Tracy Chevalier
Remarkable Creatures

From the moment she’s struck by lightning as a baby, it is clear Mary Anning is marked for greatness. When she uncovers unknown dinosaur fossils in the cliffs near her home, she sets the scientific world alight, challenging ideas about the world’s creation and stimulating debate over our origins. In an arena dominated by men, however, Mary is soon reduced to a serving role, facing prejudice from the academic community, vicious gossip from neighbours and the heartbreak of forbidden love. Luckily Mary finds an unlikely champion in prickly, intelligent Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster who is also fossilobsessed. Despite their differences in age and background, Mary and Elizabeth discover that, in struggling for recognition, friendship is their strongest weapon.

Gillian Flynn
Dark Places

Libby Day was just seven years old when her older brother massacred her family while she hid in a cupboard. Her evidence helped put him away. Ever since then she has been drifting, surviving for more than twenty years on the proceeds of the Libby Day fund. But now the money is running out and Libby is desperate. When she is offered $500 to do a guest appearance, she feels she has to accept. But this is no ordinary gathering. The Kill Club is a group of true-crime obsessives who share information on notorious murders – and they think her brother Ben is innocent.

Andrew Grant
Even

David Trevellyan takes a late-night walk between a restaurant and his New York hotel. A huddled shape catches his eye. A homeless man has been shot dead. As David steps forward, a police car arrives. And a second too late he realises he’s been set up. Trevellyan isn’t worried. He’s a survivor from the shadowy world of Royal Navy Intelligence: he’s been in and out of trouble a thousand times before. But when the police hand the case to the FBI, he’s sucked deeper into the system. With no idea who is friend and who is foe, he penetrates an international conspiracy, which spans from war-torn Iraq to the USA.