Longing to connect to his ancestral roots, Cajetan Pereira has taken up residence near one of the rare and mystical Baobab trees in South India. Into his world walks Sylvia, a young woman in search of a story. They bond over their new-found relationship, until one day consumed by regret, Sylvia disappears.

In a rich kaleidoscope of tales, Sylvia is glimpsed in the lives of other characters as a colleague, friend, wife and lover, until she comes back into focus as she finds herself becoming whole once more – but is it too late?

Brimming with exquisite prose, Sylvia is a beautifully woven tapestry of the ways in which we leave indelible imprints on each other’s lives.

A beautifully rendered portrait of love, healing, and long-buried pain, digging deep into the nature of trauma and class division.

Perfect for fans of ELIF SHAFAK and KAMILA SHAMSIE

Zohaib, Misha and Nadia believed they would be in each other’s lives forever. Yet nothing could have prepared them for the tragic turn of events one fateful afternoon in Karachi, Pakistan, when the divisions and differences between them are revealed.

Years later and they are still trying to piece their lives back together, still trying to make sense of what happened. Zohaib is living in London, haunted by the ghosts of the past. Nadia has escaped the household where she first met Misha and Zohaib but finds fate delivering her back to their door…

Fourteen-year-old Brooke Tyler has spent her whole life waiting for a boy to choose her. Matt is about to go to university, scared to leave behind everything he knows. When both are cast as romantic leads in Romeo and Juliet, they fulfil the roles of forbidden lovers both on and off the stage. Brooke is sure that her fairy tale is coming true – and best of all, Matt is older.

Brooke considers secrets and lies a small price to pay for her first boyfriend, but the relationship is set to cost her after one night alone in an empty auditorium. When Brooke learns that Matt’s actions that night were illegal, her world shatters.

Years later, Brooke and Matt reunite as adults. Matt wants to undo all the damage he caused, but Brooke makes a choice which forces them both to question their relationship.

Told in three acts this captivating debut reveals a young woman’s journey for independence as she strays away from everything she has ever known to navigate her traumatic past.

1798: A magical, dark adventure. Fourteen-year-old Pâtca, initiated in the occult arts, comes to Bucharest, to her uncle, Cuviosu Zăval, to retrieve the Book of Perilous Dishes. The recipes in this magical book can bring about damaging sincerity, forgetfulness, the gift of prediction, or hysterical laughter. She finds her uncle murdered and the book missing. All that Zăval has left her is a strange map she must decipher. Travelling from Romania to France and on to Germany to do so, Patca’s family’s true past and powers are revealed, as is her connection to the famous and sublime chef, Silica.

This witty and poignant coming-of-age story catapults 18-year-old Billy Reed across Europe. Penniless and desperate to escape middle England, Billy is working as a grave-digger, the ultimate dead-end job. To make matters worse, he’s a virgin, and there’s no hope of him meeting a girl any time soon. The only women at work are in coffins. Meeting the older, mysterious Eva changes everything. A scramble across Europe follows, involving hitch-hiking with truckers, walking with refugees, and an encounter with suicidal cows. But the further Billy goes, the harder it is to be sure what he’s chasing – and what he’s running from. Part coming-of-age narrative, part European travel adventure, this is a hilarious and moving book for everyone who wants to break away and follow their dreams.

Hassanakis is a young Muslim boy of Turkish descent growing up on Crete during WWI. Fifteen generations of his family have lived on the island and until now he has never had any reason not to think he is a Cretan. But with the Great Powers tussling over the collapsing Ottoman Empire and the island’s Christians in rebellion, an outbreak of ethnic violence forces his family to flee to the Cretan City of Chania. He begins to lay down roots and his snappy dress earns him the nickname of Hassan ‘the mirror’. As WWI draws to a close and the Turkish War of Independence rages, he begins a heady romance with the elegant Hüsniye. There are rumours that the Cretan Muslims will be sent to Turkey but Hassanakis can’t believe he will be sent to a country whose language he barely knows and where he knows no-one.

This powerful novel drawn from the diary of a refugee family evokes the beauty, complexity and trauma of Crete’s past and weaves it into a moving tale of an ordinary man living through extraordinary times.

Based on 3 diaries left by a Cretan refugee in Ayvalik in Turkey, this novel by Ahmet Yorulmaz is the first of a trilogy. It is one of very few Turkish novels ever written about the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey in 1923, during which about 1.8 million people were ‘exchanged’ almost solely on the basis of their religion. This all but emptied the new Turkey of its Christian Greek population, which dated back to about 20 BC, and emptying Crete of its Muslim inhabitants. Most deportees did not speak the language of their new country and had no roots there whatsoever.

Distant Signs is an intimate portrait of two families spanning three generations amidst turbulent political change, behind and beyond the Berlin Wall.

In 1960s East Germany, Margret, a professor’s daughter from the city, meets and marries Hans, from a small village in the Thuringian forest. The couple struggle to contend with their different backgrounds, and the emotional scars they bear from childhood in the aftermath of war. As East German history gradually unravels, with collision of the personal and political, their two families’ hidden truths are quietly revealed. An exquisitely written novel with strongly etched characters that stay with you long after the book is finished and an authentic portrayal of family life behind the iron curtain based on personal experience of the author who is East German and was 16 years old at the fall of the Berlin Wall.

ANNE RICHTER on THE AUTHORS SHOW

Young love, meddling relatives, heart-to-hearts with friends real and imagined – Philistia’s world is that of an ordinary university student, except that in occupied Palestine, and when your father is in indefinite detention, nothing is straightforward.

Philistia is closest to her childhood, and to her late grandmother and her imprisoned father, when she’s at her part-time job washing women’s bodies at the ancient Ottoman hammam in Nablus, the West Bank. A midwife and corpse washer in her time, Grandma Zahia taught Philistia the ritual ablutions and the secrets of the body: the secrets of life and death.

On the brink of adulthood, Philistia embarks on a journey through her country’s history – a magical journey, and one of loss and centuries of occupation.

As trees are uprooted around her, Philistia searches for a place of refuge, a place where she can plant a memory for the ones she’s lost.

Young love, meddling relatives, heart-to-hearts with friends real and imagined – Philistia’s world is that of an ordinary university student, except that in occupied Palestine, and when your father is in indefinite detention, nothing is straightforward.