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Memories of expat life in pre-handover Hong Kong.Lyrical, wry, amusing, deceptively gentle, Simon Barnes’s second novel packs a powerful punch after it has crept up on the reader with the narrator’s fond reminiscences of expat life in pre-handover Hong Kong. The hazy and often hilarious memories of work and play in the heartstopping beauty and pulse-racing commercialism of the colony is suddenly flooded by darker memories of tragedy and loss, although Barnes, the most optimistic and delightful of authors, pulls the reader through to a warmly satisfying conclusion.

We’ve had MOMMY DEAREST about Joan Crawford; now Delia Ephron brings us Daddy Dearest in her witty, bittersweet first novel about love, death and the telephone, based on the Ephron sisters’ experiences dealing with the death of their alcoholic father.Hanging Up is about the three Mozell sisters, Georgia, Eve and Maddy. Georgia, the eldest, is a super-successful tough career woman, the editor of a magazine named after her. Eve, the middle sister, is just an ordinary mum. Maddy the youngest is a ditsy irresponsible soap opera star. Their father is dying. He is an alcoholic and has Alzheimers known as The Dwindles. The mother ran off with their biology teacher years ago. The father is in a home and threatening to marry one of the other inmates. He worships Georgia and talks about her endlessly which drives the other two mad since Georgia never does anything for him. He drives them all mad by telephoning them incessantly and they in turn have to phone each other to find out what he’s told whom. He plays them off against each other. And in the middle, keeping the whole thing going, shouldering most of the burderns, is Eve – the middle child.

You have a funny way of doing things here.The voice is that of Vid Cosic, a Serbian immigrant whose immediate friendship with a young Dublin lawyer, Kevin Concannon, is overshadowed by a violent incident in which a man is left for dead in the street one night. The legal fallout forces them into an ever closer, uncertain partnership, drawing Vid right into the Concannon family, working for them as a carpenter on a major renovation project and becoming more and more involved in their troubled family story.While he claims to have lost his own memory in a serious accident back home in Serbia, he cannot help investigating the emerging details of a young woman from Connemara who was denounced by the church and whose pregnant body was washed up on the Aran Islands many years ago. Was it murder or suicide? And what dark impact does this event in the past still have on the Concannon family now?As the deadly echo of hatred and violence begins to circle closer around them, Vid finds this spectacular Irish friendship coming under increasing threat with fatal consequences.Drawing his own speckled, Irish-German background, Hugo Hamilton has given us a highly compelling and original view of contemporary Ireland, the nature of welcome and the uneasy trespassing into a new country.

The debut novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is a gutsy, funny, tragic and completely original work for fans of William Faulkner and Alice Walker.In the 1950s, in a small southern town in the US, the Beedes are the lowest of the low. Always struggling, they remain shackled by poverty and their own lack of ambition. Everyone, but sixteen-year-old Billie Beede.Billy Beede has big ideas about her life. She's had the Beede misfortune to get pregnant by an itinerant coffin salesman. And when he proves to have a wife and seven kids in another town, she determines to try her luck elsewhere. The answer seems to be in the hem of her mother's dress, her mother who died ten years ago. The rumour is that Willa Mae – a Billie Holiday look-alike – was the only Beede who made good, and was buried with a pearl necklace and a diamond ring sewn into the hem of her dress.Billie – and all her relatives – aim to get their hands on this treasure and make something of themselves. What follows is a mad road trip that evokes shades of Faulkner – in its potent earthiness – but also has the approachability and warmth of novels like The Colour Purple. This is a fantastic debut novel from an accomplished and well-loved American playwright.

A big-hearted, funny and sad novel about the messiness of love, family and belief‘Hilarious and timely, a dazzling debut’ John Boyne‘Bustling, bubbly, bittersweet fun’Daily Mail‘Bulging, big-hearted, a pleasure to read’Irish Times‘Think Zadie Smith. But much funnier’Sunday Independent‘Very moving, highly entertaining, clever and funny’Sunday Times (Ireland)‘Funny, warm and full of heart’ Image MagazineIn 1979 Bridget Doyle has one goal left in life: for her family to produce the very first Irish pope. Fired up by John Paul II’s appearance in Phoenix Park, she sprinkles Papal-blessed holy water on the marital bed of her son and daughter-in-law, and leaves them to get on with things. But nine months later her daughter-in-law dies in childbirth and Granny Doyle is left bringing up four grandchildren: five-year-old Peg, and baby triplets Damien, Rosie and John Paul.Thirty years later, it seems unlikely any of Granny Doyle’s grandchildren are going to fulfil her hopes. Damien is trying to work up the courage to tell her that he’s gay. Rosie is a dreamy blue-haired rebel who wants to save the planet and has little time for popes. And irrepressible John Paul is a chancer and a charmer and the undisputed apple of his Granny’s eye – but he’s not exactly what you’d call Pontiff material.None of the triplets have much contact with their big sister Peg, who lives over 3,000 miles away in New York City, and has been a forbidden topic of conversation ever since she ran away from home as a teenager. But that’s about to change.

A bargain set of three funny warm accounts of chaotic family life from bestselling author Fiona Gibson.In Pedigree Mum Kerry’s husband has left her heartbroken and alone with her kids. Can a naughty stray dog lead her to a new love?Mum on the Run’s heroine Laura hates running. Her nightmare is the Mums’ Race at Sports Day. But when her husband starts paying too much attention to a glamorous colleague, Laura is determined to get the spark back in their marriage. Even if it means joining an exercise club …In The Great Escape Hannah, Lou and Sadie are determined to leave the trials of parenthood behind and recapture their lost youth on a hen weekend. Trouble is, things don’t go according to plan, and while they’re away, the men in their lives have some revelations of their own …

‘Londonstani’, Gautam Malkani's electrifying debut, reveals a Britain that has never before been explored in the novel: a country of young Asians and white boys (desis and goras) trying to work out a place for themselves in the shadow of the divergent cultures of their parents’ generation.Set close to the Heathrow feed roads of Hounslow, Malkani shows us the lives of a gang of four young men: Hardjit the ring leader, a Sikh, violent, determined his caste stay pure; Ravi, determinedly tactless, a sheep following the herd; Amit, whose brother Arun is struggling to win the approval of his mother for the Hindu girl he has chosen to marry; and Jas who tells us of his journey with these three, desperate to win their approval, desperate too for Samira, a Muslim girl, which in this story can only have bad consequences. Together they cruise the streets in Amit's enhanced Beemer, making a little money changing the electronic fingerprints on stolen mobile phones, a scam that leads them into more dangerous waters.Funny, crude, disturbing, written in the vibrant language of its protagonists – a mix of slang, Bollywood, texting, Hindu and bastardised gangsta rap – ‘Londonstani’ is about many things: tribalism, aggressive masculinity, integration, cross-cultural chirpsing techniques, the urban scene seeping into the mainstream, bling bling economics, 'complicated family-related shit'. It is one of the most surprising British novels of recent years.

A wickedly funny comedy of New York life and love, from the bestselling author of The First Wives Club and Bestseller.She’s the despair of her family, she tries to run their lives, and she just won’t act her age. In fact there’s only one way to get Mom out of her children’s hair…When Phyllis Geronomous decides that retirement in Florida is not for her and moves back to the Big Apple, her three grown-up children are horrified. Sigourney is a successful stockbroker and a control freak, Sharon has two young children and a troubled marriage, while Bruce, the baby of the family, is finally feeling comfortable about having a significant other called Todd. They just can’t let crazy Phyllis ruin their lives all over again. Murder is out – purely for practical reasons. Only Sigourney has the ideal solution: they’ll marry Mom off, and then she’ll be someone else’s problem. But where are they going to find a deaf, dumb, old, blind, and, above all, rich groom?