Your Next Book Club Read

The Avallon Hotel offers unrivalled luxury in the wild Appalachian Mountains, its curative sweetwater washing away the troubles of high society. June ‘Hoss’ Hudson, a local girl turned general manager, has known its power since she first stepped through the century-old doors – and into the fold of the Gilfoyle family, the hotel’s aristocratic owners.

But in 1942, the real world intrudes. War comes to the Avallon dressed in fine furs and government suits. Under the State Department’s watchful eye, the Gilfoyle heir welcomes three hundred enemy diplomats and Nazi sympathisers. And June must play host.

As dark alliances and unexpected desires crack the Avallon’s polished veneer, not every guest is who they seem. Not least Agent Tucker Minnick, listening for secrets through the hotel walls, whose coal tattoo threatens to betray his past and undo June. And more troubling is the secret she has guarded for years – that the mountain waters can harm as much as heal…

The extraordinary, genre-defying debut adult novel by the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author.

Plucky fourteen-year-old Adunni is in Lagos, excited to finally enrol in school.

But it’s not so simple to run away from your past.

On the night before she is due to join her new classmates , a terrible knocking at the front gate summons Adunni back to her home village, Ikati, where her dramatic story of resilience first began.

There, Adunni must try to not only save herself, but also transform Ikati into a place where girls are allowed to claim the bright futures they deserve – and roar their stories to the world.

The beautiful new novel that will make you laugh and cry, from the global bestselling author of Anxious People and A Man Called Ove. Fredrik Backman returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger’s life twenty-five years later…

You have to take life for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and
water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.
 
In the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world three tiny figures sit at the end of a pier. Most people don’t even notice them. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers seek refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days together. They tell jokes, they share secrets, and they commit small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into 18-year-old Louisa’s care. Determined to learn how it came to be and to decide what to do with it, Louisa embarks on a cross-country journey.  But the closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes.
 
In this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art, Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect.

The latest book in Alexander McCall Smith’s entertaining and hilarious Professor von Igelfeld series

Professor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld is not just any German professor – he is the author of that great work of scholarship, Portuguese Irregular Verbs. His eminence in language studies is widely recognised, even if it is rarely acknowledged by his colleague, Professor Detlev-Amadeus Unterholzer, author of a much less important work on the subjunctive. Their rivalry bubbles away under the surface, but is apt to come into the open if something unusual disturbs the calm waters of the institute in Regensburg in which they both work.

One such event is the arrival from New Orleans of two visiting scholars. These ladies, Professor Pom Pom Boisseau, and her friend, Professor Alice Martinique, are both experts in the Provençal language as well as being keen bikers. When they choose to arrive on large, noisy motorbikes, Unterholzer is shocked, but von Igelfeld is rather taken with Pom Pom. In fact, he is very taken with her, even to the extent of going for a ride with her on her motorbike.

Anybody can tell that this infatuation will lead to disappointment, if not worse. But for von Igelfeld, disasters often arrive in twos and threes. The great professor is invited to attend a student occasion in which the old habit of duelling rears its head. He is handed a sword…

Von Igelfeld may suffer humiliation after humiliation, but at the end of it all there is the promise of a visit to Louisiana, a culinary paradise, where important research is being undertaken into communication among oysters.

April is lonely. Since her office issued a permanent work from home mandate, she’s lost herself a little. So, in a bid to break out of the funk, she leaves an anonymous note inside a book for the hot guy at her neighbourhood bookstore.

Laura is a busy single mum. Thanks to the meddling hand of fate, she’s the one who finds April’s note, thinking it’s from the guy who served her at the bookstore. A little flirtation with an attractive man who loves books might be just what she needs.

Meanwhile Westley, handsome but not so perceptive, is too distracted by a movie filming at the shop to notice either woman’s furtive glances as they leave notes for each other amid the books in the stacks.

April and Laura’s continued anonymous correspondence will shake all three of these characters out of their mundane routines, sparking a glimmer of hope that they might just get what they want: a storybook ending of their own.

An intricate web of miscommunication and serendipitous encounters, Storybook Ending is a playful tribute to romance, friendship and bookstores; and to the objects – from a forgotten slip of paper to someone’s heart – left between the pages of books.

“I got what I wanted. I became buddy-buddy with my boss in an instant. But the cost will be hefty . . . finding a husband by tomorrow.”

Scottie Price just started a new job, and it’s a real sausage fest. She’s the only woman on a team filled with Brads and Chads and so, expecting a bachelor-pad atmosphere, she is surprised when she finds out that everyone around her is happily married.

In an effort to try and impress her new team, Scottie mentions her own husband. The only problem? He doesn’t technically exist. So when her boss offers her and the supposed love of her life a one-on-one session with the best counsellor money can buy – who just happens to be her boss’s partner – she has to think quickly.

Enter Wilder Wells. Her best friend’s brother.

And next thing she knows, the two of them are on an eight-day marriage camp. With all her co-workers. Sharing a cabin. And unfortunately for Scottie, Wilder’s even more handsome than she remembers . . .

From New York Times bestselling author comes a brand new sizzling summer read that will have you laughing, swooning . . . and sweating.

From the author of The Stationery Shop of Tehran, a heartfelt, epic new novel of friendship, betrayal and redemption set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran.

In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation.

Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming ‘lion women.’

But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls’ high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.

Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.