October - Mystery, Secrets & the Unknown

The occult raps at the table once more for the Society of Free Spirits; Bridgerton meets The Haunting of Hill House in the satisfyingly spooky sequel to former Young Adult Book of the Month A Grave Inheritance.

An occult device leaving threatening messages. A dinner party featuring a fatal main course. Was it a tragic accident, or is something foul at play? The Society of Free Spirits invites you to investigate, in this YA crime series with a supernatural twist.

Ada Hawthorne would much rather be hunting for ghosts than for a husband. So when the Society of Free Spirits is invited to host a séance investigating the Spirit Hand – an occult device haunting its owner with threatening messages – Ada can’t wait to show off her spiritualist talents to London’s elite.

But then a guest is fatally stabbed with a hatpin during the séance, and Ada ends up with more on her plate than a fancy dinner!

The society’s reputation is hanging on by a thread, and Ada can’t afford her family name being dragged through another scandalous gossip column. But when visions of the ghost appear and demand that the murder be solved, Ada and her friends have no choice but to engage in some less-than-ladylike behaviour to uncover the mystery. They’ll soon learn that in high society, everyone’s watching – including the ghosts.

The nephew of the King. The son of the Viceroy of India. Churchill’s nephew.

Thrown together in late 1944 into the notorious prisoner of war camp at Colditz Castle, these men were among the Prominente: a small group of captives who were scions of the British establishment and pawns in the endgame being played by the Nazi leadership.

As German defeat loomed, the head of the POW camps, SS General Gottlob Berger, made a pivotal decision: to disobey direct orders from Hitler to ‘kill them all’ and grant them safe passage back to the Allied frontline. This Nazi overseer, later convicted of war crimes, held the future of the Prominente in his hands.

George Lascelles, Earl of Harewood, was one of the men who survived. Eighty years later, drawing on archives and family records from Britain and Germany, his son David retraces their extraordinary journey and asks what motivated Berger’s fateful choice – remorse? Honour? Or simple self-interest?

A century ago, an astronomer discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star. She predicted that one day humans would travel there to build a utopia. Today, ten astronauts are leaving everything behind to find it. Four are veterans of the twentieth century’s space-race.

And six are teenagers who’ve trained for this mission most of their lives.

It will take the team twenty-three years to reach Terra-Two. Twenty-three years locked in close quarters. Twenty-three years with no one to rely on but each other. Twenty-three years with no rescue possible, should something go wrong. And something always goes wrong.