she meets along the way. There's Winston, the Labrador, who isn't allowed to get muddy, even after his owners split up and then enlist Kate in their custody battle. There's the chic trio of Islington couples whose immaculately arranged dog walking schedule is thrown off when one of them gets off with the dog walker Kate has employed. There's Kate's long-suffering, dog-agnostic boyfriend Finlay, and her mother, who is always on the alert for wedding bells. Amongst all this, there's Kate herse...

I'm so pleased to be on the blog tour for this book today. Description They say you can't choose your family . . . But what if they're wrong? Chloe lives a quiet life. Working as a newspaper archivist in the day and taking care of her nan in the evening, she's happy simply to read about the lives of others as she files the news clippings from the safety of her desk. But there's one story that she can't stop thinking about. The case of Angie Kyle  –  a girl, Chloe's age, who went missing as a child. A girl whose parents never gave up hope. When Chloe's nan is moved into care, leaving Chloe on the brink of homelessness, she takes a desperate step: answering an ad to be a lodger in the missing girl's family home. It could be the perfect opportunity to get closer to the story she's read so much about. But it's not long until she realizes this couple isn't all they seem. In a house where everyone has something to hide, is it possible to get  t...