Autumn Catalogue 2020 July - December CONTENTS Little, Brown 2 Abacus 17 Virago 21 Fleet 33 The Bridge Street Press 37 Corsair 41 Dialogue 49 Sphere 56 Piatkus 81 Constable 107 Robinson 129 Orbit 141 Atom 163 Contacts 167 The stunning third novel in the award-nominated, critically acclaimed Darktown series sees a newspaper editor murdered against the backdrop of Rosa Parks’s protest and Martin Luther King Jnr’s emergence Midnight Atlanta THOMAS MULLEN Atlanta, 1956. ABOUT THE AUTHOR When Arthur Bishop, editor of Atlanta’s leading Thomas Mullen is the author of black newspaper, is killed in his office, cop- Darktown, an NPR Best Book of turned-journalist Tommy Smith finds himself in the Year, which has been the crosshairs of the racist cops he’s been trying shortlisted for the Los Angeles to avoid. To clear his name, he needs to learn Times Book Prize, the Southern more about the dangerous story Bishop had Book Prize, the Indies Choice been working on. Book Award, has been nominated for two CWA Dagger Awards, and Meanwhile, Smith’s ex-partner Lucius Boggs is being developed for television and white sergeant Joe McInnis – the only white by Sony Pictures with executive cop in the black precinct – find themselves producer Jamie Foxx. His other caught between meddling federal agents, racist novels include The Last Town on detectives and Communist activists as they try Earth, which was named Best to solve the murder. Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today and was awarded the James With a young Rev Martin Luther King Jnr Fenimore Cooper Prize for making headlines of his own, and tensions in the excellence in historical fiction; city growing, Boggs and Smith find themselves The Many Deaths of the Firefly back on the same side in a hunt for the truth Brothers and The Revisionists. He that will put them both at risk. lives in Atlanta with his wife and sons. Soon to be a major TV series from Jamie Foxx and Sony Pictures Television. 3 July | Hardback | £18.99 | 9781408713105 | Crime & Mystery The twentieth novel by Sunday Times number one bestseller Mark Billingham is a thrilling treat for fans and new readers alike – a prequel to his landmark, massively influential debut novel, Sleepyhead Cry Baby MARK BILLINGHAM It’s 1996. Detective Sergeant Tom Thorne is a ABOUT THE AUTHOR haunted man. Haunted by the moment he Mark Billingham has twice won ignored his instinct about a suspect, by the the Theakston’s Old Peculier horrific crime that followed and by the memories Award for Crime Novel of the that come day and night, in sunshine and Year, and has also won a Sherlock shadow. Award for the Best Detective created by a British writer. Each So when seven-year-old Kieron Coyne goes of the novels featuring Detective missing while playing in the woods with his best Inspector Tom Thorne has been a friend, Thorne vows he will not make the same Sunday Times bestseller. mistake again. Cannot. Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat were made into a hit TV series on Sky 1 The solitary witness. The strange neighbour. The starring David Morrissey as friendly teacher. All are in Thorne’s sights. Thorne, and a series based on the novels In the Dark and Time of This case will be the making of him . or the Death was broadcast on BBC1. breaking. Mark lives in North London with his wife and two children. 4 July | Hardback | £20.00 | 9781408712412 | Crime & Mystery From the author of the beloved Terms & Conditions, British Summer Time Begins is a delightful, nostalgic and joyous celebration of summer holidays British Summer Time Begins YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM British Summer Time Begins is about summer ABOUT THE AUTHOR holidays of the mid-twentieth century and how Ysenda Maxtone Graham was they were spent, as recounted to Ysenda born in 1962 and educated at The Maxtone Graham in vividly remembered detail King’s School, Canterbury and by people who were there. Through this prism, it Girton College, Cambridge. She paints a revealing portrait of twentieth-century has written widely for many Britain in summertime: how we were, how newspapers and magazines, as families functioned, what houses and gardens features writer, book reviewer and and streets were like, what journeys were like, columnist. She is the author of and what people did all day in their free time. It The Church Hesitant: A Portrait of explores their expectations, hopes, fears and the Church of England; The Real habits, the rules or lack of rules under which Mrs Miniver, which was they lived, their happiness and sadness, their shortlisted for the Whitbread sense of being treasured or neglected – all within Biography of the Year Award; and living memory, from pre-war summers to the late Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School. She 1970s. lives in London with her husband and their three sons. Ysenda takes us back to the long stretch of time from the last days of June till the early days of September – those months when the term-time self was cast off and you could become the person you really were, and you had (if you were lucky) enough hours in the endless succession of days to become good at the things that would later define your adulthood. 5 July | Hardback | £20.00 | 9781408710555 | History ‘Wide-ranging, ambitious, socially panoramic . Amanda Craig anatomises the state of the nation with wit and empathy’ Jonathan Coe The Golden Rule AMANDA CRAIG ‘Amanda Craig is one of the most brilliant and ABOUT THE AUTHOR entertaining novelists now working in Britain’ Amanda Craig is a British Alison Lurie novelist, short-story writer and critic. When Hannah is invited into the First-Class After a brief time in advertising carriage of the London to Penzance train by and PR, she became a journalist Jinni, she walks into a spider’s web. Now a poor for newspapers, winning both the young single mother, Hannah once escaped Young Journalist of the Year and Cornwall to go to university. But once she the Catherine Pakenham Award. married Jake and had his child, her dreams were She was the children’s critic for crushed into bitter disillusion. Her husband has the Independent on Sunday and left her for Eve, rich and childless, and Hannah The Times. She still reviews has been surviving by becoming a cleaner in children’s books for the New London. Jinni is equally angry and bitter and in Statesman, and literary fiction for the course of their journey the two women agree the Observer, but is mostly a full- to murder each other’s husbands. After all, they time novelist. Her novel Hearts are strangers on a train – who could possibly and Minds was longlisted for the connect them? Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction, and her most recent But when Hannah goes to Jinni’s husband’s novel, The Lie of the Land, was home the next night, she finds Stan, a huge, chosen as a book of the year hairy, ugly drunk who has his own problems – across the national press. not least the care of a half-ruined house and garden. He claims Jinni is a very different person to the one who has persuaded Hannah to commit a terrible crime. Who is telling the truth and who is the real victim? 6 July | Hardback | £16.99 | 9781408711521 | Modern & Contemporary Fiction (Post c. 1945) The UK’s position as a “soft power superpower” was already under threat, after years of turbulent domestic politics, and now a Covid pandemic is changing how we assess and deploy soft power. This crisis is affecting everything, and countries that fail could potentially be left behind in the new order Soft Power ROBERT WINDER 'Soft power' is the power of friendly persuasion ABOUT THE AUTHOR rather than command, inviting nations to ROBERT WINDER is the compete - as they did in the C19th - to expand former literary editor of the their 'sphere of influence' as brands in a global Independent and deputy editor marketplace. In Bloody Foreigners and The Last of Granta. He is a regular Wolf, Robert Winder explored the way Britain contributor to publications was shaped first by migration, and then by including the Observer and New hidden geographical factors. Now, in Soft Power, Statesman. He is the best-selling moving from West to East, he reveals the ways in author of Bloody Foreigners: The which modern states are asserting themselves not Story of Immigration to through traditional realpolitik but through Britain and The Last Wolf: The alternative means: business, language, culture, Hidden Springs of Englishness. ideas, sport, education, music, even food ... the He has also written books about texture and values of history and daily life. cricket and golf, and three novels. Winder analyses how soft power operates, in its varied ways, from an American sheriff in Poland Robert is Trustee of the to an English garden in Ravello, to a Chinese Migration Museum in Lewisham, Friendship Hall in the Sudan; the fact that 58 South London. The Migration modern heads of state were educated in Britain Museum is shining a light on the or the student exchange that took a teenaged many ways that the movement of Deng Xiaoping to a small town on the Loire. people to and from Britain across Soft power's quiet ingredients may be the only the ages has shaped who we are – force supple enough to tackle what the future as individuals, as communities, looks likely to pose – this year in particular – not and as a nation. least the slam-the-door reflexes pulling in the www.migrationmuseum.org other direction.