Showing results by publisher "Orion Publishing Group" in Literary Fiction

Ma Taffy may be blind, but she sees everything. So when her great-nephew, Kaia, comes home from school in tears, what she senses sends a deep fear through her. While they wait for Kaia's mama to come home from work, Ma Taffy recalls the story of the flying preacherman and a great thing that did not happen. A poor suburban sprawl in the Jamaican heartland, Augustown is a place where many things that should happen don't, and plenty of things that shouldn't happen do.

The novel Carlos Ruiz Zafón wrote just before The Shadow of the Wind. 'Fifteen years on, the remembrance of that day has returned to me. I have seen that boy wandering through the mist of the railway station, and the name of Marina has flared up again like a fresh wound. We all have a secret buried under lock and key in the attic of our soul. This is mine...' In May 1980, 15-year-old Oscar Drai suddenly vanishes from his boarding school in the old quarter of Barcelona. For seven days and nights no one knows his whereabouts...

Meet Balram Halwal, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells his story.... Born in a village in the dark heart of India, the son of a rickshaw puller, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teas hop.

Gravy worked in the graveyard - hence the name. He was having a normal day until his friend Benjy turned up in a car Gravy didn't recognise. Benjy had a bullet hole in his chest, but lived just long enough to ask Gravy to hide him and look after his gun. Gravy had looked after things for Benjy before, but never a gun. When Gravy looked in the car he found blood, a balaclava, and a bag stuffed with money. Gravy's not too bright but he wants to help his friend. So Gravy finds himself caught up in the middle of a robbery gone wrong....

In the contested and unexplored territories at the edge of the Empire, a boat is making its laborious way up stream. Riding along the banks are the mercenaries hired to protect it - from raiders, bandits and, most of all, the stretchers, elf-like natives who kill any intruders into their territory. The mercenaries know this is dangerous, deadly work. But it is what they do. In the boat the drunk governor of the territories and his sons and daughters make merry. They believe that their status makes them untouchable.

Loosely inspired by a true story, this tender portrait of marriage asks: what do you do when the person you love has to change? It starts with a question, a simple favour asked by a wife of her husband while both are painting in their studio, setting off a transformation neither can anticipate.

Some moments can change your life for ever. Have you ever wondered, what if....? A man is walking down a country lane. A woman, cycling towards him, swerves to avoid a dog. On that moment their future hinges. There are three possible outcomes, three small decisions that could determine the rest of their lives. Eva and Jim are 19 and students at Cambridge when their paths first cross in 1958. And then there is David, Eva's then lover, an ambitious actor who loves Eva deeply.

Giverny. During the day, the home of the famous artist Claude Monet and the gardens where he painted his water lilies. But once the tourists have gone, there is a darker side to the peaceful French village. This is the story of 13 days that begin with one murder and end with another. Jérôme Morval, a man whose passion for art was matched only by his passion for women, has been found dead in the stream that runs through the gardens.

When an exotic stranger, Vianne Rocher, arrives in the French village of Lansquenet and opens a chocolate boutique directly opposite the church, Father Reynaud denounces her as a serious moral danger to his flock - especially as it is the beginning of Lent, the traditional season of self-denial. As passions flare and the conflict escalates, the whole community takes sides. Can the solemnity of the church compare with the sinful pleasure of a chocolate truffle?

Ben Jewell has hit a breaking point. His 10-year-old son, Jonah, has severe autism, and Ben and his wife, Emma, are struggling to cope. When Ben and Emma fake a separation - a strategic decision to further Jonah's case in an upcoming tribunal - Ben and Jonah move in with Georg, Ben's elderly father. In a small house in North London, three generations of men - one who can't talk, two who won't - are thrown together.

Brought up in Switzerland, the only son of well-to-do parents, Charles Fryerne is somewhat unprepared for the world he meets when he goes up to Oxford University in the early 1980s. There he meets a fascinating social set, including a stellar young playwright, a student dubbed 'the future leader of the Conservative party' and a mercurial figure with ambitions to become the youngest prime minister since Pitt. When they leave university, the characters go their separate ways.

Molly Sullivan said that the new baby was a little star. She was no trouble at all and she was always smiling - so she became known as Star and no one remembered that her name was Oona.Star Sullivan just wanted everyone to be happy - her father to stop gambling, her mother not to work so hard, her brother to stay out of trouble, her sister to stop worrying about every little thing she ate.

It is on a golfing trip to France that Hector Chetwode-Talbot, Eck to his friends, first meets Charlie Summers, a fly-by-night entrepreneur whose latest scheme is to import Japanese dog food into the UK. Soon Charlie lands on Eck's doorstep with his suitcase, intent on staying and relaunching his dog food business in the area. But with the financial crash looming, Eck begins to ask himself if they are so very different....

Reminiscent of One Day meets Nicholas Sparks, That Part Was True is a bittersweet debut about falling in love and risking it all. When Eve Petworth writes to Jackson Cooper to praise a scene in one of his books, they discover a mutual love of cookery and food. As their letters criss-cross the ocean that lies between them, friendship and then romance blossom despite Jackson's colourful love life and Eve's tense relationship with her soon-to-be-married daughter.

A prisoner sits on death row in a high-security prison. His only escape is through the words he dreams about, the world he conjures around him using the power of language. For the reality of his world is brutal and stark. He is not named, nor do we know his crime. But he listens. He listens to the story of York, the prisoner in the cell next to him who has been sentenced to death. He hears The Lady, a mitigation specialist who is piecing together York's past. He watches as The Lady falls in love with The Priest and wonders if love is still possible in this place.

When her beloved father dies, Vivien Epstein - a 22 year old hairdresser from Manchester - leaves her hometown for London in the hope of finding Jack Fox - a man she had a brief, but intense, love affair with some months ago. All Vivien has to go is one letter Jack sent to her father, the address of a boarding house scribbled hastily on the back, and very soon her hopes of finding him are dashed.

Joan Seabrook, a fledgling archaeologist, has fulfilled a lifelong dream to visit Arabia by travelling from England to the ancient city of Muscat with her fiancé, Rory. Desperate to escape the pain of a personal tragedy, she longs to explore the desert fort of Jabrin and unearth the treasures it is said to conceal. But Oman is a land lost in time - hard, secretive and in the midst of a violent upheaval - and gaining permission to explore Jabrin could prove impossible.

In 1910, eleven-year-old Iris Villarca lives with her father at Rawblood, a lonely house on Dartmoor. Iris and her father are the last of their name. The Villarcas always die young, bloodily. Iris believes it's because of a congenital disease which means she must isolate herself from the world. But one sunlit autumn day, beside her mother's grave, she forces the truth from her father: the disease is biologically impossible. A lie to cover a darker secret.

Smoke opens in a private boarding school near Oxford, but history has not followed the path known to us. In this other past, sin is a physical attribute, visible to all, and children are born carrying the seeds of evil within them. It is in this school, surrounded by the sons of the wealthy and well connected, that two boys called Thomas and Charlie discover that the world of smoke, soot and ash is not as it seems, for sin has a secret history and virtue a politics both intricate and murderous.

While held in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, Azar gives birth to a baby girl whom she fears she cannot keep. Arash, a fellow revolutionary, makes his daughter a bracelet of date stones, knowing it will be all she has to remember him by. Leila has to choose between fleeing Iran with her lover or staying to care for the children of her imprisoned sisters. And Forugh must grow up in the shadow of her parent's deaths. Courageous, heart-wrenching and beautifully written, Children of the Jacaranda Tree is a novel about family, sacrifice, and the search for a better world.