Elizabeth Day

In Jake, Marisa has found everything she's ever wanted. Then their new lodger Kate arrives. Something about Kate isn't right. Is it the way she looks at Marisa's boyfriend? Sits too close on the sofa? Constantly asks about the baby they are trying for? Or is it all just in Marisa's head? After all, that's what her Jake keeps telling her. And she trusts him--doesn't she? But Marisa knows something is wrong. That the woman sleeping in their house will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Marisa just doesn't know why. How far will she go to find the answer--and how much is she willing to lose?

Max Weston, twenty-one and a newly commissioned lance corporal, leaves home for his first posting in central Africa. Fiercely patriotic and completely at home in the army, he is eager to make a difference. He never comes back. His parents Caroline and Andrew are devastated by the death of their only child. The overwhelming love Caroline has always felt for her son is now matched by the intensity of her loss, and as she is borne away on a private ocean of grief the moorings of their marriage begin to come loose. The silence is broken by the arrival of Andrew's mother, Elsa, who at the age of ninety-eight can no longer look after herself. Caroline has never felt good enough for this elegant, cuttingly courteous lady and has lived for years in fear of putting a foot wrong. Now, suddenly, Caroline has the upper hand. As Elsa lies, marooned and disorientated, in the spare room, the past unspools in her mind, throwing up fragments of her anxious childhood in 1920s Richmond - under the shadow of her father, a soldier who came back from the Great War a different man. A stunning, delicate portrait of a family bookended by war, Home Fires explores the legacy of loss, the strictures of class and the long road to redemption.

Having survived the Strain 7 virus that killed much of the human race, six teenagers settle in Novo Mundum, a hidden city where people are reviving science and the arts, and search for a traitor who threatens to betray their community.

A taut psychological tale of obsession and betrayal set over the course of a dinner party, THE PARTY tells the story of two married couples who, in a single evening, will come to question everything they thought they knew about each other, as the long-buried secret at the heart of their friendship comes to the surface, culminating in an explosive act of violence. -- amazon.com