Focus On: General Fiction
Here are our general fiction picks for autumn/winter 2024! Have a browse through to help focus your gift buying for this season, and beyond!
Karla's Choice (Nick Harkaway)
Set in the missing decade between two iconic instalments in the George Smiley saga, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Nick Harkaway's Karla's Choice is an extraordinary, thrilling return to the world of spy fiction's greatest writer, John le Carré.
It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West's spy war with the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only on a more peaceful life. And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumour in Whitehall – unconfirmed and a little scandalous – that George Smiley might almost be happy. But Control has other plans. A Russian agent has defected in the most unusual of circumstances, and the man he was sent to kill in London is nowhere to be found.
Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Susanna, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. But in his absence the shadows of Moscow have lengthened. Smiley will soon find himself entangled in a perilous mystery that will define the battles to come, and strike at the heart of his greatest enemy...
The Hotel Avocado (Bob Mortimer)
Gary Thorn is struggling with a big decision. Should he stay in London, wallowing in the safety of his legal job in Peckham and eating pies with his next door neighbour, Grace and her dog Lassoo, or should he move to Brighton, where his girlfriend Emily is about to open The Hotel Avocado? Either way, he’d be letting someone down.
But sinister forces are gathering in a cloud of launderette scented-vape smoke, and the arrival of the mysterious Mr Sequence puts Gary in an even worse predicament: soon he might be dead. All Gary wants is a happy life. But he also wants to be alive to enjoy it...
Think Again (Jacqueline Wilson)
Best friends Ellie, Magda and Nadine are all grown up now - but if they think they know what's coming, they'd better think again...
Adulthood isn’t quite what Ellie Allard dreamed it would be when she was fourteen years old. Though she’s got her beautiful daughter Lottie, her trusty cat Stella and life-long best friends in Magda and Nadine, 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 rent on her poky little flat. But this year on her birthday, it seems it’s time for all that to change – whether Ellie wants it to or not.
As she navigates new, exciting and often choppy waters, she’s about to discover that life will never stop surprising you – if only you let it.
Intermezzo (Sally Rooney)
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties - successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women - his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude - a period of desire, despair and possibility - a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Friends of Dorothy (Sandi Toksvig)
After much searching, the happily married young couple, Amber and Stevie think they have found the perfect spot in Grimaldi Square. Despite the rundown pub across the way, the overgrown garden and a decidedly nosy neighbour, number 4 is the house of their dreams.
Stevie, a woman who has never left anything to chance, has planned everything so nothing can spoil their happiness. But ... upstairs in their new home, seated on an old red sofa is the woman they bought the place from - eighty-year-old foul-mouthed, straight-talking, wise-cracking Dorothy - who has decided that she's not going anywhere.
It turns out that Dorothy will be only the first in a line of life-changing surprises. Friends of Dorothy is a touching, funny novel about a family that is not biological, but logical; a story close to Sandi Toksvig's heart.
Rare Singles (Benjamin Myers)
Dinah has always lived in Scarborough. Trapped with her feckless husband and useless son, her one release comes at her town’s Northern Soul nights, where she gets to put on her best and lose herself in the classics. Dinah has an especial hero: Bucky Bronco, who recorded a string of soul gems in the late Sixties and then vanished off the face of the earth. When she manages to contact Bucky she can’t believe her luck.
Over in Chicago, Bucky Bronco is down on his luck – and has been since the loss of his beloved wife Maybelle. The best he can hope for is to make ends meet, and try and stay high. But then an unexpected invitation arrives, from someone he’s never met, to come to somewhere he’s never heard of. With nothing to lose – and in need of the cash – Bucky boards a plane. And so Bucky finds himself in rainy Scarborough, where everyone seems to know who is – preparing to play for an audience for the first time in nearly half a century.
Over the course of the week, he finds himself striking up new and unexpected friendships; and facing his past, and its losses, for the very first time.
Frankie (Graham Norton)
Always on the periphery, looking on, young Frankie Howe was never quite sure enough of herself to take centre stage - after all, life had already judged her harshly. Now old, Frankie finds it easier to forget the life that came before.
Then Damian, a young Irish carer, arrives at her London flat, there to keep an eye on her as she recovers from a fall. A memory is sparked, and the past crackles into life as Damian listens to the story Frankie has kept stored away all these years.
Travelling from post-war Ireland to 1960s New York - a city full of art, larger than life characters and turmoil - Frankie shares a world in which friendship and chance encounters collide. A place where, for a while, life blazes with an intensity that can't last but will perhaps live on in other ways and in other people. But as Frankie's past slowly emerges, her spirit and endurance are revealed as undeniable...and unforgettable.
The Perfect Passion Company (Alexander McCall Smith)
The Perfect Passion Dating Company at No. 24 Mouse Lane in Edinburgh's New Town is run by Katie Donald who has an innate instinct for bringing people together. She has developed a skill for finding out what it is that people really want.
Along the way, Katie learns profound lessons about her own desires as she works at better understanding others. Although Katie has little in the way of direct experience, with the help of her amiable and handsome office neighbour William Kidd, she soon finds herself making matches for the lonely hearts tired of meeting online – and who want a more personal touch. For fans of Alexander McCall Smith's many beloved series and romantic standalone novels, The Perfect Passion Company shows him at his most perceptive, playful, and generous.
In the way that only McCall Smith can, this novel offers a glimpse inside the psychology of matchmaking, the search for love and companionship, and the mysterious spark of attraction that can, at times, catch hold of us all.
The Glassmaker (Tracy Chevalier)
Venice, 1486. Across the lagoon lies Murano. Time flows differently here – like the glass the island’s maestros spend their lives learning to handle. Women are not meant to work with glass, but Orsola Rosso flouts convention to save her family from ruin. She works in secret, knowing her creations must be perfect to be accepted by men.
But perfection may take a lifetime. Skipping like a stone through the centuries, we follow Orsola as she hones her craft through war and plague, tragedy and triumph, love and loss. The beads she creates will adorn the necks of empresses and courtesans from Paris to Vienna – but will she ever earn the respect of those closest to her?
There are Rivers in the Sky (Elif Shafak)
This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers, and three remarkable lives – all connected by a single drop of water. In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, there lies hidden in the sand fragments of a long-forgotten poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. Arthur’s only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, with one book soon sending him across the seas: Nineveh and Its Remains.
In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptised with water brought from the holy sit of Lalish in Iraq. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon Narin and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people.
In 2018 London, broken-hearted Zaleekhah, a hydrologist, moves to a houseboat on the Thames to escape the wreckage of her marriage. Zaleekhah foresees a life drained of all love and meaning – until an unexpected connection to her homeland changes everything.