Susan Kurosawa
Coronation Talkies: a novel of 1930s India

In Chalaili, an Indian hill station stranded above the clouds, a small enclave of British expatriates cling to the glory of a fast-fading empire. Into this faltering world come two starkly different but memorable women: the larger-than-life Mrs Banerjee and Lydia Rushmore, a timid Surrey school teacher hurriedly married off to the town's disgraced meteorologist. Mrs Banerjee sets out to transform the rundown Chalaili theatre into Coronation Talkies, a thoroughly modern cinema showing Hollywood's latest love stories. Lydia Rushmore discovers the soothing effects of gin as she tries to fit into hill station society and please her complicated new husband. A charming comic debut novel of love, lust and lies.

John Hall
The Ghost Writer

Viola Hatherley was a writer of ghost stories in the 1890s. But her work is forgotten until her great-grandson, as a young boy in Mawson, Australia, learns how to open the secret drawer in his mothers room. In John Harwood's astonishingly assured first novel, Gerard's quest to unveil the mystery that shrouds his family, and his life, will lead him from Mawson to London, to a long-abandoned house and the terror of a ghost story come alive. Darkly comic, fraught with the perils of reading, The Ghost Writer draws us into a labyrinth where spellbinding horror lurks at every turn.

In 1940s rural New South Wales, Lilian is forced to choose between her baby daughter and the love of her life, an Ialian prisoner-of-war. Decades later, Lilian has made a life in Italy as a novelist. But an unexpected encounter with Francesca, the daughter she left behind, sets in motion a new chapter in both their lives. Set between Italy and Australia, The Italian Romance examines the choices we make and their unexpected consequences. In this moving novel about families and the different faces of love, Joanne Carroll reminds us what is it to be human.