Kate Atkinson

In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past forever. Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly...

"The #1 national bestselling, award-winning author of Life after Life transports us to the dazzling London of the Roaring Twenties in a whirlwind tale of corruption, seduction, and debts that have come due. 1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances...

Tracy Waterhouse leads a quiet, ordered life as a retired police detective -- a life that takes a surprising turn when she encounters Kelly Cross, a habitual offender, dragging a young child through town. Both appear miserable and better off without each other -- or so decides Tracy, in a snap decision that surprises herself as much as Kelly. Suddenly burdened with a small child, Tracy soon learns her parental inexperience is actually the least of...

Presents a tale involving the unexpected intersection of three lives, including a woman whose life had been shattered thirty years earlier, an ex-detective on a crowded train, and a teenage girl who is called upon to test her preparedness.

"A dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life, with everything that readers love about her novels-the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop. In this brilliant volume, nothing is quite as it seems. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over...

Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette), an ambitious geologist, suddenly finds herself having to baby-sit Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima) a taciturn Japanese businessman. Hoping to strike up a business deal, she agrees to take him on a field trip around Western Australia's remote Pilbara desert. Against the background of the outback these two diametrically opposed strangers are to find themselves thrust together in a potentially life or death situation. As they...