Anna Ann Annie by Thomas Trebitsch Parker

A compelling novel of dark miracles and angelic visitation, set in a Nazi-occupied Belgian town that is scented by chocolate. A young French Jew girl is saved by Belgian nuns after a bomb kills her grandmother. Then the miracles begin. In a town haunted by memories of the past and the desperation of the present, the miraculous is hard to recognize.

Meet Dolores Price. She’s thirteen, wise-mouthed but wounded. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the chocolate, crisps and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she’s determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly up. In his extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch an incredible ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. At once a fragile girl and a hard-edged cynic, so tough to love yet so inimitably loveable, Dolores is as poignantly real as our own imperfections.

Set in the mid-1970s in India, A Fine Balance tells the story of four unlikely people whose lives come together during a time of political turmoil soon after the government declares a ‘State of Internal Emergency’. Through days of bleakness and hope, their circumstances – and their fates – become inextricably linked in ways no one could have foreseen. Written with compassion, humor and insight, A Fine Balance is a vivid, richly textured and powerful novel by one of the most gifted writers of our time.

Highly topical and absolutely compelling, the new thriller from bestselling author Kyle Mills features an intriguing protagonist caught up in a fight where there are no rights or wrongs. Trevor Barnett is the scion of an old tobacco family. Trevor is 31 and will come into a USD 10 million trust fund when he turns 60 so long as he has been in continuous employment from graduation until his 60th birthday with the cigarette company his ancestor founded. Trevor is consequently not the most motivated person in the world – at least when the novel opens. At the beginning of SMOKE SCREEN, the tobacco industry is facing a multi-billion dollar lawsuit which could bankrupt the industry. But the industry decides to fight back, and decides to use Trevor to do it. And Trevor may or may not have his own agenda, which may or may not include the woman he loves from afar, who is a lawyer for one of the anti-smoking campaigner groups.