検索キーワード： 制作 "Sceptre" 大衆小説

Set in Northfield, an understaffed military psychiatric hospital immediately before the NHS is founded, Walking Wounded is the story of a doctor and his patient: David Reece, a young journalist-to-be whose wartime experiences in Burma have come back to haunt him violently; and Daniel Carter, one of the senior psychiatrists, a man who is fighting his own battles as well as those of his patients.

In a field outside Bromsgrove, two elderly brothers live in adjoining railway carriages. No one visits, and they never speak to each other. Until the day Zohra Dasgupta, a young postwoman, delivers an extraordinary letter - from a woman claiming to be the sister they thought had been murdered 50 years earlier.

How good are people? Let me tell you, Dee: people are as good as the pair of eyes they believe is on them.... When Claudia Talwar is called to meet a mysterious visitor in the reception of her Manchester office block, she can't believe her eyes. It's Samson Glaze, former hippy turned internationally famous entrepreneur, and the 15-years-absent father figure of her youth. It doesn't take much for Samson to convince her to help find his son, Reggie Glaze, who's got into a bit of trouble....

I've known Death a long time but now Death knows me. When their idyllic childhood is shattered by the sudden death of their parents, siblings Marty, Liz and Jules are sent to a bleak state boarding school. Once there, the orphans' lives change tracks: Marty throws himself into academic life; Liz is drawn to dark forms of escapism; and Jules transforms from a vivacious child to a withdrawn teenager.

Some time in the near future, thanks to medical technology HealthTechTM, immortality is now within humanity's grasp. But faced with declining economic productivity, falling birth rates and a severely aging population, the Ministry has become the all-powerful arbiter of how healthcare resources are allocated. Resources accrue to 'lifers', those predisposed for a life expected to be lived healthily well beyond a hundred years old. Some factors that determine lifer status are genetically incidental - but there are other, more intangible factors that are within individuals' control: the degree to which they are 'life-loving' and self-caring. 

One rain-swept February night in 1809, an unconscious man is carried into a house in Somerset. He is Captain John Lacroix, home from Britain's disastrous campaign against Napoleon's forces in Spain. Gradually Lacroix recovers his health but not his peace of mind - he cannot talk about the war or face the memory of what happened in a village on the gruelling retreat to Corunna. After the command comes to return to his regiment, he sets out instead for the Hebrides, with the vague intent of reviving his musical interests and collecting local folk songs.

In a tale taut with tension, events unfold hour by hour from the perspectives of nine people involved. They include Willie himself, who knows what really happened, and his father, desperately trying to reach the town jail to see his son one last time; the prosecuting lawyer, haunted by being forced to seek the death penalty against his convictions, and his wife, who believes Willie to be innocent; the priest who has become a friend to Willie; and a mother whose only son is fighting in the Pacific, bent on befriending her black neighbours in defiance of her husband.

Giacomo Casanova arrives in England in the summer of 1763 at the age of 38, seeking a respite from his restless travels and liaisons. But the lure of company proves too hard to resist and the dazzlingly pretty face of young Marie Charpillon even harder. Casanova's pursuit of this elusive bewitcher drives him from exhilaration to despair and to attempt to reinvent himself in the roles of labourer, writer and country squire. 

At the dawn of the Enlightenment, James Dyer is born unable to feel pain. A source of wonder and scientific curiosity as a child, he rises through the ranks of Georgian society to become a brilliant surgeon. Yet as a human being he fails, for he can no more feel love and compassion than pain. Until, en route to St Petersburg to inoculate the Empress Catherine against smallpox, he meets his nemesis and saviour.

When Lucy wins a place at university, she thinks London will unlock her future. It is a city alive with pop up bars, cool girls and neon lights illuminating the Thames at night. At least this is what Lucy expects, having grown up seemingly a world away in working-class Sunderland, amid legendary family stories of Irish immigrants and boarding houses, now-defunct ice rinks and an engagement ring at a fish market. Yet Lucy's transition to a new life is more overwhelming than she ever expected.

A provocative, exuberant novel about time, desire, memory and the imagination, which tells the story of a young Midwestern woman's first year in New York in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious neighbour, Lucy Brite. As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S. H. transcribes her neighbour's bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one night when Lucy bursts into her apartment to rescue S. H. from a frightening situation.

If you had to pick five people to sum up your life, who would they be? If you were to raise a glass to each of them, what would you say? And what would you learn about yourself, when all is said and done? This is the story of Maurice Hannigan, an Irish farmer. Over the course of a Saturday night in June, he orders five drinks at the Rainsford House Hotel, and with each he toasts a key person from his life: his adored older brother; his troubled sister-in-law; his daughter of 15 minutes; his son far off in America; and his late, much missed wife.   

A missionary begs to be moved from disease-ridden Bangkok. A musician plays a private show for ghosts. A student abandoned by his lover bleeds to death in the street. A plastic surgeon designs a girl a new face. A woman decides whether to cook a final meal for a dying murderer. Lurching through decades, from Bangkok's rich past to its imagined, uploaded future, witness the city as it changes from a booming capitalist hub to a city engulfed by water, through human tales seeping into one another, held together by delicate threads.  

Donald believes he knows all there is to know about seeing. An optometrist in suburban Boston, he is sure that he and his wife, Viv, who runs the local stables, are both devoted to their two children and to each other. Then Mercury - a gorgeous young thoroughbred with a murky past - arrives at Windy Hill, and everything changes. Mercury's owner, Hilary, is a newcomer to town who has enrolled her daughter in riding lessons.

Love is not a singular concept. In this collection, seven award-winning authors explore seven concepts of love: from philautia (self-love) to agape (love for humanity) and from storge (a natural affection for family) to mania (a frenzied, obsessive love).

Thomas Keneally pulls no punches in this powerful novel about the Catholic Church's attempts to cover up cases of child abuse. Expelled from the archdiocese of Sydney as a young priest for his outspoken views on the Vietnam War, Father Frank Docherty returns to Australia in 1996 to speak at a conference on paedophilia within the Catholic Church. There, he finds himself caught up in the cases of two people who claim to have been sexually abused by an eminent Sydney cleric.

London, the 1720s. Welcome to Romeville, the underworld of that great city. The financial crash caused by the South Sea Bubble sees the rise of Jonathan Wild, self-styled Thief-taker General who purports to keep the peace while brutally controlling organised crime. Only two people truly defy him: Jack Sheppard, apprentice turned house-breaker, and his lover, the notorious whore and pickpocket Edgworth Bess.

At the end of May 1381, the 14-year-old King of England had reason to be fearful: the plague had returned, the royal coffers were empty and a draconian poll tax was being widely evaded. Yet Richard, bolstered by his powerful, admired mother, felt secure in his God-given right to reign.

An ex-soldier and recovering alcoholic living quietly in Somerset, Stephen Rose has just begun to form a bond with the daughter he barely knows when he receives a summons - to an inquiry into an incident during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.  It is the return of what Stephen hoped he had outdistanced. Above all, to testify would jeopardise the fragile relationship with his daughter. And if he loses her, he loses everything.  Instead, he decides to write her an account of his life: a confession, a defence, a love letter. Also a means of buying time. 

Recently dumped and stuck with the mortgage, artist Esther Ray wants to burn the world, but instead, she reluctantly accepts a scrapbooking job from the deliriously wealthy Naomi Duncan. The scrapbooks, a secret birthday gift for Naomi's husband Bryce, trace the Duncan's twenty-five-year marriage. As Esther binges true-crime podcasts and works through the near-two hundred-boxes of Duncan detritus, she finds herself infatuated with the gilded family - until, mid-project, Naomi dies suspiciously.