SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE Mrs Death tells her intoxicating story in this life-affirming fire-starter of a novel Mrs Death has had enough. She is exhausted by her job and now seeks someone to unburden her conscience to. She meets Wolf, a troubled young writer, who – enthralled by her stories – begins to write Mrs Death’s memoirs. As the two reflect on the losses they have experienced (or facilitated), their friendship flourishes. All the while, despite her world-weariness, Death must continue to hold humans’ fates in her hands, appearing in our lives when we least expect her . . .

A collection of 13 pieces of courage and resistance, this is work inspired by protests and rallies. Poems written for the women's march, for women's empowerment and amplification, poems that salute people fighting for justice, poems on sexism and racism, class discrimination, period poverty and homelessness, immigration and identity. This work reminds us that Courage is a Muscle, it also contains a letter from the spirit of Hope herself, because as the title suggests, Pessimism is for Lightweights.

'A lyrical, fascinating, important book. More than just a family story, it is an essay on belonging, denying, pretending, self-deception and, at least for the main characters, survival.' Literary Review 'Simon May's remarkable How to Be a Refugee is a memoir of family secrets with a ruminative twist, one that's more interested in what we keep from ourselves than the ones we conceal from others.' Irish Times The most familiar fate of Jews living in Hitler’s Germany is either emigration or deportation to concentration camps. But there was another, much rarer, side to Jewish life at that time: denial of your origin to the point where you manage to erase almost all consciousness of it. You refuse to believe that you are Jewish. How to Be a Refugee is Simon May’s gripping account of how three sisters – his mother and his two aunts – grappled with what they felt to be a lethal heritage. Their very different trajectories included conversion to Catholicism, marriage into the German aristocracy, securing ‘Aryan’ status with high-ranking help from inside Hitler’s regime, and engagement to a card-carrying Nazi. Even after his mother fled to London from Nazi Germany and Hitler had been defeated, her instinct for self-concealment didn’t abate. Following the early death of his father, also a German Jewish refugee, May was raised a Catholic and forbidden to identify as Jewish or German or British. In the face of these banned inheritances, May embarks on a quest to uncover the lives of the three sisters as well as the secrets of a grandfather he never knew. His haunting story forcefully illuminates questions of belonging and home – questions that continue to press in on us today.

'Honest, grippingly readable, funny and uplifting' MAGGIE GEE Springfield Road is a journey into childhood in the late 1970s, a time of halfpenny sweets, fish and chips in newspaper, scrumping apples and foraging for conkers. Set in the dawn of Thatcher's Britain, it's a salute to every curly-top, scabby knee'd, mixed-up, half-crazy kid with NHS glasses, free school dinners and hand-me- downs, as told by the daughter of an Irish jazz musician and a Jamaican go-go dancer. It's about discovering that life is unfair, that there are bullies out there, and that parents die; yet it is the very antithesis of a misery memoir. It's a vivid, uplifting tale that seeks out the humour, colour and tenderness in the world, and when you read it you will say Hey! I remember, we did that too! You might say: I remember being closer to the ground; I remember summers were longer and how oranges were bigger; I remember struggling to comprehend sex and war, life and death, heaven and hell, and perhaps you’ll say, I remember I missed my dad too...

When we were on a No Girls Allowed! holiday, my daddy's heart stopped beating and I had to find help all by myself. He was very badly broken. Not even the ambulance people could help him... This honest, sensitive and beautifully illustrated picture book is designed to help explain the concept of death to children aged 3+. Written in Alex's own words, it is based on the real-life conversations that Elke Barber had with her then three-year-old son, Alex, after the sudden death of his father. The book provides reassurance and understanding to readers through clear and honest answers to the difficult questions that can follow the death of a loved one, and carries the invaluable message that it is okay to be sad, but it is okay to be happy, too.

Ancient church rituals meet cutting-edge crime-solving in this thriller in the #1 New York Times bestselling series featuring NYPSD Lieutenant Eve Dallas. Seconds after partaking of wine during a Catholic funeral mass, Father Miguel Flores is dead on the altar. Detective Lieutenant Eve Dallas confirms that the consecrated wine contained enough potassium cyanide to kill a rhino. And though the East Harlem neighborhood is a long way from the stone mansion she shares with her billionaire husband Roarke, it’s the holiness flying around St. Christobal’s that makes her uneasy. The autopsy reveals faint scars of knife wounds, a removed tattoo—and evidence of plastic surgery suggesting “Father Flores” may not be the man his parishioners thought. Now, as Eve pieces together clues that suggest identity theft, gang connections, and a deeply personal act of revenge, she hopes to track down whoever committed this unholy act. Until a second murder—in front of an even larger crowd of worshippers—knocks the whole investigation sideways...