Other Women by Emma Flint, £9.99 paperback
London, 1923. Like so many single women after the Great War, Beatrice Cade, a thirty-seven-year-old typist, is holding tight to her small scrap of independence and trying to build a life for herself. When charismatic visiting salesman Tom Ryan directs his attention at her, Bea falls hard for him. But Ryan is married with a child. And his wife, Kate, has worked to create a seemingly happy domestic life. When Bea is found dead and Tom Ryan is in the frame for her murder, it looks like Kate will do anything to protect her family.
The Signalman by Charles Dickens, £4.99 paperback
On the 9th of June 1865, Charles Dickens was travelling aboard the Folkestone to London Boat Train with his mistress and her mother, when it derailed while crossing a viaduct near Staplehurst in Kent. The train plunged down a bank into a dry river bed, killing ten passengers, and badly wounding forty. Dickens was profoundly affected by the disaster, and a year later, he published The Signalman, a supremely atmospheric ghost story in which the narrator, while investigating a dank and lonely railway cutting, meets the signalman who works there.
His new acquaintance appears to live under the shadow of an unbearable secret, haunted by an apparition whose appearance prefigures terrible rail accidents. Drawing on Dickens own experiences, and introduced by Simon Bradley, author of The Railways, The Signalman is both an important piece of rail history, and a sinister tale which will make you think twice next time you enter the quiet carriage.
Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, £9.99 paperback
It feels remarkable to be a deserted wife when one is only twenty-four. New York, 1924. Patricia and Peter are a thoroughly modern married couple. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work. Both believe in ‘Love-Outside-Marriage’. Until they don’t. Or, really, until he doesn’t. So when Peter pushes for divorce with increasing violence, Patricia has to forge a new life as a single woman: as an ex-wife. A sensational bestseller in 1929, yet utterly timeless, Ex-Wife plunges us into the ‘era of the one-night stand’. It evokes not only the Manhattan bars, fashion advertising offices, female friendships and all-night parties of a dazzling city, but the hollow affairs, emotional hangovers, backstreet abortions, and struggles for sexual freedoms amidst the moral double standards of a patriarchal world.
What you are looking for is in the library by Michiko Aoyama, £9.99 paperback
What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. But she is no ordinary librarian.Sensing exactly what someone is searching for in life, she provides just the book recommendation to help them find it. We meet five visitors to the library, each at a different crossroads: The restless retail assistant eager to pick up new skills, the mother faced with a demotion at work after maternity leave, the conscientious accountant who yearns to open an antique store, the gifted young manga artist in search of motivation, the recently retired salary-man on a quest for newfound purpose. Can she help them find what they are looking for? Which book will you recommend?