'Beautifully written, dark, twisted and often funny' Charlotte Levin 'Dark and twisted, comic and toxic. I loved it!' Jenny Colgan 'Shocking and compelling. I raced through it. Fabulous' Daily Mail Ruth and Muriel are best friends. And often, worst enemies. Inseparable since they were little, Ruth and Muriel have shared everything. Now, fate has left them living together in a North London home, with Ruth caring for Muriel in her deteriorating health, playing Scrabble, arguing and making up, passing the days in monotony. Until one afternoon, when Muriel makes an unexpected and sinister announcement: ‘In exactly seventy-two hours, I am going to die’. The end might be in sight for Muriel, but that’s just the beginning of this story about two old friends who have seventy-two years of history – and more than one shocking secret – between them... A darkly comic novel about two old friends, a lifelong (toxic) friendship, and the very fine line between love and hate. Perfect for fans of Joanna Cannon, Charlotte Levin and Jennie Godfrey.

The darkly comic debut novel from Claire Parkin. A tale of toxic friends, lost love and deep seething resentment. For all the fans of Joanna Canon and Gail Honeyman.

"Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions," begins The Girls of Slender Means, Dame Muriel Spark's tragic and rapier-witted portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of World War II. Like the May of Teck Club itself—"three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit"—its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal: practicing elocution, and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. The novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds. Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called "one of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."

The paths of two women from different walks of life intersect amid counterculture of the 1960s in this haunting and provocative novel from the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend Named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Christian Science Monitor Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind introduces two women who meet as freshmen on the Columbia campus in 1968. Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. She is mortified by Ann's romanticization of the underprivileged class, which Georgette herself is hoping college will enable her to escape. After the violent fight that ends their friendship, Georgette wants only to forget Ann and to turn her attention to the troubled runaway kid sister who has reappeared after years on the road. Then, in 1976, Ann is convicted of murder. At first, Ann's fate appears to be the inevitable outcome of her belief in the moral imperative to "make justice" in a world where "there are no innocent white people." But, searching for answers to the riddle of this friend of her youth, Georgette finds more complicated and mysterious forces at work. The novel's narrator Georgette illuminates the terrifying life of this difficult, doomed woman, and in the process discovers how much their early encounter has determined her own path, and why, decades later, as she tells us, "I have never stopped thinking about her."

Jessica Barnes has a one-way ticket to the career of her dreams as a corporate VP when Adam Taylor, the sexy consultant and chief hatchet man, arrives on the scene. Suddenly Jessica's not sure whether her job will get axed if a merger with a rogue company goes through. She wants to ignore the man who's turning her world upside down, but instead he's turning her on…. Adam Taylor never expected to find his dream woman. And he certainly never expected her to be the fireball in the power suit, who's making him want her in as many positions as possible. But when they make a bet to keep their hands to themselves for ten whole days, Adam's not sure he can keep up his side of the bargain! Besides, what's one kiss? Unless it leads to a whole lot more…