Full House: Club Stephanie: Friend or Flamingo? by Wendy Haley

In Paradise – her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of “the one all black town worth the pain,” assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town’s ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void “Out There . . . where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose.” Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.

With the elegant economy of scenes glimpsed from a moving train, this extraordinary novel portrays one woman’s trajectory through life in episodes as haunting as dreams remembered. A single image – fine leather gloves strewn across the landscape by Nazi soldiers – speaks to us as powerfully as the more sweeping events of Anna’s life. Not since D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel has there been a novel of such elegiac, heart stirring beauty. It is a portrait with all the richness and exactitude of a Vermeer and the resonance of Anna’s own music.

Control was the word Dr Toby Harper lived by. She strove to keep her life in order, her ER in order. But no one could have been prepared for the man she admits one quiet night to the Springer Hospital. Delirious and in critical condition, he barely responds to treatment. And then he disappears without trace. The subsequent search leads Toby to a second patient with the same infection. And it reveals an unsettling twist – the infection can only be spread through direct tissue exchange. Soon Toby’s on a trail that winds from a pregnant sixteen-year-old prostitute to an unexpected tragedy in her own home. Only then does she discover the unthinkable: a terrifying and deadly epidemic is about to be unleashed …

A pilot calls into the control tower to request an emergency landing. Following a mystery incident, the plane’s cabin is virtually destroyed, ninety-four passengers are injured and three are dead. Investigating this fatal accident for the airline, Casey Singleton must find out the truth before the multi-million dollar business goes bust in the face of a huge media backlash. Further lives are at stake and it seems everyone is against her – even her own colleagues – and everyone has something to hide. Airframe is a fast-paced, adrenaline-fueled thriller from the master of high-concept storytelling.