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first novels
This month we bring you some exceptional first novels including How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff which was praised as 'magical and utterly faultless' by Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and The Perfect Age by Heather Skylar, an extremely accomplished first novel. Click on the titles below to read an extract and find out more about the book. |
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How I Live Now
Daisy is sent from New York to England to spend a summer with cousins she has never met. She's never met anyone quite like them before - and, as a dreamy English summer progresses, Daisy finds herself caught in a timeless bubble. It seems like the perfect summer. But their lives are about to explode. Falling in love is just the start of it. War breaks out - a war none of them understands, or really cares about, until it lands on their doorstep. The family is separated. The perfect summer is blown apart. Daisy's life is changed forever - and the world is too.
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The Perfect Age
It's summer in Las Vegas, and fifteen-year-old Helen is working as a lifeguard at the Dunes Hotel. It seems like the perfect age - and the perfect first job - but Helen's boyfriend is jealous of the men she meets, her mother embarks on an affair with the pool manager, and her father is contemplating an infidelity of his own. This is the story of a family's secrets and lies, of daughters struggling with the usual anxieties of growing up, and parents dealing with the tedium of a twenty-year-old marriage. With these sexual awakenings and mid-life crises all occurring under one roof, this apparently happy, successful and bonded family cannot help but draw apart, unravelling slowly under the stress wrought by its secrets. |
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The River
In 1958, in a small Devon village, two children, playing in a boat on the river, are drowned. Their parents are distraught but remain in the village, living together yet estranged, for the next thirty years. Over time their tragedy becomes part of the invisible fabric of village life until, one summer's day, Anna arrives. She comes to the village to escape her own disappointments. She does not tell anyone that she is pregnant.
Anna goes to live with Isabel, and for a time the women find solace in each other's company. But the baby's arrival opens old wounds leading, inexorably, to tragedy.
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The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
When it comes to the mating game, Jane's still learning how to play. As a teenager she watched her elder brother falling in and out of love. Now she's embarking on her own affairs. There's the boyfriend with the irritatingly beautiful ex; the worldly Older Man; the commitment-phobe who calls her honey but never uses her name. Plenty of fish in the sea - but how do you find a man worth catching? When she finally resorts to 'How to Meet and Marry Mr Right', a hilarious guide to hunting out and reeling in the man of your dreams, Jane discovers that with love, life and men, a girl doesn't need rules. |
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The Drowning People
It is twenty-four hours since the death of James Farrell's wife at Seton Castle and as it grows dark he tries to make sense of a life only recently understood; and to explain how he, by no means a violent man, has come to kill in cold blood after half a century of contented married life. But answers don't come easily. And explanation involves a return to the events of five decades ago, when as a talented young violinist he fell in love with Ella - his wife's cousin - and she with him. He must remember their love in all its power and fragility; and he must try to understand the test she set him and the tragic consequences of his success for them both. |
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Author interviews
