Looking for something new to read? Take a look at our brand-new books for October! All of these books and more are available to borrow for free with your library card.
Jack Reacher wakes up, alone, in the dark, handcuffed to a makeshift bed. His right arm has suffered some major damage. His few possessions are gone. He has no memory of getting there. The last thing Reacher can recall is the car he hitched a ride in getting run off the road. The driver was killed. His captors assume Reacher was the driver's accomplice and patch up his wounds as they plan to make him talk. A plan that will backfire spectacularly.
John Rebus spent his life as a detective putting Edinburgh's most deadly criminals behind bars. Now, he's joined them. As new allies and old enemies circle, and the days and nights bleed into each other, even the legendary detective struggles to keep his head. That is, until a murder at midnight in a locked cell presents a new mystery. They say old habits die hard. However, this is a case where the prisoners and the guards are all suspects, and everyone has something to hide. With no badge, no authority and no safety net, Rebus walks a tightrope - with his life on the line. But how do you find a killer in a place full of them?
When a small bone at the centre of a famous sculpture is revealed to be human, three people become intimately connected by the secrets and lies that put it there. Set on a Scottish tidal island connected to the mainland for just a few hours each day, and home to only one inhabitant, 'The Blue Hour' asks questions of ambition, power, art and perception.
Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles' envy and violence. As their lives unfold over the next half a century, the two boys' careers will diverge dramatically: Dave, a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician.
A suspect covered in blood, without a memory of how it got there. A murder committed without setting foot inside the room where it happens. And an advent calendar. Because, you know, it's Christmas.
Summoned to an unnerving, abandoned theme park to retrieve a body, Dr Kay Scarpetta is devastated to learn that the victim is a man she once loved. While teaching in Rome during the early days of her career, Scarpetta had a love affair with acclaimed astrophysicist Sal Giordano that led to a lifelong friendship. The murder scene is bizarre, with a crop circle of petals around the body, and Giordano's skin is strangely red. Scarpetta's niece Lucy believes he was dropped from an unidentified flying craft. Scarpetta knows an autopsy can reveal the dead's secrets, but she is shocked to find her friend seems to have deliberately left her a clue. As the investigators are torn between suspicions of otherworldly forces, and of Giordano himself, Scarpetta detects an explanation closer to home that, in her mind, is far more evil.
Nineteen-year-old Merowdis Scott is an unusual girl. She can talk to animals and trees - and she is only ever happy when she is walking in the woods. One snowy afternoon, out with her dogs and Apple the pig, Merowdis encounters a blackbird and a fox. As darkness falls, a strange figure enters in their midst - and the path of her life is changed forever.
'Gliff' - a Scots or Northern word for a glimpse, a shock, a glance - will not only tell its own story but also contain within it a hidden story, to be revealed only in a second novel, 'Glyph' - from the Greek, meaning a mark, carving or symbol - to be published a year later. In form and feeling, 'Gliff' will light a new, fabular and fabulist path for Ali Smith and for us through the gathering darkness of our chaotic times.
December 1962, a small village near Bristol. Eric and Irene and Bill and Rita. Two young couples living next to each other, the first in a beautiful cottage - suitable for a newly appointed local doctor - the second in a run-down, perennially under-heated farm. Despite their apparent differences, the two women (both pregnant) strike an easy friendship - a connection that comes as a respite from the surprising tediousness of married life, with its unfulfilled expectations, growing resentments and the ghosts of a recent past. But as one of the coldest winters on record grips England in a never-ending frost and as the country is enveloped in a thick, soft, unmoving layer of snow, the two couples find themselves cut off from the rest of the world. And without the small distractions of daily existence, suddenly old tensions and shocking new discoveries threaten to change the course of their lives forever.
In 1581, Emilia Bassano is allowed no voice of her own. But as the Lord Chamberlain's mistress she has access to the theatre, and finds a way to bring her work to the stage secretly. And yet, creating some of the world's greatest dramatic masterpieces comes at a great cost: by paying a man for the use of his name, she will write her own out of history. His name? William Shakespeare. In modern day New York, playwright Melina Green is determined to see one of her shows make the stage. After years of struggle to be recognised she has finally written again, inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor - Emilia Bassano, England's first published female poet. Although the challenges are different for her, four hundred years later, a woman's voice is still not heard like a man's. But what lengths will she be willing to go to in order to achieve her dreams?
