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A peculiar pet shop in Tokyo has been known to offer customers a unique opportunity: the chance to adopt one of seven special cats whose "magic" is never promised, but always received. But there are rules: these cats must be returned after three days. They must eat only the food supplied by the owner, and they must travel to their new homes with a distinctive blanket. In The Blanket Cats, we meet seven customers, each of whom is hoping a temporary feline companion will help them escape a certain reality.

Alice Love is 29, crazy about her husband, and pregnant with her first child. So imagine Alice’s surprise when she comes to on the floor of a gym and is whisked off to the hospital, where she discovers the honeymoon is truly over - she’s getting divorced, she has three kids, and she’s actually 39 years old. Alice must reconstruct the events of a lost decade and find out whether it’s possible to reconstruct her life at the same time.

The gripping new thriller from the bestselling author of The Couple at No 9.

Beekeeper Jake Stevenson should be celebrating. After winning a prestigious culinary award, his fledging honey farm has been inundated with orders. But as he approaches his largest harvest ever, Jake is worried. He can’t seem to hire any helpers, and there’s no way he can do it all by himself. Meanwhile Flaco López, a Mexican teen sent north by his mother to escape growing danger in his village, has become separated from his companions and is lost on Mount Hood—hungry, scared, and alone—when he stumbles upon Jake’s beehives in a high alpine meadow.

Being an adult isn’t quite what Ellie Allard dreamed it would be when she was fourteen years old. Though she’s got her beautiful daughter Lottie, life-long best friends in Magda and Nadine and her trusty cat Stella, her love life is non-existent and she feels like she’s been living on auto-pilot, just grateful to be able to afford the mortgage on her pokey little flat. But this year on her birthday, the universe seems to decide it’s time to for all that to change.

Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life: when she was 11 and her mother disappeared, being proposed to at 21, the accident that would make her a widow at 41. At each of these moments, Willa ended up on a path laid out for her by others. So when she receives a phone call telling her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help, she drops everything and flies across the country. The spur-of-the moment decision to look after this woman - and her nine-year-old daughter, and her dog - will lead Willa into uncharted territory....

Skye MacKinnon is desperate for an escape. When she wins a lottery to buy a run-down cottage on a Greek island for only one euro, Skye jumps at the chance to get out of England and start over. As she unlocks the tattered blue door of her whitewashed new cottage, the sun-kissed sea glinting in the bay outside her windows, Skye immediately feels like she’s found her true home.

Adora Hazzard has it all figured out. A Stoic philosopher and divorcée, she lives a contented life on New York City’s Upper West Side. Having discovered that the secret to happiness is to desire only what you have, she’s applied this insight to blissful effect: relishing her teenage daughter, the freedom of being solo, and her job as a moral tutor for the twin boys of an old-money family. Adora’s carefully curated life is humming along brilliantly until a chance meeting with a handsome stranger.

It's a baking hot summer in 1960s California and three women have formed an unlikely friendship. From the outside, Beverly, Elsie and Margot lead idyllic lives, but behind the false smiles and glittering pools lies the truth: their husbands are some of the country's most notorious convicted killers. But when a string of local killings hits the news, the women – underestimated and overlooked – are hurled into an investigation of their own. After all, who better to catch a killer than those who have shared their lives with one?

Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP, for short), has always loved his niece, Maisie, and nephew, Grant. That is, he loves spending time with them when they come out to Palm Springs for weeklong visits, or when he heads home to Connecticut for the holidays. But in terms of caretaking and relating to two children, no matter how adorable, Patrick is, honestly, overwhelmed. So when tragedy strikes and Maisie and Grant lose their mother and Patrick's brother has a health crisis of his own, Patrick finds himself suddenly taking on the role of primary guardian.

Alice is stifled, bored, and misunderstood. So when she meets wealthy and handsome American, Bennett Van Cleve, she is quickly swept off her feet. Marrying him and moving to America seems like a great adventure - but life as a newlywed in stuffy Baileyville, Kentucky, is not at all what she hoped for. Until, that is, she responds to a call for volunteers to start a travelling library, surprising herself by saying yes, before her husband can say no.

Single parent Louise is trying to help her fragile young daughter navigate life. So, when the nine-year-old insists on finding out who her father is, Louise organizes a sisters’ outing to track down her Italian one-night stand. Meanwhile, due to her sons’ sporting success, mother-of-four Julie is anointed Cook-Bottlewasher-and-Cheerleader-in-Chief for the rugby parents’ group. Finally, glamorous Sophie is determined that her daughter Jess won’t be boy-crazy and image-obsessed like she was. But when things go wrong at a teen party, Sophie and her sisters are forced to take drastic measures.

Daiyu is the orphaned daughter of a once influential, now missing, family. Alone and on the streets, she must rely on her wits to discover what happened to her family. But when Daiyu is kidnapped and smuggled from China to America, she relinquishes the future she imagined.

Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression.

Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn't remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is unrecognizable - or her daughter Helen seems a total stranger. But there's one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to the bottom of it. Because somewhere in Maud's damaged mind lies the answer to an unsolved seventy-year-old mystery. One everyone has forgotten about. Everyone, except Maud.

When Lucy's estranged mother dies unexpectedly, her grief is overwhelming. So when her widowed father Edward begs her and Danny's forgiveness for his part in their argument, she's overjoyed. Newly pregnant, she's determined to give her baby the family she longed for. Danny, however, isn't convinced: Edward's mended ways feel too good to be true. But Lucy's pregnancy is difficult, and she can't hear his worries. Until the worst happens, and their fragile family is tested to its very limit… Will love be enough to get them through?

For Constance 'Connie' Costa, life is just beginning. She dreams of leaving behind her dull, dreary life in '70s East London, shaking off her deeply embarrassing Greek-Cypriot community of interfering Aunties and pretend 'cousins', and running away with her best mate Vas (fellow misfit; NHS specs; soul of a poet). She is determined to take her rightful place alongside her hero, David Bowie, onstage at Wembley Stadium.

Best friends Darcy, Camilla and Kate have just landed in the Maldives for a luxury holiday at the exclusive Sapphire Island Resort. They can't wait for ten days of scorching sun, crystal-clear waters, white-sand beaches - and the chance to put a traumatic shared past behind them. But what awaits them is a murderous revenge plot that none of them saw coming.

Frank Bridge turned his back on his family's gangland conflicts in Northumberland decades ago. When his father, the violent patriarch, dies, he decides to face the past and returns to Spain to carry out his research, and perhaps reconcile with his erstwhile brother Gordon, who lives on absconded gang money in a villa on the Costas. However, whilst Frank has been changed by twenty-five years apart, Gordon still holds on to the rage and terror of a life of crime.

Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance.