The Glass of Time, by Michael Cox

1876. Nineteen-year-old Esperanza Gorst arrives at the great country house of Evenwood to be interviewed for the position of lady’s-maid.

But Esperanza is no ordinary servant. She has been sent by her guardian, the mysterious Madame de L’Ome, to uncover the dark and dangerous secrets that her new mistress has sought to conceal, and to set right a past injustice in which Esperanza’s own closest interests are bound up.

Gradually those secrets are revealed, and with them the truth of Esperanza really is, enmeshing her in a complicated web of intrigue, deceit, and murder that culminates in betrayal by those she trusted most.

A sequel to the widely praised The Meaning of Night, The Glass of Time is a page-turning period mystery and a gripping novel about identity, obsession and secrets.

The Harrowing, by Robert Dinsdale

January, 1916, and the rooftops of Leeds creak with the weight of the winter’s snows. William Redmond, soon to join the Chapeltown Rifles, wanders with his younger brother Samuel through the old haunts of their childhood – and, there, at the top of the Moor across which they are forbidden to walk, Samuel, for too long trapped in his brother’s shadow, stoves William’s head in with a stone.

When William wakes, it is a different world through which he walks. His brother has vanished, the town is silent, and not a man among them will give up the secret of where he has gone.

On the other side of the water, the fields of France and Belgium are torn apart by war – and, when William discovers that Samuel has been sent to the war in his stead as punishment for what he did upon the Moor, he resolves to go out there and bring him back, to put right what his family has done wrong. This will not be revenge; this will be forgiveness.

And so, with the fresh wound of Samuel’s attack still screaming at the back of his head, William ventures into the hell of Flanders – a mire of death and disease and deserters – to bring back alive the brother who wanted him dead.

The Assassin’s Song, by Moyez Vassanji

Karsan Dargawalla, heir to the shrine of a mysterious, medieval sufi begins to tell the story of his family and the destroyed shrine in the aftermath of the violence that gripped western India in 2002. His tale begins in the 1960s, and young Karsan wishes above all else to be ordinary. and when he is accepted to Harvard he can’t resist the opportunity to escape his hereditrary obligation. After a bitter quarrel with his father that leads him to abdicate his successorship, he marries and has a son in Canada, but after tragedy strikes in Canada and India, he is drawn back after thirty years to see if anything is left for him…

A story of grand historical sweep and intricate personal drama, a stunning evocation of the physical and emotional landscape of a man caught between the ancient and the modern, between legacy and discovery, between the most daunting filial obligation and the most undeniable personal yearning – The Assassin’s Song is a heartbreaking ballad of a life irrevocably changed.

The Interrogator, by Andrew Williams

Spring, 1941.  The armies of the Reich are masters of Europe. Britain stands alone, dependent on her battered navy for survival, while Hitler’s submarines – his ‘grey wolves’ – prey on the Atlantic convoys that are the country’s only lifeline.

Lieutenant Douglas Lindsay is amongst just a handful of men picked up when his ship is torpedoed.  Unable to free himself from the memories of that night at sea, he becomes an interrogator with naval intelligence, questioning captured U-Boat crews. He is convinced the Germans have broken British naval codes, but he’s a lone voice, a damaged outsider, and his superiors begin to wonder – can he really be trusted when so much is at stake?

As the Blitz reduces Britain’s cities to rubble and losses at sea mount, Lindsay becomes increasingly isolated and desperate. No one will believe him, not even his lover, Mary Henderson, who works at the very heart of the intelligence establishment. Lindsay decides to risk all in one last throw of the dice, setting a trap for his prize captive – and nemisis – U-Boat Commander Jürgen Mohr, the man who sent his ship to its doom…

Turbulence, by Giles Foden

The D-Day landings: the fate of two and half million men, three thousand landing-craft and the entire future of Europe depends on the right weather conditions in the English Channel on a single day.

A team of Allied scientists is charged with agreeing an accurate forecast five days in advance. But is it even possible to predict the weather so far ahead? And what is the relationship between predictability and turbulence, one of the last great mysteries of modern physics?

Wallace Ryman has devised a system that comprehends all of this – but he is a reclusive pacifist who stubbornly refuses to divulge his secrets. Henry Meadows, a young maths prodigy from the Met Office, is sent to Scotland to discover Ryman’s system and apply it to the Normandy landings.

But turbulence proves more elusive than anyone could have imagined, and events, like the weather, begin to spiral out of control.

Martyr, by Rory Clements

England is close to war. Within days the axe could fall on the neck of Mary Queen of Scots, and Spain is already gathering a battle fleet to avenge her.

Tensions in Elizabeth I’s government are at breaking point. At the eye of the storm is John Shakespeare, chief intelligencer in the secret service of Sir Francis Walsingham. When an intercept reveals a plot to assassinate England’s ‘sea dragon’, Francis Drake, Shakespeare is ordered to protect him. With Drake on land fitting out his ships, he is frighteningly vulnerable. If he dies, England will be open to invasion.

In a London rife with rumour, Shakespeare must decide which leads to follow, which to ignore. When a high-born young woman is found mutilated and murdered at an illicit printing house, it is political gunpowder – and he has no option but to investigate.

But why is Shakespeare shadowed at every turn by the brutal Richard Topcliffe, the blood-drenched priest-hunter who claims intimacy with Queen Elizabeth herself? What is Topcliffe’s interest in a housemaid, whose baby has been stolen? And where do two fugitive Jesuit priests fit into the puzzle, one happy to die for God, the other to kill for Him?

From the splendour and intrigue of the royal court, to the sleek warships of Her Majesty’s Navy and the teeming brothels of Southwark, Shakespeare soon learns that nothing is as it seems . . .

Read an extract of Martyr on Bookhugger

Serena, by Ron Rash

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton arrive from Boston in the North Carolina mountains to create a timber empire. Serena is new to the mountains – but she soon shows herself the equal of any worker, overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes, even saving her husband’s life in the wilderness. Yet she also learns that she will never bear a child. Serena’s discovery will set in motion a course of events that will change the lives of everyone in this remote community. As the Pembertons’ intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel, this riveting story of love, passion and revenge moves toward its shocking reckoning.

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