VERVE BOOKS – serie

It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. But only one can offer her real happiness.Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp.

January 1965. The orphaned O'Leary siblings - Tom, Jack, Anna and Peggy - arrive in the village of Ballycrea, tight-lipped about their troubled past and desperate for a fresh start.After being met with suspicion from most of the locals, the family are thrilled when they're taken under the wing of their well-respected neighbours, Bill and Betty Nevan, who offer them work, companionship and an opportunity to fit in.But for one of the O'Learys, this new friendship sparks an intense attachment that makes the dynamic dangerous for all. It's difficult to bury secrets, but almost impossible to bury feelings...Crackling with suspense and intensity from start to finish, Heap Earth Upon It revisits the rural Ireland of Howarth's critically acclaimed debut, delving into claustrophobic relationships and tangled identities, and leaving you wondering who to trust until the very last page.

A candid portrayal of first love and self-discovery, from the author of the 'instant queer classic', Isaac.Cornwall, 2018. In the quiet fishing village of Portscatho, sixteen-year-old Daniel and seventeen-year-old Jago form an unexpected connection - something neither of them can name. What unfolds is transformative, particularly for Daniel, who for the first time feels truly seen.East London, 2023. Daniel has rewritten himself: sharper, louder, queer in a way the city understands. But a visit from Jago stirs up a reckoning with his former life, forcing them both to question how much change their bond can withstand.Reminiscent of Édouard Louis and Douglas Stuart's writing, Orange examines how we reconcile our past selves with the people we become, those we bring with us and those we leave behind.

A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley startup, Cassie is trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses and unethical projects, she struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of houseless people bathing in the bay. Startup burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets.Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, the black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, its size changing in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever closer as the world around her unravels.When her CEO's demands cross an illegal line and her personal life spirals towards a bleak precipice, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are worth the pain, or succumb to the black hole.

No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Ollie is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof and the empirical world. None of that explains what's happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy's carefully constructed life.As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place - first in academia, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships - every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. Yet for all that threatens their sibling bond, Amy and Ollie cannot escape or deny the inextricable sister knot that binds them.Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of sisterhood, mental health, loss and love.

January 1965. The orphaned O'Leary siblings - Tom, Jack, Anna and Peggy - arrive in the village of Ballycrea, tight-lipped about their troubled past and desperate for a fresh start.After being met with suspicion from most of the locals, the family are thrilled when they're taken under the wing of their well-respected neighbours, Bill and Betty Nevan, who offer them work, companionship and an opportunity to fit in.But for one of the O'Learys, this new friendship sparks an intense attachment that makes the dynamic dangerous for all. It's difficult to bury secrets, but almost impossible to bury feelings...

January 1965. The orphaned O'Leary siblings - Tom, Jack, Anna and Peggy - arrive in the village of Ballycrea, tight-lipped about their troubled past and desperate for a fresh start.After being met with suspicion from most of the locals, the family are thrilled when they're taken under the wing of their well-respected neighbours, Bill and Betty Nevan, who offer them work, companionship and an opportunity to fit in.But for one of the O'Learys, this new friendship sparks an intense attachment that makes the dynamic dangerous for all. It's difficult to bury secrets, but almost impossible to bury feelings...Like Howarth's acclaimed debut, Heap Earth Upon It explores rural Irish life at a specific moment in time and delves into claustrophobic relationships and tangled identities, leaving you wondering who to trust until the very last page.

A spellbinding tale of sisterhood, betrayal and reclamation revolving around three 18th-century wax models of women, known as Anatomical Venuses or 'slashed beauties'. Legend has it, these beauties are bewitched, coming to life to murder men who have wronged them.Finally, these men will get what they deserve. We will make sure of it. Together.Seoul, present day: Antiques dealer Alys is offered a vast sum of money to transport one of three highly coveted Anatomical Venuses to London, with one key condition - she must destroy it when she reaches the city.London, 1769: After a chance meeting at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, young and inexperienced Eleanor is promised a life of luxury by the beautiful and charismatic Elizabeth and her protégé, Emily. All she must do is allow Elizabeth complete control of her destiny.In a darkly compelling and magical plot, prepare to discover the dangerous secret shared by these four women - a secret that spans centuries, and which will unearth horrors not of this world.

New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA.Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns war makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows, and she's forced to take extreme measures to save herself.An exhilarating page turner and perceptive coming-of-age story, Who is Vera Kelly? introduces an original, wry and whip-smart female spy for the twenty-first century.

** SELECTED AS ONE OF COSMOPOLITAN'S HOTTEST NEW BEACH READS FOR SUMMER 2022 **It's a fine line between admiration and envy.Diana Martin has lived her life in the shadow of her sadistic older brother. She quietly watches the family next door, enthralled by celebrity fashion designer Marianne Taylor and her feted daughter, Aurelle.She wishes she were a 'Taylor girl'.By the summer of 1995, the two girls are at university together, bonded by a mutual desire to escape their wealthy families and personal tragedies and forge new identities.They are closer than lovers, intoxicated by their own bond, falling into the hedonistic seduction of the woods and the water at a remote university that is more summer camp than campus.But when burgeoning artist Diana has a chance at fame, cracks start to appear in their friendship. To what lengths is Diana willing to go to secure her own stardom?

Julia Lerner is one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley and an icon to professional women across the country. She is the COO of Tangerine, one of America's biggest technology companies. She is also a Russian spy. Julia has been carefully groomed to reach the upper echelons of the company and use Tangerine's software to covertly funnel information back to Russia's largest intelligence agency.Alice Lu works as a low-level analyst within Tangerine, having never quite managed to climb the corporate ladder. One afternoon, when performing a server check, Alice discovers some unusual activity and is burdened with two powerful but distressing suspicions: Tangerine's privacy settings aren't as rigorous as the company claims they are and the person abusing this loophole might be Julia Lerner herself. Now, she must decide what to do with this information - before Julia finds out she has it.

Ava Simon designs storage boxes for STÄDA, a slick Brooklyn-based furniture company. She's hard-working, obsessive and heartbroken from a tragedy that killed her girlfriend and upended her life. It's been years since she's let anyone in.But when Ava's new boss - the young and magnetic Mat Putnam - offers Ava a ride home one afternoon, an unlikely relationship blossoms. Ava remembers how rewarding it canbe to open up - and, despite her hesitancy, she starts to fall for him. But what if Mat isn't who he claims to be?The Very Nice Box is a darkly comic and suspenseful novel that will keep you on the edge of your seat until its gripping finale. It's at once a satire of toxic masculinity and a big-hearted account of grief, friendship and trust.

Ruby Mills is ruthlessly ambitious, strikingly beautiful - and one of the Forty Thieves' most talented members.Harriet Littlemore is an aspiring journalist from a 'good' family, engaged to a rising star of the Tory party - but she wants a successful career of her own.After witnessing Ruby fleeing the scene of a robbery, Harriet develops a fascination with the young thief that extends beyond journalistic interest, one which Ruby can use to her advantage.But both the Forties and London society have strict rules - and the fallout from Ruby and Harriet's unlikely acquaintance may be more than either woman is prepared for.The Dazzle of the Light tells a compulsive, cinematic story, fraught with envy and desire, about class, morality and the cost of being an independent woman in 1920.

Mallika is a painfully shy young woman growing up in the heart of a lively, sometimes stifling New Delhi colony. Though she is surrounded by love, her life is complicated by secrets that she, her mother and her aunt work hard to keep.After suffering a trauma aged nineteen, Mallika loses three days of her memory and slowly spirals into a deep depression. She must find a way out of the abyss, back to herself and those she cares about. But she must also hide her mental illness from her community.In a narrative that unfolds elliptically from the perspectives of Mallika and the seven people closest to her, the astonishing story of these characters lives emerges. For Mallika's family, childhood friends and the two men she loves are also hiding truths. As each gives voice to contending with their own struggles, secrets and silences shatter.

Doors open at 7. The sacrifice is at 9. The dress code is, as usual, black tie.It's the winter solstice in a Philadelphia that has been eroded by extreme weather, economic collapse, and disease-carrying mosquitoes. The Saturnalia carnival is about to begin, an evening on which reality is suspended, and troubles forgotten.For tarot reader Nina, Saturnalia is simply a cruel reminder of the night that changed everything for her - the night she walked away from the elite Saturn Club, with its genteel debauchery, arcane pecking order, and winking interest in alchemy and the occult.But when she gets a chance call from Max, her last remaining friend from the Saturn Club, Nina will put on a dress of blackest black and attend the Club's wild solstice masquerade, the biggest party of the year, on a mysterious errand she can't refuse.Before the night is over, she will become the custodian of a horrifying secret - and prey to a mysterious hunter.

The last time Maeve saw her cousin was the night she escaped the cult they were raised in.For the past two decades, Maeve has worked hard to build a normal life in New York City, where she keeps everything - and everyone - at a safe distance.When her cousin Andrea suddenly reappears, Maeve regains the only true friend she's ever had. Soon she's spending more time at Andrea's remote Catskills estate than in her own cramped apartment. Maeve doesn't even mind that her cousin's wealthy work friends clearly disapprove of her single lifestyle. After all, Andrea has made her fortune in the fertility industry - baby fever comes with the territory.What worries Maeve is that the more she immerses herself in Andrea's world, the more her long-buried memories flood to the surface. But confronting the terrors of her childhood may be the only way for Maeve to transcend the nightmare still to come...

Six decades. Seven people. One unspeakable secret.1957. A catastrophe occurs at the pharmaceutical lab in Coventry where sixteen-year-old Wilf is working for the summer. A catastrophe that needs to be covered up at all costs.2017. Phiney is shocked by the death of her grandfather, Wilf, who has jumped from a railway bridge at a Coventry station. Journalist Mat Torrington is the only witness.Left with a swarm of unanswered questions, Phiney, Mat and Wilf's wife, Dora, begin their own enquiries into Wilf's death. It is soon clear that these two events, sixty years apart, are connected - and that Wilf is not the only casualty.But what is the link? And can they find out before any more lives are lost?

In an isolated town on the North Norfolk coast, Fran's life is unravelling. Her one source of solace is slipping out to the beach early in the morning, to watch the birds.Small-town tensions simmer when a new teacher starts at the local school and a Romany community settle in the field adjoining Fran's caravan park. Then the schoolteacher and Fran's brother-in-law both go missing on the same night and accusations fly. Yet all Fran can seem to care about is the birds.Eerie and unsettling, Bird Spotting in a Small Town is a psychological suspense featuring unreliable narrators and the perfect balance of mystery, tension and family drama.

An unflinching and emotionally insightful debut about cultural identity, homesickness, love and loss.In the five years following his brother's death, Aaron has built himself a life of solitary routines. After moving from Dublin to Boston, and illegally overstaying her visa, Róisín has done the same.When the two meet on a night out, they each find in the other something missing in their lives. A semblance of home.Their relationship is complicated by their disparate religious backgrounds - Aaron is Jewish; Roísín is atheist - and by the harsh realities of everyday life. Just as they're pushed to their breaking point, Roísín realises she is pregnant.Placeholders is a poignant story of loneliness corrected and the transformative power of love.

At a meatpacking facility in Missouri, Dee-Dee and her coworkers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift.The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee's more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term.Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges her to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend, Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother and boyfriend's newfound attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete.When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither another miscarriage nor Sloane's own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby's arrival.

Still reeling from a life-threatening experience on the coast of Calais, daredevil climber Jen Shaw finds herself in Glasgow for a funeral, devastated with grief and in search of answers.As her dogged determination propels her closer to the criminal underworld than ever before, Jen and her family become the target of some dangerous and powerful people with links to the heart of Glasgow's Police Force.In the absence of anyone she can truly trust, Jen has no option but to rely on her own instincts and everything she's learnt from her close bond with police officer Nick Crawford for survival. Even if it means going undercover herself and disappearing into the city's dark underbelly.

What is motherhood in the midst of uncertainty, buried trauma and an unravelling America? What it's always been - a love song.Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an America that\'s coming undone. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class.Unmoored by the grief of a recent, devastating miscarriage and Noah\'s fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world. Yet her husband Asher is just as desperate to keep trying.Throwing herself into a new documentary on motherhood and making secret visits to Noah in the hospital, this is when she learns she is, impossibly, pregnant. As life shifts once more, she must decide what she dares hope for the shape of her future to be.

1999: An island off the southern coast of Greece. Art historian Elizabeth Clarke arrives with the intent to acquire a rare female sculpture. But what begins as a quest for a highly valued cultural artifact evolves into a trip that will force Elizabeth to contend with her ambition, her desire, and her troubling history.Disoriented by jet lag, debilitating migraines, and a dependence on prescription pills, Elizabeth finds herself enthralled by her new surroundings - and equally, by her translator's inscrutable wife, a young artist named Theo.As the nude's acquisition proves to be riskier than she could have ever imagined, the fates of Elizabeth and the sculpture are called into question. To find a way out, Elizabeth must grapple with the role she's played in the global art trade and the ethical fallout her personal and professional decisions could leave behind.

Dairy farmer George Calvert is fighting to keep the family business afloat. Worried about the future but resistant to change, he refuses to face the reality of his failing farm, his elderly mother's declining health and his troubled relationship with his youngest son, Tom.Newly returned from university, Tom isolates himself in his childhood bedroom, guarding the truth of his burgeoning identity.When animal rights activists break into the cowshed one morning and Tom appears to side with the protesters, father and son lock horns. As the Calverts begin to unravel, a decades-old secret surfaces - one that might rip them apart completely, or finally unite them.A deeply moving debut about one family's struggle to find connection in a rapidly changing world, Human, Animal is an ode to the wild, a journey of self-discovery and a hopeful path to common ground.

A one-eyed chicken, a chimpanzee forgotten in a cage, a tormented daughter searching for a link to past lives. Everyday madness and monsters are explored against the backdrop of an indifferent Lagos in Uche Okonkwo's dynamic debut collection.Across ten evocative stories, A Kind of Madness dips in and out of the lives of Nigerians, unravelling the tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, best friends, siblings and more. Brimming with vitality, these bites of mundane madness mark the arrival of an extraordinary new talent in fiction and will leave you hungering for more.

The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in.Twining the drama of the everyday - school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents - with the surreal - rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats - Cassie's realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.

A love story about the almost crossovers of our lives...1972. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, Australia, two teenage girls must each make a choice: to act upon their desires or suppress them? To live an openly queer life or to try desperately not to?Over the following three decades, these girls grow into women and live out their decisions, always almost crossing paths at pivotal moments. In an era that spans Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, there is joy and grief and loss and desire for each of them - but will their lives ever collide?A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak. A celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.

In late-twenty-first-century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside an immersive, consumerist virtual reality called Gaia. They log on, go to work, socialise and even eat in this digital utopia. Meanwhile, their aging bodies lie suspended in pods inside cramped apartments.Across the city, in the abandoned real world, Tao-Yi's mother remains stubbornly offline, dwindling away between hospital visits and memories of her earlier life in Malaysia.When a new technology is developed to permanently upload a human brain to Gaia, Tao-Yi must decide what is most important: a digital future or an authentic past.

A timely and poignant story of masculinity, addiction and grief told from the perspectives of two Jewish-American brothers coming of age.Phillip grows up in the glow of his mother's adoration, moulded by her praise and attention into a young man who values intellect above all else. However, his introspective mind soon becomes a prison, one that distances him from the rest of the world - socially, romantically, politically - and can only be escaped using drugs and alcohol.An outsider to the closeness shared by Phillip and their mother, elder brother Donald is shaped by the long-distance phone calls he receives from their absentee father. This father-son bond feels entirely predicated on Donald's success on the wrestling mat, where he spends his teenage years grappling with competitors and his sense of self.After an unexpected family tragedy strikes, the brothers are pulled apart and reunited over the course of their lives, forcing them to reckon with the legacy that they've inherited. A novel that is as much family saga as cultural excavation of modern masculinity, When On High asks what it means to become men in a country losing grip with what a man should be.