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.

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.

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.

Jemma would kill to end the housing crisis - one landlord at a time...Jemma has lost everything... Well, the very little she had. Her toxic boyfriend has run off with her best friend, leaving Jemma alone in their flat, and she can't afford the extortionate rent on her own. She's aimless, depressed and, above all, furious. Slowly but surely, her fury finds its focus: landlords. If only something could be done about them...When Jemma's landlord has a fatal accident while carrying out a property repair, she stumbles across her life's mission: to punish as many landlords as possible. She begins targeting landlords who have appeared on her favourite binge-watch, a home-improvement TV show where their greed is laid bare. It's a messy job, but someone's got to do it.Governed by her own rules, Jemma is convinced her actions are just - but how long before this vigilante turns villain?