By Kathryn Stockett
Published by Penguin
£7.99
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk.
A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humour, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.
By Patricia Cornwall
Published by Sphere
£7.99
Christmas is coming but the festive spirit is sorely missing in freezing, credit-crunch New York. Everyone feels bad: Kay Scarpetta, Benton Wesley, Pete Marino and Lucy Farinelli are haunted by their gruesome pasts.
The Title refers to a TV show which CNN hopes the forensic pathologist will host. Until now Scarpetta has, against her better judgment, only been a contributor to another crime show fronted by an unscrupulous bitch. The loss of her BlackBerry, a present from her niece, Lucy the lesbian loose cannon, at the TV station causes panic among her inner circle. Meanwhile, there is the murder of a young female runner and the disappearance of Hannah Starr a crooked financier, to investigate. Then someone delivers a bomb to Scarpetta’s apartment. The suspects include a wicked witch, a sleazy Hollywood heart-throb and an arch-enemy of Benton, Scarpetta’s husband, whose sudden return from the dead a few years ago is still causing problems.
Alone in Berlin
by Hans Fallada
Published by Penguin
£9.99
Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels’ necks …
