“A book is a gift you can open again and again.”
Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce
A funny and charming story of a wonderful adventure and unexpected female friendship.
It is 1950. Miss Margery Benson is a domestic science teacher, single and alone, who, in a moment of madness resigns and decides to fulfil her dream of travelling to New Caledonia to find the elusive Gold Flower Beetle. She advertises for an assistant, and though Enid Pretty is not the companion she had in mind, the two women find themselves drawn into an adventure that exceeds all expectations, gradually building a true friendship together. Hardcover, Doubleday, £16.99
We have beautiful gold beetle-embellished postcards handwritten by the author to give away with each copy.
I Survived by Victoria Cilliers
Subtitled: I married a charming man. Then he tried to kill me. A true story.
In 2015, Emile Cilliers was jailed for life for the attempted murder of his wife, a story that made headline news partly because of his method: tampering with his wife’s parachute. Now in her memoir, Victoria tells of her toxic marriage, murderous husband and miraculous survival, showing that reality can be as dramatic and gripping as fiction. Paperback, Macmillan, £8.99
The Glass Hotel by Emily St.John Mandel
This is a novel about money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it.
Vincent (a young woman) is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette on an island in British Columbia. Jonathan Alkaitis works in finance and owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, Vincent’s half-brother, Paul, scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass,” a note which is seen by Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, and which shakes him to his core. Thirteen years later Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship.
Weaving together the lives of these characters, The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and the wilderness of northern Vancouver Island, painting a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts. Hardcover, Picador, £14.99