Abacus London, Burning Quinn Anthony

London, Burning is a novel about the end of the 1970s, and the end of an era. It concerns a nation divided against itself, a government trembling on the verge of collapse, a city fearful of what is to come, and a people bitterly suspicious of one another. In other words, it is also a novel about now • Vicky Tress is a young policewoman on the rise who becomes involved in a corruption imbroglio with CID. Hannah Strode is an ambitious young reporter with a speciality for skewering the rich and powerful. Callum Conlan is a struggling Irish academic and writer who falls in with the wrong people. While Freddie Selves is a hugely successful theatre impresario stuck deep in a personal and political mire of his own making. These four characters, strangers at the start, happen to meet and affect the course of each other's lives profoundly

From the award-winning author of Curtain Call, Freya and Our Friends in Berlin comes a sweeping story of art and love through the lens of a single painting • A celebrated artist of the Georgian era paints his two young daughters at the family home in Bath. The portrait, known as "Molly &the Captain", becomes instantly famous, its fate destined to echo down the centuries, touching many lives • In the summer of 1889 a young man sits painting a line of elms in Kensington Gardens. One day he glimpses a mother at play with her two daughters and decides to include them in his picture. From that moment he is haunted by dreams that seem to foreshadow his doom • A century later, in Kentish Town, a painter and her grown-up daughters receive news of an ancestor linking them to the long-vanished double portrait of "Molly &the Captain"

Summer, 1967. As London shimmers in a heat haze and swoons to the sound of Sergeant Pepper, a mystery film – Eureka – is being shot by German wunderkind Reiner Werther Kloss • The screenwriter, Nat Fane, would do anything for a hit but can’t see straight for all the acid he’s dropping. Fledgling actress Billie Cantrip is hoping for her big break but can’t find a way out of her troubled relationship with an older man. And journalist Freya Wyley wants to know why so much of what Kloss touches turns to ash in his wake

Freya Wyley meets Nancy Holdaway amid the wild celebrations of VE Day, the prelude to a devoted and competitive friendship… • Freya, ambitious and outspoken, pursues a career on Fleet Street while Nancy, less self-confident, struggles to get her first novel published. Both friends become entangled with Robert Cosway, a charismatic young man whose own ambition will have a momentous bearing on their lives • Flitting from war-haunted Oxford to the bright new shallows of the 1960s, Freya plots the unpredictable course of a woman’s life and loves in extraordinary times

London, 1941. The city is in blackout and an enemy is hiding in plain sight • Jack Hoste has become entangled in a national treachery. His mission: to locate the most dangerous Nazi agent in the country • He soon receives a promising lead in Amy Strallen, whose life is a world away from the machinations of Nazi sympathisers. But when Hoste pays a visit to Amy’s office, the dangerous game he is playing becomes even more lethal

From the author of Half of the Human Race (Channel 4 TV Book Club) comes an intricate and thrilling tale of love and conspiracy in Victorian London • London, 1882. David Wildeblood, an idealistic young journalist, pounds the streets of Camden reporting on the notorious slums. The misery and squalor surprise him, but more shocking still is the realisation that someone is profiting from this destitution. Wildeblood’s urge to uncover the truth draws him into mortal danger as his investigations reveal a trail of corruption that leads to the very highest levels of society

In the first book by a British writer about this extraordinary football manager, lifelong Liverpool fan Anthony Quinn has crafted a memorable love letter to Jurgen Klopp. Taking in all the drama of LFC’s disrupted, but ultimately triumphant, 2019–20 season, it offers unique insight into one of football’s most charismatic figures

Summer of 1911. English society is on the brink of change. The streets of London ring with cheers for a new king's coronation and the cries of increasingly violent suffragette protests • Connie Callaway, fired up by the possibilities of independence, wants more than the conventional comforts of marriage. Spirited and courageous, she is determined to fight for 'the greatest cause the world has ever known' • Will Maitland, the rising star of county cricket, is a man of traditional opinions. He is both intrigued and appalled by Connie's outspokenness and her quest for self-fulfilment • Their lives become inextricably entangled just as the outbreak of war drives them further apart. Buffeted and spun by choice and chance, Connie and Will struggle against the aftershocks of war and the changes it wreaks

On a sultry afternoon in the summer of 1936 a young woman is witness to an attempted murder in a London hotel room • Nina, a West End actress, faces a dilemma: she shouldn't have been at the hotel in the first place, and certainly not with a married man. But once it becomes apparent that she has seen the face of the man the newspapers have dubbed ‘the Tie-Pin Killer’ she realises that unless she acts quickly, more women will die • From the glittering murk of Soho’s underworld, to the grease paint and ghost-lights of theatreland, Curtain Call is a poignant and gripping story about love and death in a society dancing towards the abyss

Liverpool, 1939. Lonely historian Tom Baines is at work on a study of the city's architectural past but the ominous news from Europe, together with his burgeoning friendship with Richard, a young photographer, and his beautiful wife, Bella, are proving a distraction • When the bombings begin, Tom joins up as 'rescue man', retrieving the wounded and dying from the ruins of buildings, but the love affair he embarks on soon leads him into a very different kind of danger

The seventy-fifth anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Anthony Quinn • London, 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earls Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation. Netta is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George. George is adrift in a drunken hell, except in his 'dead' moments, when something goes click in his head and he realises, without a doubt, that he must kill her. In the darkly comic Hangover Square Patrick Hamilton brilliantly evokes a seedy, fog-bound world of saloon bars, lodging houses and boozing philosophers, immortalising the slang and conversational tone of a whole generation and capturing the premonitions of doom that pervaded London life in the months before the war

'Beyond the fact that it was, in face of a vivid and calamitous ending, to reveal from his own experience the ardent splendours of Youth's adventure, he didn't quite know what his novel was going to be about.' • Monday Morning wryly tells the story of Anthony, a young man taking his passionate first steps in life, in London, and in love. Not yet worn down by the world, Anthony is determined to write the novel that will bring him fame and fortune - and to marry the beautiful Diane. Patrick Hamilton's witty, playful first novel introduces us to the grimy world of metropolitan boarding houses and provincial theatrical digs that would be the setting for his later masterpieces Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude, and the hopes, dreams and regrets those who live there