Raffaela Barker
Poppyland

On a freezing cold night in an unfamiliar city, a man meets a woman. The encounter lasts just moments, they part barely knowing one another's names, they make no plans to meet again. But both are left breathless. Five years on, the man and woman are living separate lives, thousands of miles apart. But both still think about that night. So if they were to meet again, you'd think, this time, they'd do whatever it took to hold on to each other. But can it really be that simple? Or will real life get in the way? Sweeping, insightful and crackling with emotional intensity, Raffaella Barker's brilliant new novel is for anyone who's ever dared wonder, What If .. ?

James Anderson
The Affair of the Thirty-Nine Cufflinks

Understandably, Lord Burford had some misgivings about hosting another house party at Alderley, his beautiful country mansion. After all, the previous two could at best be described as disastrous, since a couple of their guests were bumped off during their stay on each occasion. But with family members travelling down for the funeral of an elderly relative, the Earl really had no choice but to offer them accommodation. And it didn't take long for things to start to go wrong. One of the guests claimed she had knowledge that would ruin the others' reputations, but nobody took her seriously enough to take offence. At least, not until her body was found.

The Jeddah streets resemble a scene from an old black-and-white movie: the women dressed like dark shadows and the men in their light cotton tunics. Naser is an outsider in Saudi and he needs to hold down his job at the carwash. But it's hard to adjust to a world that puts up so many barriers between men and women: walls in the mosque, divider panels in the buses and veils on the street. A splash of colour arrives in Naser's world when a piece of paper is dropped at his feet. It is a love note, from a woman whose face he has never seen and whose voice he has never heard. She tells him that she will wear a pair of pink shoes the next time she passes so that he can pick her out from the other women in their identical black abayas. Erotic tension soon runs high.