The Little Friend - Donna Tartt

Twelve-year-old Harriet is doing her best to grow up, which is not easy as her mother is permanently on medication, her father has silently moved to another city, and her serene sister rarely notices anything. All of them are still suffering from the shocking and mysterious death of her brother Robin twelve years earlier, and it seems to Harriet that the family may never recover. So, inspired by Captain Scott, Houdini, and Robert Louis Stevenson, she sets out with her only friend Hely to find Robin's murderer and punish him. But what starts out as a child's game soon becomes a dark and dangerous journey into the menacing underworld of a small Mississippi town.

The Mule - David Quantick

Jacky is a translator. He is a bit of an eccentric. And he can't quite understand why the enigmatic and beautiful girl at the bar wants to talk to him. 

Even more perplexing is the tatty-looking book she carries with her but won't let him touch. Written in an untranslatable language – even for him – it contains, quite impossibly, what seem to be photographs of her murder.

When she disappears hours later and the book comes into his custody, the suspicion falls on him. Accused of her murder, Jacky must find a way to decipher the untranslatable book she has left behind. Racing through Paris in pursuit of the truth and the missing girl, he must track her down with nothing but an unwavering determination and the assistance of the world's most annoying man.

The Mule is a wholly original, comical thriller filled with eccentric characters, sporadic violence and other peculiarities. Weaving a tale of intrigue, betrayal and romance, this is the bizarre story of the world's most enigmatic book.

Fates and Furries - Lauren Groff

Every story has two sides. 
Every relationship has two perspectives. 
And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. 

At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but behind closed doors things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed.

The Rise and Fall of Great Powers – Tom Rachman

9-year-old Tooly is living in Bangkok, largely left to her own devices, when she is spirited away by a seductive group of outsiders who take her from city to city across the globe.

At 20, she is wandering the streets of Manhattan with a scribbled-on map, living with a ping-pong-playing, avocado-loving Russian émigré called Humphrey and scamming strangers for her shadowy protector, Venn.

Now, aged 31, she runs a second-hand bookshop on the Welsh borders and has found a kind of peace with her strange upbringing - until she gets a message from an old flame asking her to come back to New York to see her dying father.

Tooly has spent so much of her life becoming what others want her to be, she has lost all sense of herself. Warm, hilarious, moving and fizzing with intelligence, THE RISE AND FALL OF GREAT POWERS is a masterpiece about the search for identity, the people who rise into and fall out of our lives, and how to figure out what home means.

The Cartel - Don Winslow

It’s 2004. DEA agent Art Keller has been fighting the war on drugs for thirty years in a blood feud against Adan Barrera, the head of El Federación, the world’s most powerful cartel, and the man who brutally murdered Keller’s partner. Finally putting Barrera away costs Keller dearly – the woman he loves, the beliefs he cherishes, the life he wants to lead.

Then Barrera gets out, determined to rebuild the empire that Keller shattered. Unwilling to live in a world with Barrera in it, Keller goes on a ten-year odyssey to take him down. His obsession with justice – or is it revenge – becomes a ruthless struggle that stretches from the cities, mountains and deserts of Mexico, to Washington’s corridors of power, to the streets of Berlin and Barcelona.

Keller fights his personal battle against the devastated backdrop of Mexico’s drug war, a conflict of unprecedented scale and viciousness, as cartels vie for power and he comes to the final reckoning with Barrera – and himself - that he always knew must happen.

The Cartel is a story of power, corruption, revenge, honour and sacrifice, as one man tries to face down the devil without losing his soul. It is the story of the war on drugs and the men – and women – who wage it.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley - Antonio Garcia Martinez

Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a datacenter powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon Valley’s most audacious chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez.

After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, García Martínez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team, turning its users’ data into profit for COO Sheryl Sandberg and chairman and CEO Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg. Forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company’s monetization strategy, García Martínez eventually landed at rival Twitter. He also fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, committed lewd acts and brewed illegal beer on the Facebook campus (accidentally flooding Zuckerberg's desk), lived on a sailboat, raced sport cars on the 101, and enthusiastically pursued the life of an overpaid Silicon Valley wastrel.

Now, this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is invading our lives and shaping our future. Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. The question is, will we survive?

The Quick - Lauren Owen

You are about to discover the secrets of The Quick –

But first, reader, you must travel to Victorian England, and there, in the wilds of Yorkshire, meet a brother and sister alone in the world, a pair bound by tragedy. You will, in time, enter the rooms of London’s mysterious Aegolius Club – a society of the richest, most powerful men in England. And at some point – we cannot say when – these worlds will collide. 

It is then, and only then, that a new world emerges, a world of romance, adventure and the most delicious of horrors – and the secrets of The Quick are revealed.