After the Funeral

Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who gets to tell their story? In her first historical novel, Zadie Smith transports the reader to a Victorian England transfixed by the real-life trial of the Tichborne Claimant, in which a cockney butcher, recently returned from Australia, lays claim to the Tichborne baronetcy, with his former slave Andrew […]

The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in this Sunday Times bestselling novel Alex and Christine and Zach and Lydia have been inseparable since their twenties. From student house-shares and grubby pubs to proper homes and grown-up careers, the two couples’ lives have been interlinked for decades. Then one […]

Transcription is a bravura novel of extraordinary power and substance. Juliet Armstrong is recruited as a young woman by an obscure wartime department of the Secret Service. In the aftermath of war she joins the BBC, where her life begins to unravel, and she finally has to come to terms with the consequences of idealism.

Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby. A housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. A young girl accepts a lift in a car with a group of strangers. An old friend brings bad news to a dinner party. In these gripping and unsettling stories, the ordinary […]