Nancy Foster has harboured a devastating secret that shattered her professional and personal life. On meeting her, journalist Stef Lansdown realizes that she has the power to restore Nancy’s reputation and to heal the wounds, if only Nancy will trust her. But someone else wants to get to the bottom of the story first, someone […]
Chain Reactions by Lucy Jane Santos
Tracing uranium’s past, and how it intersects with our understanding of other radioactive elements, this book aims to disentangle our attitudes and to unpick the atomic mindset. Chain Reactions looks at the fascinating, often-forgotten, stories that can be found throughout the history of the element. Ranging from glassworks to penny stocks; medicines to weapons; something […]
Women in science – a true story
Sometimes the inspiration for a novel is very close to home, very personal. It was the true story of her mother and aunt, both biologists and PhDs, both denied the careers they might have had, that led Rachel Hore to the idea for The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge. Here she writes about the barriers that […]
Bonjour, Sophie by Elizabeth Buchan
It’s 1959 and time for 18-year-old Sophie’s real life to start. Her existence in the village of Poynsdean, Sussex, with her austere foster-father and his frustrated wife is suffocating. She dreams of escape to Paris, the wartime home her French mother fled before her birth. Getting there will take spirit and ingenuity, but it will […]
City of Destruction by Vaseem Khan
Bombay, 1951, and a political rally ends in tragedy when India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, kills a lone gunman as he attempts to assassinate the divisive new defence minister, a man calling for war with India’s new post-Independence neighbours. With the Malabar House team tasked to hunt down the assassin’s co-conspirators — aided […]
Looking for radioactivity in Las Vegas
Lucy Jane Santos, the author of Chain Reactions, is prepared to go anywhere to look for the history of radioactivity. Even Las Vegas. Fortunately, she found that the sinful city still radiates with its atomic heritage, which hasn’t decayed yet. Over the last — almost — decade of tracing the history of radioactive elements – […]
The Drummond Affair: Murder and Mystery in Provence by Daniel Smith and Stephanie Matthews
1950s France. A British establishment figure. A shocking crime. A miscarriage of justice. The search for truth. In 1952, in a peaceful corner of Provence, a farmer’s son stumbled upon a terrible scene. Three bodies: a husband and wife shot dead, their ten-year-old daughter savagely beaten to death. They were all British. So begins one […]
The Black Crescent by Jane Johnson
1950s Morocco is full of murder, magic and divided loyalties… Hamou Badi is born in a mountain village with the magical signs of the zouhry on his hands. The zouhry is a figure of legend, capable of finding all manner of treasure. But instead of finding treasure, young Hamou finds a body. Haunted by this […]