Fiction & related items

Fourteen-year-old Maryam and Zahra have always been the best of friends, despite their different backgrounds. Maryam takes for granted that she will stay in Karachi and inherit the family business; while Zahra keeps her desires secret, and dreams of escaping abroad. This year, 1988, anything seem...

Fourteen-year-old Maryam and Zahra have always been the best of friends, despite their different backgrounds. Maryam takes for granted that she will stay in Karachi and inherit the family business; while Zahra keeps her desires secret, and dreams of escaping abroad. This year, 1988, anything seem...

Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit is one of poverty and violence - both from outside the family and also, devastatingly, from within. When her family's darkest secrets are brought to light, Betty has no ch...

Zara is planning her wedding. She loves her fiancé Dan, but the pressure is huge: a marriage to a British-Asian from a good family has been her mother's dream for Zara since she was six. In desperation, Zara turns to her granny, who is planning her own Big Day: her funeral. Granny's snobbish fri...

Malaya Clondon hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings in the church's stuffy basement community centre. A quietly inquisitive eight-year-old struggling to suppress her insatiable longing, she would much rather paint alone in her bedroom, or sneak out with her father for a sam...

Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship. He will work for a Bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition, and prejudice - but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse. He will learn to hand-craft beautiful volumes,...

Former field-worker Emmett Farmer takes up the offer of an apprenticeship binding the books of the memories others want to forget or erase, but is subsequently surprised to find in the memory archives a book with his name on it. Imagine you could erase your grief. Imagine you could forget your p...

An unambitious 22-year-old, Darren lives in a Brooklyn brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential. But Darren is content working at Starbucks, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother's home-cooked meals. All that changes when...

Eleanor Bennett won't let her own death get in the way of the truth. So when her estranged children - Byron and Benny - reunite for her funeral in California, they discover a puzzling inheritance. First, a voice recording in which everything Byron and Benny ever knew about their family is upended...

Eleanor Bennett won't let her own death get in the way of the truth. So when her estranged children - Byron and Benny - reunite for her funeral in California, they discover a puzzling inheritance. First, a voice recording in which everything Byron and Benny ever knew about their family is upended...