National Network for Equitable Library Service

Uplifting and heartwarming: drama, courage and romance at Marlow's department store this Christmas For Lily Collins and her fellow shop girls at Marlow's Department store, another Christmas with ration books, shortages of goods and staff - not to mention a store coping with war damage - will be a real challenge. But the girls rally round and put their worries aside to make this, the hardest wartime Christmas yet, one that their families, and their town, will never forget.

'It whisked me away on a much-needed holiday' - Beth O'Leary 'I can't remember the last time a book made me forget I had a phone' - Stacey Halls 'What an absolute delight!' - Emily Henry. One cancelled wedding When the day finally comes for Annie to marry Alexander, the last thing she expects is to be left standing at the altar. She was so sure he was Mr Right. Now, she has no idea how she could have got it so wrong.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of The Way We Were by Sinead Moriarty, read by Robert Portal, Rachel Louise Miller, Alison McKenna and Daniel Weyman. Winner of the Irish Book Award for Popular Fiction 2015. 'Heartfelt and deeply moving ... I couldn't put it down.' Susan Lewis 'Intriguing and thought provoking ... a great read.' Katie Fforde When Alice's husband Ben dies suddenly, her world falls apart. They shared twenty years and two daughters and life without him is unimaginable. Having lost her parents while young, Alice understands her girls' pain.

A new short story by award-winning author Pasha Malla. Set during the summer in a small town on the edge of the Arctic Circle, To Sweep the Light is a love story about solitude and companionship, proximity and distance, and the quest for intimacy between a boy and a girl.

A dozen stories: a dozen ways of looking at love, or the lack of love. Over five previous collections, A. L. Kennedy has shown herself to be a master of the short form, with a perfect way with sentences and a voice so distinct as to be instantly recognizable. Here, as before, lies the battlefield of the heart, where characters who have suffered disaffection, alienation, or emotional damage somehow emerge — haltingly, awkwardly — into the astonishment of intimacy. And here, too, are the ones who will not shake off the hurt and the loss, who will not come through.

A sweeping saga of intrigue and romance set during the Italian Renaissance and told through the eyes of Grazia dei Rossi, a young Jewish woman torn between duty and forbidden romance, who wins our hearts with her recorded secrets of love. Grazia dei Rossi, private secretary to the world-renowned Isabella d’Este, is the daughter of an eminent Jewish banker, the wife of the pope’s Jewish physician, and the lover of a Christian prince.

Does true love have supernatural power? Where Did You Sleep Last Night is a love story about a teenage girl who embarks on a relationship with Kurt Cobain. Evelyn Gray is a sad and lonely sixteen-year-old from Carnation, Washington who is terrorized by her classmates at school. She spends most of her time in her room reading, writing letters to dead people, listening to old records and talking to the poster of Kurt Cobain above her bed.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin meets The Marrying of Chani Kaufman in this cinematic novel about the birth of Israel and the true story of the marriages of convenience that were arranged to smuggle Jewish women out of Nazi-occupied Europe. On the eve of World War II, a ship bearing twenty young men sets sail from the Palestine Territory toward Europe. Eagerly awaiting them on the other side are twenty young women, whom the men have never met. They have been set up in arranged marriages to enable Jewish women to escape Nazi Germany and enter Palestine without being turned back by the British.

Wendy Hebb has been a fisherman's wife for forty years. She has also been a mother, a yoga instructor, and part-time soap maker. She loves her life in picturesque Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, but it's just not enough anymore. With a decades' old business degree and a burning entrepreneurial desire, she decides that when her husband, Paul, retires, it will finally be her turn to live out her dream. The catch: her dream is to open a sex shop.

Full of colourful, authentic characters and set in Toronto, Confessions of a Teenage Drag King highlights diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, and identity. Seventeen-year-old Lauren tries to navigate the tricky waters of teen romance that brings high school to the drag show and back, all while Lauren must keep up their two personas -- Ren, a drag king, and Lauri, a typical student -- and come to terms with their feelings both for mixed-race student Clover and for their own identity as an LGBTQ+ teen.