Dee loves her children very much, but now they are all grown up, shouldn’t they leave home? Rosie moved out when she got married, but it didn’t work out, so now she is back with her parents. Helen is a teacher, and doesn’t earn enough for a place of her own. Anthony writes songs, and is just waiting for the day when someone will pay him for them.

Until then, all three are happy at home. It doesn’t cost them anything, and surely their parents like having a full house? When a crisis occurs, Dee decides things have to change for the whole family …whether they like it or not.

Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine – in touch only with his daughter and still trying to reconcile himself to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset – he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The return address on the box – Dussmann – unsettles him completely.

For it is the name of the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-six years ago in Berlin – at a time when the city was cleaved in two, and personal and political allegiances were haunted by the deep shadows of the Cold War. Refusing initially to confront what he might find in that box, Thomas nevertheless finds himself forced to grapple with a past he has never discussed with any living person – and in the process relive those months in Berlin, when he discovered, for the first and only time in his life, the full, extraordinary force of true love. But Petra Dussmann – the woman to whom he lost his heart – was not just a refugee from a police state, but also someone who lived with an ongoing sorrow beyond dreams…and one which gradually rewrote both their destinies.

In this, his tenth novel, Douglas Kennedy has written that rare thing: a love story as morally complex as it is tragic and deeply reflective. Brilliantly gripping, it is an atmospherically dense, ethically tangled tale of romantic certainty and conflicting loyalties, all set amidst a stunningly rendered portrait of Berlin in the final dark years before “The Wall” came down. Like all of Kennedy’s previous, critically acclaimed bestselling novels, “The Moment” is both unputdownable and profound.

Posing so many searching questions about why and how we fall in love – and the tangled way we project on to others that which our hearts seek – it is a love story of great epic sweep and immense emotional power.

This is an extraordinarily moving novel about coming to terms with loss. The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do.

But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting. He’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming…The monster in his back garden, though, this monster is something different. Something ancient, something wild.

And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth. Costa Award winner Patrick Ness spins a tale from the final idea of much-loved Carnegie Medal winner Siobhan Dowd, whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself.

Darkly mischievous and painfully funny, “A Monster Calls” is an extraordinarily moving novel of coming to terms with loss from two of our finest writers for young adults.

Part story, part graphic novel – this is a tender slice of life and death from the creators of “The Savage”. Do you believe there’s life after death? Slog does. He reckons that the scruffy bloke sitting outside the pork shop is his dad come back to visit him for one last time – just like he’d said he would, just before he died.

Slog’s mate Davie isn’t convinced. But how does this man know everything Slog’s dad would know? Because Slog says it really is his dad, that’s how….age 6-12

The recent discovery that as a young man Charles Dickens lived only a few doors from a major London workhouse made headlines worldwide, and the campaign to save the workhouse from demolition caught the public imagination. Internationally, the media immediately grasped the idea that Oliver Twist’s workhouse had been found, and made public the news that both the workhouse and Dickens’s old home were still standing, near London’s Telecom Tower. This book, by the historian who did the sleuthing behind these exciting new findings, presents the story for the first time, and shows that the two periods Dickens lived in that part of London – before and after his father’s imprisonment in a debtors’ prison – were profoundly important to his subsequent writing career.