Pan

Bloomsbury

Is it a cookbook?? Well, it’s full of Heston’s typically brilliant, delicious and inventive recipes, including green gazpacho, beetroot and pea salad, Moroccan pasties, hemp panna cotta, banana and parsley smoothie, tomato and coffee muffins, parsnip granola, rice ice cream, cricket ketchup and thyme and orange kombucha, not forgetting popcorn chicken with real popcorn. Every recipe is simple, straightforward and totally do-able. This is Heston at his most accessible.

But there’s so much more. Each of the 70 recipes is accompanied by Heston’s thoughts, stories, insights and hacks, turning each cooking session into a journey that’ll inspire and reveal a whole world of culinary possibilities, health info, fresh perspectives and even some quantum physics.  Brought to life by Heston’s long-term collaborator, Dave McKean’s incredible, whacky illustrations, you’ll find yourself reading it cover to cover before deciding what to cook!

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This is the book to prove that science can dramatically improve the way we eat. Having spent years refining his analytical and imaginative approach at the Fat Duck restaurant, Heston Blumenthal is uniquely qualified to bring the benefits of science to the domestic kitchen. Both time-saving and energy-efficient, his methods unlock the alchemical potential of flavour and taste.

Hodder & Stoughton

This is a story about love – romantic love between two young adults; the love mothers have for their children and the lengths they will go to to protect them;  love of the great outdoors as well as love, more specifically, of bees!  It’s also a story about the difference between secrets and privacy.  About what we really know about our children and what they know about us.  What we chose to share and what we chose to keep to ourselves.  There’s a tragedy, there’s a court room battle and in true Jodi Picoult style, there’s a controversial twist which will challenge any preconceived ideas you may have on gender and identity…plus you’ll learn a lot about bees!

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Olivia fled her abusive marriage to return to her hometown and take over the family beekeeping business when her son Asher was six. Now, impossibly, her baby is six feet tall and in his last year of high school, a kind, good-looking, popular ice hockey star with a tiny sprite of a new girlfriend.

Lily also knows what it feels like to start over – when she and her mother relocated to New Hampshire it was all about a fresh start. She and Asher couldn’t help falling for each other, and Lily feels happy for the first time. But can she trust him completely?

Then Olivia gets a phone call – Lily is dead, and Asher is arrested on a charge of murder. As the case against him unfolds, she realises he has hidden more than he’s shared with her. And Olivia knows firsthand that the secrets we keep reflect the past we want to leave behind – and that we rarely know the people we love well as we think we do.

Heart-pounding and heartbreaking. This collaboration between two best-selling authors seamlessly weaves together Olivia and Lily’s journeys, creating a provocative exploration of the strength that love and acceptance require – The Washington Post

Jodi Picoult is that rare, one-in-a-million writer whose books both squeeze your heart and expand your mind. – Emily Henry

Please listen to this fabulous interview – Pippa Hudson of Cape Talk chatting to Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan

Doubleday

What a perfect and absolutely right sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas!

Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same well-to-do mansion block in London for decades. She lives a quiet, comfortable life, despite her deeply disturbing, dark past. She doesn’t talk about her escape from Nazi Germany at age 12. She doesn’t talk about the grim post-war years in France with her mother. Most of all, she doesn’t talk about her father, who was the commandant of one of the Reich’s most notorious extermination camps.

Then, a new family moves into the apartment below her. In spite of herself, Gretel can’t help but begin a friendship with the little boy, Henry, though his presence brings back memories she would rather forget. One night, she witnesses a disturbing, violent argument between Henry’s beautiful mother and his arrogant father, one that threatens Gretel’s hard-won, self-contained existence.

All The Broken Places moves back and forth in time between Gretel’s girlhood in Germany to present-day London as a woman whose life has been haunted by the past.  Now, Gretel faces a similar crossroads to one she encountered long ago. Back then, she denied her own complicity, but now, faced with a chance to interrogate her guilt, grief and remorse, she can choose to save a young boy. If she does, she will be forced to reveal the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting. This time, she can make a different choice than before—whatever the cost to herself….

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Read this fabulous review in the Guardian All the Broken Places by John Boyne review – a sequel of sorts | John Boyne | The Guardian

When is a monster’s child culpable? Guilt and complicity are multifaceted. John Boyne is a maestro of historical fiction. You can’t prepare yourself for the magnitude and emotional impact of this powerful novel. – John Irving

A powerful novel about secrets and atonement after Auschwitz… All the Broken Places is a defence of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature; and it does so with a novelist’s skill, precision and power. – The Guardian

A complex, thoughtful character study that avoids easy answers.- Kirkus Reviews

In Gretel, Boyne has created a magnificently dyspeptic protagonist whose self-assurance, sharp tongue and wry humor are at odds with her private agony. – the Financial Times

Tinder Press

Did you read Maggie O’Farrell’s glorious Hamnet – the emotional story of Shakespeare’s son – which won the Women’s Prize last year?   This time – based on a small historical fact –  she turns her talents to Renaissance Italy in an extraordinary portrait of a resilient young woman’s battle for survival in a cruel political world.

Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.

Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now enter an unfamiliar court whose customs are unclear and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her new husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful gentleman he appeared to be before their wedding or is he the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?

As Lucrezia sits in constricting finery for a painting intended to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance…
An extraordinary writer with a profound understanding of the most elemental human bonds – Observer

O’Farrell pulls out little threads of historical detail to weave this story of a precocious girl sensitive to the contradictions of her station … You may know the history, and you may think you know what’s coming, but don’t be so sure. – The Washington Post

 O’Farrell intelligently connects Lucrezia’s trapped circumstances with the art that her husband, a notable patron and collector, commissions to immortalize her . . . There is a blinding power to the heightened, almost fetishistic beauty of Renaissance art, this novel suggests as it portrays a world of far greater brutality and fierceness. – Wall Street Journal

A compelling portrait of a young woman out of step with her times . . . a vivid portrait of a turbulent age and a vibrant heroine. – Kirkus Reviews

This duchess certainly looks and sounds and feels as if she were alive . . . O’Farrell has an uncanny ability to put us in Lucrezia’s very unusual shoes. One experiences, viscerally, Lucrezia’s exhaustion and terror when she is abandoned in a strange place a few hours after her marriage, her giddy excitement and expansive feeling of freedom in the early days of her marriage, her revulsion and fear as her husband’s ‘fury and contempt’ emerge . . . The final twist is so unexpected and so gorgeously executed that it brought this reader to tears. With it, O’Farrell demonstrates fiction’s ability to offer counter narratives to those of received history, to open before us imaginative abundance and a tremulous sense of possibility.  – The Boston Globe

Doubleday

I’m a huge Kate Atkinson fan and in Shrines of Gaiety she delivers again!! 1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, aristocrats rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time.

The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six quirky children, all different and not overly-known to their mother. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie’s empire faces threats from without and within. For beneath the dazzle of Soho’s gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost, especially if you’re a young girl seeking fame on the stage, as Detective Chief Inspector  Frobisher discovers…

With her unique Dickensian flair, Kate Atkinson brings together a glittering cast of characters in a truly mesmeric novel. Slyly funny, brilliantly observant, and ingeniously plotted, Shrines of Gaiety showcases the myriad talents that have made Atkinson one of the most lauded writers of our time.

If Dickens had lived to write about The Jazz Age, he would have produced a novel much like Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety. A sprawling and sparkling tale …. captures the excitement of Roaring 20s London. – Washington Post

[Atkinson] takes on London in the 1920s, masterfully capturing both its shimmer and its seediness…It’s a deliciously fun, absorbing read. – Time

Atkinson vividly conjures the post-Great War London of a century ago…Tangible warmth suffuses her storytelling…A cocktail of fizz and melancholy, generously poured.- The New York Times Book Review

There is the perfect balance throughout of sweetness and heartbreak. And, as always, there is the unmistakable zest of Ms. Atkinson’s dry wit…Ms. Atkinson has perfected the comic wizardry that keeps us both airborne and immersed in her mosaic-like narratives – The Wall Street Journal

Kate Atkinson is a novelist of unrivalled immediacy, authority and skill…This book is sharp, witty and fiendishly plotted. You don’t so much read it as surrender to it, and you sense—and share—the relish with which she creates such an attention-grabbing cast. It’s an exhilarating ride. – Financial Times

A heady brew of crime, romance and satire set amid the sordid glitz of London nightlife in the 1920s…This is Atkinson on her finest form…A marvel of plate-spinning narrative knowhow, a peak performance of consummate control. – The Observer

grabs the reader from the outset… paints a picture of the capital’s glittering nightlife and its seedier underside so vivid, that it is almost possible to smell the stale cigarette smoke and taste the alcohol. – The Independent

a heady brew of crime, romance and satire set amid the sordid glitz of London nightlife in the 1920s. – The Guardian

faber

Oh my gosh – this book… I can’t stop thinking about it!  Who better than Barbara Kingsolver to rework Dickens’s David Copperfield into a contemporary tale remaining true to his politics of highlighting the plight of orphans?  It’s meaty, it’s compelling, it’s heart-breaking, it’s funny and it’s thought-provoking… Demon is that character who you get behind 100% and you will him to do the right thing. He deserves his chance!

Demon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia. It’s the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-coloured hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival.  Told in Demon’s unsparing, mature and ironic voice, the story follow’s his young life as he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labour, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses yet he never loses hope.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to her own place and time, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

‘It’s EPIC. Righteously angry, DEEPLY moving, wholly immersive, totally convincing and exquisitely written. She is so GIFTED.’ – Marian Keyes

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.’ ― Kirkus Reviews

I am a long-time fan of Barbara Kingsolver’s writing but I was really blown away by Demon Copperhead – without a doubt the best book I’ll read this year. – Kate Atkinson

Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, Kingsolver’s latest is the story of Damon, the only child of a teenage alcoholic in southwestern Virginia. In a feat of literary alchemy, Kingsolver uses the fire of his spirit to illuminate — and singe — the darkest recesses of our country. Inspired by the work of Charles Dickens, she has effectively reignited the moral indignation of the great Victorian novelist to dramatize the horrors of child poverty in the late 20th century. This would be a grim melodrama if it weren’t for the main character’s endearing humour, formed by his unaffected innocence and weary cynicism – Washington Post