Best Books of 2018

Preface: Silence can be deafening.

Jean spends her days in almost complete silence, limited to a quota of just one hundred words a day.

No woman is able to speak over this limit without punishment by electric shock.

But when the President’s brother suffers a stroke, Jean is temporarily given back her voice in order to work on the cure.

And she soon soon discovers that she is part of a much larger plan: to eliminate the voices of women entirely.

Preface: Six year old Zach Taylor is hidden in a cloakroom with his teacher and classmates listening as a gunman roams the halls of his school. By the time he is done he will have claimed 19 victims.

Afterwards Zach's life will be changed forever. His dad will be absent at work more than ever and his mum will become obsessed with her crusade for justice. Will Zach be able to help them find a way through their grief or will the tragedy rip their family apart forever?

Preface: My real name, no one remembers. The truth about that summer, no one else knows.

In the summer of 1862, a group of young artists led by talented Edward Radcliffe descends upon Birchwood Manor. Their plan is to spend the month working on their creativity. But by the end of the summer one woman has been shot dead while another has disappeared; a priceless heirloom is missing; and Edward Radcliffe’s life is in ruins.

Over one hundred and fifty years later, Elodie Winslow, a young archivist in London, uncovers a leather satchel containing a sepia photograph , and an artist’s sketchbook containing the drawing of a twin-gabled house.

Why does the Manor feel so familiar to Elodie? And who is the beautiful woman in the photograph? Will she ever give up her secrets?

Preface: Paper Ghosts is a compelling read about a young girl’s struggle to be brave in the wake of her older sisters being missing and presumed dead.

The unnamed protagonist believes her sister was killed by Carl Feldman a fine art photographer and suspected serial killer living out his days in a halfway house. Does he really have early onset dementia and no memory of the supposed killings he was once accused of or is he pretending? Was he wrongly accused of those murders or is she putting her life in danger by driving around remote Texas with a serial killer?

Preface: When the powerful Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald was captured in New York with the help of Newt Scamander he made a threat, to escape custody. He begins gathering followers, a lot of whom are unsuspecting of his true agenda: to raise pure-blood wizards up to rule over all non-magical beings.

Unable to stand against him Dumbledore enlists Newt, his former Hogwarts student, to help thwart him. The wizarding world is divided between those who follow Grindelwald and those who oppose him.

Preface: Orïsha was once a land full of magic and those who wielded it, known as the Maji. A land where ‘Burners’ had the ability to call forth and control flames, where ‘Tiders’ could manipulate the waves and ‘Reapers’ could summon the souls of those who had died.

For Zélie memories of those times are bitter sweet. On the one hand she can remember her mother whose face was like the sun and myths of the old Gods are woven into her childhood memories along with visions of her mother practicing the magic of a Reaper.

However, Zélie cannot think of her mother without thinking of the night the magic disappeared and they took her mother away.

Now there is a way to bring the magic back and Zélie may be the only one who can do it...but should she?

Preface: As a child, Daniel Sempere discovered among the passageways of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books an extraordinary novel that would change the course of his life. Now Daniel runs the Sempere & Sons bookshop but the mystery surrounding the death of his mother continues to plagues him still despite a seemingly happy life.

When Daniel believes he is close to solving this enigma, he will learn knowledge of the conspiracy comes at a terrible price.

Preface: It is the summer of 1969 and Frances has been hired to write a report on the follies in the garden of a grand country house but becomes distracted when she discovers a peephole in the floor that allows her to spy on her neighbours.

Frances is entranced by Cara and Peter and soon begins to spend all her free time with them but as she does the boundaries between truth and lies, right and wrong begin to fade. By the end of the summer all their lives will be changed forever.

Preface: You'd trust your sister with your life. But should you?

The police say she's guilty.

She insists she's innocent.

She's your sister.

You loved her.

You trusted her.

But they say she killed the person you care about most.

Martha last saw her sister when she left her babysitting. Now, she's watching Becky stand trial for murder. They are on opposite sides of the courtroom, hearing evidence that's meant to finally bring the truth to light. What happened that night? And does Martha really want to know?

Preface: When Willa’s housemaid and best friend, Mavis, dropped dead unexpectedly Willa chose to take in

her daughter despite the disapproval of her other friends and neighbours.

Mavis’ daughter Nell and Willa’s daughter Lady considered each other sisters and best friends until an incident on the night of Lady’s sixteenth birthday tore them asunder.

Now Willa is dying, and her biggest wish is to bring Nell back to the family she cut off all those years ago.

Preface: Every other weekend since their parents divorce Hope and Eden wait for their dad to pick them up. Only this weekend, he’s forgotten, and their world changes when a stranger lures them into his truck.

More than twenty years later, Hope is that classic New York failure: a playwright with only one play produced long ago, newly evicted from an illegal sublet, working a humiliating temp job. Eden has long since distanced herself from her family, and no one seems to know where she is. When the man who abducted them is up for parole, the sisters might be able to offer testimony to keep him jailed. Hope sets out to find her sister—and to find herself—and it becomes the journey of a lifetime, taking her from hippie communes to cities across the country. Suspenseful and moving, Eden asks: how much do our pasts define us, and what price do we pay if we break free?

Preface: A fresh, opinionated history of all the brilliant women you should have learned about in school but didn’t.

In this freewheeling history of modern Britain, Cathy Newman writes about the pioneering women who defied the odds to make careers for themselves and alter the course of modern history; women who achieved what they achieved while dismantling hostile, entrenched views about their place in society. Their role in transforming Britain is fundamental, far greater than has generally been acknowledged, and not just in the arts or education but in fields like medicine, politics, law, engineering and the military.

While a few of the women in this book are now household names, many have faded into oblivion, their personal and collective achievements mere footnotes in history. We know of Emmeline Pankhurst, Vera Brittain, Marie Stopes and Beatrice Webb. But who remembers engineer and motorbike racer Beatrice Shilling, whose ingenious device for the Spitfires’ Rolls-Royce Merlin fixed an often-fatal flaw, allowing the RAF’s planes to beat the German in the Battle of Britain? Or Dorothy Lawrence, the journalist who achieved her ambition to become a WW1 correspondent by pretending to be a man? And developmental biologist Anne McLaren, whose work in genetics paved the way for in vitro fertilisation?

Were it not for women, significant features of modern Britain like council housing, municipal swimming pools and humane laws relating to property ownership, child custody and divorce wouldn’t exist in quite the same way. Women’s drive and talent for utopian thinking created new social and legislative agendas. The women in these pages blazed a trail from the 1918 Representation of the People Act – which allowed some women to vote – through to Margaret Thatcher’s ousting from Downing Street.

Blending meticulous research with information gleaned from memoirs, diaries, letters, novels and other secondary sources, Bloody Brilliant Women uses the stories of some extraordinary lives to tell the tale of 20th and 21st century Britain. It is a history for women and men. A history for our times.

Preface: Alice and her mother, Ella, have been plagued by bad luck for as long as Alice can remember. They have constantly moved about to try to outrun it but somehow it always catches up with them. That all changes with the death of Alice's reclusive author grandmother, finally Ella says it is safe to stay in one place.

Then one morning Ella is gone leaving nothing but a cryptic message telling Alice to Stay Away From The Hazel Wood. Alice knows she that her grandmother's book is the key to her mother's disappearance but hasn't read it herself so she has no choice but to turn to superfan Ellery Finch for help.

Preface: Cece Solarin has reluctantly moved from London to Brighton with her three children due to her husband’s new job and a desire to rectify problems in her marriage.

Outside of the home Cece’s biggest fear is that she won’t make any friends among the mums at her twin’s school. When Cece learns that the school was the scene of a violent attack just a few weeks earlier she is less than impressed with her husband Sol for not mentioning it to her.

School mum Yvonne Whitmore was found on the school grounds brutally attacked and is now in a coma and so far, no one has been arrested for the crime.

Cece is pleased when she finally starts to make some friends: Maxie, Hazel and Anaya. Cece finally starts to feel like maybe this could be somewhere she could settle but then she is approached by a policeman wanting her help. He believes one of her new friends was behind the attempted murder and he wants Cece to spy on them to find out which one.

Preface: 'Thirteen' isn't about a serial killer on trial....he's on the jury.

Robert Soloman and his beautiful wife were Hollywood superstars but now she is dead and he is on trial for her murder.

Eddie Flynn, former conman turned lawyer is new to the defence team and begins to suspect that his client is innocent and there is more to this case than meets the eye.

Preface: Translated from the original Japanese version this is a a moving tale of loss and reaching out to the ones we love, of one man’s journey to discover what really matters in life. Our narrator’s days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he is unprepared for the doctor’s diagnosis that he has only months to live. Then one day, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life.

Preface: A murder. A legend. A family haunted.

In 1990 three girls devote themselves to an ominous figure.

In 2000 a mother inexplicably disappears leaving behind her baby and husband.

and in 2018 a young girl is charged with murder.

Through each of the events The Tall Man is there.

Preface: Schoch lives on the streets of Zurich, he drinks and hallucinates, in particular he sees a pink elephant. What if the elephant is still there when he is sober?

Preface: Butterfly is the incredibly powerful memoir of young Syrian refugee Yusra Mardini.

Yusra has always dreamed of being an Olympic champion swimmer and trains hard trying to make that dream come true but when war came to Syria she had to push that dream to one side.

Together with her sister she fled to Germany on a perilous journey in search of a life where bombs and the death of friends are not the norm. Along the way she and her sister became heroes and met some of the worse and best of humankind.

This amazing book reminds us that nobody chooses to be a refugee and that refugees are human too.

Preface: Brighton Beach, 1993

Nell and Jude are just teenagers when they find a body on the beach. When nobody comes forward to claim the young woman's body she becomes known as 'The Brighton Mermaid.' Three weeks later Nell is finding it difficult to move on when Jude goes missing.

Twenty five years later Nell quits her job to looking into the events of that summer - who was The Brighton Mermaid and why did Jude disappear? As Nell edges closer to the truth she begins to suspect someone is watching her and to wonder who in her life she can really trust.