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The third Nancy Chan novel: a mischievous, insightful romp set in Provence during the summer of 2002.It’s 2002 and New Yorkers from every walk of life are anxious about the local economy. A girl can't always meet her quota, and hotel security's a lot more challenging than it was last summer. So, feeling ambivalent about having a baby with Matt, Nancy accepts an offer to travel with Milton, her most favoured customer, to the South of France, where he has recently purchased a vacation home. Besides, it's ego-enhancing to be offered big bucks by a hugely successful guy and whilst Nancy has resisted travelling with her johns in the past, she now jumps at the chance to leave New York.Using her own mother as an alibi, Nancy tells Matt that Mom (divorced, running a B&B in Wales) has planned a mother-daughter vacation in the South of France, so they can check out some property together. In reality, we find Nancy and her friends getting up to some unwholesome frolics in Milt’s pad, with a new cast of colourful characters – including an international madam living in St-Tropez – and a startling romantic collision involving Duncan, Milt’s cook, to keep things interesting.

A powerful novel exploring the effects of autism on a young family from Marti Leimbach, author of the international bestseller ‘Dying Young’, who has experienced and dealt with the condition within her immediate family.My husband saw me at a party and decided he wanted to marry me.Melanie Marsh is an American living in London married to Stephen, the perfect Englishman, who knew the minute he saw her that she was to be his future. But when their youngest child is diagnosed with autism their marriage starts to unravel at great speed. Stephen runs back into the arms of his previous girlfriend while Melanie does everything in her power to help her son and keep her family together.And then one day Melanie hears about a man named Andy O'Connor, who calls himself a ‘play therapist’ and has a client list so long she can barely get him on the phone. Some say he's a maverick and a con artist of the first degree, but when he walks into the house and starts playing with her child, Melanie knows she's found the key to her son's success, and possibly to her own happiness.‘Daniel Isn't Talking’ is a passionate and darkly humorous novel that explores a mother's determination to help her child. A love story for grown ups, it somehow extends its wisdom far beyond the parameters of disability and into the substance of human nature itself. A tense, moving novel that will make you laugh out loud even as it breaks your heart.

Rescued from destitution and poverty…but at what price?When charming Lawson Maddox asks Daisy Drake to become his wife she jumps at the chance to better herself. But with the honeymoon over he shows his true colours, and Daisy’s life descends into loveless chaos.The appearance of John Mallory Gibson, a sensitive and idealistic painter, offers Daisy the prospect of real happiness, which she finds hard to refuse.But Lawson will not let go of her, and he embarks on an unscrupulous quest for revenge that threatens to shatter Daisy and her entire family . . .

A ribald tale from Britain’s best-love Science Fiction writer.Available for the first time in eBook.The Cretan Teat is a bawdy novel, telling the extraordinary tale a Byzantine painting of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the infant Jesus.This false icon gets adopted by the people – and so becomes instrumental in the downfall of mankind.This is a story where the narrator – the author – is regularly caught with his trousers down.It is at once funny and important, a post-modern text reminiscent of Pirandello, where sexcapades brush shoulders with the end of the world.

A darkly comic novel about the fall and rise of a TV presenter. Written by an insider, it’s a page-turning account of life on the sofa and in front of the cameras.When Katie Fisher, morning TV presenter, returns from holiday it's to discover that she's literally yesterday's news. Publicly sacked from her job as anchor of Hello Britain! and replaced by a pert young thing, she does what any self-respecting thirty something would in these circumstances – she makes a dash for her parents and hits the bottle.But Katie, sooner or later, has to face the world, the photographers, and the backstage intrigue of morning television: the cut-throat, lecherous producers, the ambitious but vacant Keera, and Mike, her co-host, a trustworthy friend or just another one of the many back-stabbers? Humour is Katie's only weapon and, as things hit rock-bottom, it could provide a perfect solution to life after the sofa.Knowing, insightful and darkly comic, Penny Smith's novel is the insider's view of TV.

A study of a man beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown, this is a brilliant and disturbing novel by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.Penniless, rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on London’s Embankment. Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge white bird.Identified as Charles Watkins, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown. As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually acquires a greater reality than the everyday…‘Briefing for a Descent into Hell’ is one of Doris Lessing’s most brilliantly achieved novels, linking her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her later experiments in science fiction. Its indictment of the tyranny of society is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered.

A striking novel of truth and soul-searching.Returning from a visit to her daughter in Iraq, Joan Scudamore finds herself unexpectedly alone and stranded in an isolated rest house by flooding of the railway tracks.Looking back over the years, Joan painfully re-examines her attitudes, relationships and actions and becomes increasingly uneasy about the person who is revealed to her…Famous for her ingenious crime books and plays, Agatha Christie also wrote about crimes of the heart, six bittersweet and very personal novels, as compelling and memorable as the best of her work.