Our booksellers have been loving these new books from emerging authors! Read them now to find out what's gotten us so excited.
By Her Hand
Marion Taffe
Peak District, Mercia, AD 910: a young girl, Freda works hard to avoid her father's temper, while longing for his approval. She loves foraging in the woods and hearthside stories of heroes. Secretly she thinks in poetry and dreams of one day being able to write; her quills are grass stalks and sticks, her parchment the sky, the earth, her skin. But Freda's world is at war, and when her village is decimated in a savage raid and her father goes missing, Freda must find the strength to survive.
Taken in by the church, her only options are a life of servitude or prayer. But the cunning bishop sees an opportunity. As well as teaching Freda to write, he uses her survival as evidence of a miracle so as to attract pilgrims who bring wealth. As Freda chafes against the bishop's increasing control, she develops a friendship with the Mercian leader Ethelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, who shows her what it is to lead as a woman in a world that worships warrior kings.
Soon Freda must choose. Does she remain the powerless, subservient quill whose fate lies in the hands of another, or does she fight for the right to create - and write - her own story?
Read our staff review here.
The River Has Roots
Amal El-Mohtar
In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.
There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family's latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.
But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters' bond but also their lives will be at risk...
Read our staff review here.
The Wolf Tree
Laura McCluskey
On a small island off the coast of Scotland, an isolated community is grieving. Eighteen-year-old Alan Ferguson was found at the foot of the lighthouse - an apparent suicide.
DIs Georgina Lennox and Richard Stewart are sent to investigate. A raging storm keeps them trapped on the island for five days. And the locals don't take kindly to mainlanders.
As George and Ritchie question the island's inhabitants, they discover a village filled with superstition and shrouded in secrets. But someone wants those secrets to stay buried. At any cost.
Read our staff review here.
First Name Second Name
Steve MinOn
Stephen Bolin leaves a bizarre note by his deathbed, asking his sisters to take his body back to his birthplace in Far North Queensland. When they ignore his request, Stephen's corpse makes the nocturnal pilgrimage alone. But what is compelling him and what will he find there?
His journey, as a kind of jiangshi, takes him back through his turbulent family history- from his Chinese great-grandfather's life on the goldfields in 1860s Queensland, to his Scottish grandparents' migration to Australia as ten-pound Poms, and to his own coming of age and coming out in Brisbane and London.
Original and satirical, First Name Second Name follows four generations of one family through a reckoning with racial, familial and sexual identity.
Read our staff review here.
Fire Exit
Morgan Talty
From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine's Penobscot Reservation. He caught brief moments of his neighbour Elizabeth's life - from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there's something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It's the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.
Now, it's been weeks since he's seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he can - his home and property; his alcoholic and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping deeper into dementia - he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, Charles contends with questions he's long been afraid to ask. Is his secret about Elizabeth his to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth, even if it could cost her everything she's ever known?
Fundamentally
Nussaibah Younis
When academic Nadia is disowned by her puritanical mother and dumped by her lover, she decides to accept a UN job in Iraq. Tasked with rehabilitating ISIS women, Nadia becomes mired in the world of international aid, surrounded by bumbling colleagues. But then she meets Sara, an East Londoner who joined ISIS at 15, and she is struck by how similar their stories are. Sara and Nadia immediately connect and a powerful friendship forms. When Sara confesses a secret, Nadia is forced to make a difficult choice.
A bitingly original, wildly funny and razor-sharp exploration of love, family, religion, radicalism, and the decisions we make in pursuit of connection and belonging, Fundamentally upends and explores a defining controversy of our age with heart, complexity and humour - delivered by one of the most fearless and talented new voices in contemporary fiction.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
Colwill Brown
Ask anyone non-Northern, they'll only know Donny as punch line of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.
But Doncaster's also the home of Rach, Shaz and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. They share everything, from blagging their way into nightclubs to trips to the Family Planning clinic when they are late. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz's bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin charting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace - their friendship is as indestructible as they are. But as they grow up and away from one another, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh takes you by the hand and leads you through Doncaster's schoolyards, alleyways and nightclubs, laying bare the intimate treacheries of adolescence and the ways we betray ourselves when we don't trust our friends. Like The Glorious Heresies and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked place into the very centre of the world.
The Persians
Sanam Mahloudji
Meet the women of the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies.
There’s Elizabeth, the regal matriarch who remained in Tehran despite the revolution. Then, Niaz, her young, Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter and companion. In America, Elizabeth’s two daughters: Shirin, a high-flying event planner in Houston, and Seema, a bored housewife in LA and finally, Bita, the other granddaughter, a disillusioned law student in New York. When an annual holiday in Aspen goes wildly awry, Shirin must embark upon a grand quest to restore the family name to its former glory. But what does that mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered to anyone?
Spanning 1940s Iran through to a splintered 2000s, The Persians is an irresistible portrait of a unique family in crisis that explores timeless questions of love, money, art and fulfilment.
