43 New Novels Coming to a Bookshop Near You This March

With the onset of spring we welcome the blooming daffodils, the sprouting bluebells, and more new novels than I can count.

Yes, by the end of March, the nights will begin to get lighter and hopefully the temperature gauge will begin to warm up but for all bookworms out there, we still crave the evenings where we can wrap ourselves up on the sofa and settle down to start a new book.

So, what will be hitting the bookshops this month?

March 2017 Releases

#1 Waking in Time by Angie Stanton

Still mourning the loss of her beloved grandmother and shaken by her mysterious, dying request to “find the baby,” Abbi has just arrived at UW Madison for her freshman year. However, on her second day, she wakes up to a different world -1983 – and that is just the first stop on Abbi’s journey backward through time.

Will, on the other hand, is a charming college freshman from 1927 who travels forward through time and when Abbi and Will meet in the middle, love adds another complication to their lives.

Communicating across time through a buried time capsule, they try to decode the mystery of their travel, find the lost baby, and plead with their champion, a kindly physics professor, to help them find each other again even though the professor gets younger each time Abbi meets him.

This page-turning story is full of romance, twists, and delightful details about campus life.

(Publish Date:  1^st March)

Purchase Waking in Time here

#2 The Cutaway by Christina Kovac

When brilliant TV news producer Virginia Knightly receives a disturbing “MISSING” notice on her desk related to the disappearance of a beautiful young attorney, she can’t seem to shake the image from her head. Despite skepticism from her colleagues, Knightly suspects this ambitious young lawyer may be at the heart of something far more sinister, especially since she was last seen leaving an upscale restaurant after a domestic dispute.

Risking her career, her life, and perhaps even her own sanity, Knightly dives deep into the dark underbelly of Washington,  in an investigation that will drag her mercilessly through the inextricable webs of corruption that bind the press, the police, and politics in our nation’s capital.

(Publish Date:  1^st March)

Purchase The Cutaway here

#3 Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet and embark on a furtive love affair.

When the unrest in their city explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors – doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price.

As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. 

Exit West follows these characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are.

Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

(Publish Date: 2^nd March)

Purchase Exit West here

#4 The Witchfinder’s Sister by Beth Underdown

A literary historical thriller based on the devastating witch hunts in 1640s England.

Before Salem, there was Manningtree. . .

With a heavy heart, Alice Hopkins returns to the small town she grew up in. Widowed, with child, and without prospects, she is forced to find refuge at the house of her younger brother, Matthew. In the five years she has been gone, the boy she knew has become a man of influence and wealth – but more has changed than merely his fortunes. Alice fears that even as the cruel burns of a childhood accident still mark his face, something terrible has scarred Matthew’s soul. 

There is a new darkness in the town, frightened whispers are stirring in the streets, and Alice’s blood runs cold with dread when she discovers that Matthew is a ruthless hunter of suspected witches.

Torn between devotion to her brother and horror at what he’s become, Alice is desperate to intervene and deathly afraid of the consequences. But as Matthew’s reign of terror spreads, Alice must choose between her safety and her soul. 

Alone and surrounded by suspicious eyes, Alice seeks out the fuel firing her brother’s brutal mission and is drawn into the Hopkins family’s past. There she finds secrets nested within secrets and at their heart, the poisonous truth. Only by putting her own life and liberty in peril can she defeat this darkest of evils before more innocent women are forced to the gallows. 

(Publish Date: 2^nd March)

Purchase The Witchfinder’s Sister here

#5 The Inexplicated Logic of My Life by Benjamin Alire Saenz

Sal used to know his place with his adoptive gay father, their loving Mexican-American family, and his best friend, Samantha. But it’s senior year, and suddenly Sal is throwing punches, questioning everything, and realizing he no longer knows himself.

If Sal’s not who he thought he was, who is he? 

(Publish Date: 7^th March)

Purchase The Inexplicated Logic of My Life here

#6 Close Enough to Touch by Colleen Oakley

And so begins the story of Jubilee Jenkins, a young woman with a rare and debilitating medical condition: she’s allergic to other humans. After a humiliating near-death experience in high school, Jubilee has become a recluse, living the past nine years in the confines of the small town New Jersey house her unaffectionate mother left to her when she ran off with a Long Island businessman. But now, her mother is dead, and without her financial support, Jubilee is forced to leave home and face the world—and the people in it—that she’s been hiding from.

One of those people is Eric Keegan, a man who just moved into town for work. With a daughter from his failed marriage who is no longer speaking to him, and a brilliant, if psychologically troubled, adopted son, Eric’s struggling to figure out how his life got so off-course, and how to be the dad—and man—he wants so desperately to be. Then, one day, he meets a mysterious woman named Jubilee, with a unique condition…

Close Enough to Touch is an evocative, poignant, and heartrending exploration of the power and possibilities of the human heart.

(Publish Date: 7^th March)

Purchase Close Enough to Touch here

#7 The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel

After her mother’s suicide, fifteen year-old Lane Roanoke came to live with her grandparents and fireball cousin, Allegra, on their vast estate in rural Kansas. Lane knew little of her mother’s mysterious family, but she quickly embraced life as one of the rich and beautiful Roanoke girls. But when she discovered the dark truth at the heart of the family, she ran fast and far away.

Eleven years later, Lane is adrift in Los Angeles when her grandfather calls to tell her Allegra has gone missing. Did she run too? Or has something worse happened? Unable to resist his pleas, Lane returns to help search, and to ease her guilt at having left Allegra behind.

Her homecoming may mean a second chance with the boyfriend whose heart she broke that long ago summer. But it also means facing the devastating secret that made her flee, one she may not be strong enough to run from again.

As it weaves between Lane’s first Roanoke summer and her return, The Roanoke Girls shocks and tantalizes, twisting its way through revelation after mesmerizing revelation, exploring the secrets families keep and the fierce and terrible love that both binds them together and rips them apart. 

(Publish Date: 7^th March)

Purchase The Roanoke Girls here

#8 The Mermaid’s Daughter by Ann Claycomb

A modern-day expansion of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, this unforgettable debut novel weaves a spellbinding tale of magic and the power of love.

Kathleen has always been dramatic. She suffers from the bizarre malady of experiencing stabbing pain in her feet. On her sixteenth birthday, she woke screaming from the sensation that her tongue had been cut out. No doctor can find a medical explanation for her pain, and even the most powerful drugs have proven useless. Only the touch of seawater can ease her pain, and just temporarily at that.

Now Kathleen is a twenty-five-year-old opera student in Boston and shows immense promise as a soprano. Her girlfriend Harry, a mezzo in the same program, worries endlessly about Kathleen’s phantom pain and obsession with the sea.

Kathleen’s mother and grandmother both committed suicide as young women, and Harry worries they suffered from the same symptoms. When Kathleen suffers yet another dangerous breakdown, Harry convinces Kathleen to visit her hometown in Ireland to learn more about her family history.

In Ireland they meet the sea witches, who reveal that Kathleen is eight generations removed from the little mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story. The sea witches also present Kathleen with a knife and the same choice they gave all the women before her: kill yourself and end the pain, or kill your lover to break the spell and return as a mermaid to the sea.

Haunting and lyrical, The Mermaid’s Daughter asks how far we will go for those we love.

(Publish Date: 7^th March)

Purchase The Mermaid’s Daughter here

#9 Etched in Bone by Anne Bishop

After a human uprising was brutally put down by the Elders—a primitive and lethal form of the Others—the few cities left under human control are far-flung. And the people within them now know to fear the no-man’s-land beyond their borders—and the darkness.

As some communities struggle to rebuild, Lakeside Courtyard has emerged relatively unscathed, though Simon Wolfgard, its wolf shifter leader, and blood prophet Meg Corbyn must work with the human pack to maintain the fragile peace. But all their efforts are threatened when Lieutenant Montgomery’s shady brother arrives, looking for a free ride and easy pickings.

With the humans on guard against one of their own, tensions rise, drawing the attention of the Elders, who are curious about the effect such an insignificant predator can have on a pack. But Meg knows the dangers, for she has seen in the cards how it will all end – with her standing beside a grave.

(Publish Date: 7^th March)

Purchase Etched in Bone here

#10 There’s something about Cornwall by Daisy James

A knight in a shining camper van!

Life is far from picture perfect for food photographer, Emilie Roberts. Not only has her slimy ex cheated on her, he’s also stolen her dream assignment to beautiful Venice! Instead, Emilie is heading to the wind-swept Cornish coast.

Emilie doesn’t think it can get any worse until disaster strikes on the very first day! And there’s only one man to rescue this damsel in distress: extremely hunky surfing instructor, Matt Ashby.

Racing from shoot to shoot in a bright orange vintage camper van, Matt isn’t the conventional knight in shining armour but can he make all of Emilie’s fairy tale dreams come true?

(Publish Date: 7^th March)

Purchase There’s something about Cornwall here

 #11 Catching Carly by Emma Hart

Life Goal #1: Forget about my best friend’s brother.

From New York Times bestselling author, Emma Hart, comes another hilariously wild romantic comedy about being the third wheel in your friendship and, um, accidentally having sex with your best friend’s brother.

(Publish Date: 7^th March)

Purchase Catching Carly here

#12 Edgar and Lucy by Victor Lodato

Eight-year-old Edgar Fini remembers nothing of the accident people still whisper about. He only knows that his father is gone, his mother has a limp, and his grandmother believes in ghosts.

When Edgar meets a man with his own tragic story, the boy begins a journey into a secret wilderness where nothing is clear—not even the line between the living and the dead.

In order to save her son, Lucy has no choice but to confront the demons of her past.

(Publish Date: 7^th March)

Purchase Edgar and Lucy here

#13 The illusionist’s Apprentice by Kirsty Cambron

Harry Houdni’s one-time apprentice holds fantastic secrets about the greatest illusionist in the world. But someone wants to claim them or silence her before she can reveal them on her own.

Boston, 1926

Jenny “Wren” Lockhart is a bold eccentric—even for a female vaudevillian. As notorious for her inherited wealth and gentleman’s dress as she is for her unsavoury upbringing in the back halls of a vaudeville theatre, Wren lives in a world that challenges all manner of conventions.

In the months following Houdini’s death, Wren is drawn into a web of mystery surrounding a spiritualist by the name of Horace Stapleton, a man defamed by Houdini’s ardent debunking of fraudulent mystics in the years leading up to his death. But in a public illusion that goes terribly wrong, one man is dead and another stands charged with his murder. Though he’s known as one of her teacher’s greatest critics, Wren must decide to become the one thing she never wanted to be: Stapleton’s defender.

Forced to team up with the newly formed FBI, Wren races against time, and an unknown enemy, all to prove the innocence of a hated man. In a world of illusion, of the vaudeville halls that showcase the flamboyant and the strange, Wren’s carefully constructed world threatens to collapse around her. 

Layered with mystery, illusion, and the artistry of the Jazz Age’s bygone vaudeville era, The Illusionist’s Apprentice is a journey through love and loss and the underpinnings of faith on each life’s stage.

(Publish Date: 7^th March)

Purchase The illusionist’s Apprentice here

#14 Silent by David Mellon

For fans of The Book Thief and Raiders of the Lost Ark, this thrilling new novel set during World War I features a girl who must pretend to be a male soldier to save her younger brothers.

Adi is an outsider, rejected by both her British father’s and Indian mother’s cultures, so she is no stranger to trouble. But when a mysterious agitator called “Coal” kidnaps Adi’s twin brothers, Adi has to rely on herself to find them.  

With strength and cunning as fierce as any boy’s, she decides to cut her hair and put on a military uniform to slip unnoticed through the chaos of the early days of World War I. When Adi finds a pocket watch that could be the clue to her lost brothers, she must figure out a way to decode it before time runs out.

(Publish Date: 7^th March)

Purchase Silent here

#15 The Little Teashop of Lost and Found by Trisha Ashley

Alice Rose was discovered on the Yorkshire moors above Haworth as a baby. Adopted but then later rejected again by a horrid step-mother, Alice struggles to find a place where she belongs. Only baking – the scent of cinnamon and citrus and the feel of butter and flour between her fingers – brings a comforting sense of home. 

So it seems natural that when she finally decides to return to Haworth, Alice turns to baking again, taking over a run-down little teashop and working to set up an afternoon tea emporium. 

Luckily she soon makes friends including a Grecian god-like neighbour who helps her both set up home and try to solve the mystery of who she is.

There are one or two last twists in the dark fairytale of Alice’s life to come but can she find her happily ever after?

(Publish Date: 9^th March)

Purchase The Little Teashop of Lost and Found here

#16 A Simple Favour by Darcey Bell

She’s your best friend.
She knows all your secrets.
That’s why she’s so dangerous.

A single mother’s life is turned upside down when her best friend vanishes in this chilling debut thriller in the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.

It starts with a simple favour—an ordinary kindness mothers do for one another. When her best friend, Emily, asks Stephanie to pick up her son Nicky after school, she happily says yes. Nicky and her son, Miles, are classmates and best friends, and the five-year-olds love being together—just like her and Emily.

A widow and stay-at-home mommy blogger living in woodsy suburban Connecticut, Stephanie was lonely until she met Emily, a sophisticated PR executive whose job in Manhattan demands so much of her time.

But Emily doesn’t come back. She doesn’t answer calls or return texts. Stephanie knows something is terribly wrong—Emily would never leave Nicky, no matter what the police say.

Terrified, she reaches out to her blog readers for help. She also reaches out to Emily’s husband, the handsome, reticent Sean, offering emotional support. It’s the least she can do for her best friend. Then, she and Sean receive shocking news. Emily is dead. The nightmare of her disappearance is over.

Or is it? Because soon, Stephanie will begin to see that nothing—not friendship, love, or even an ordinary favour—is as simple as it seems.

(Publish Date: 9^th March)

Purchase A Simple Favour here

#17 Rome Is Where The Heart Is by Tilly Tennant

Can a holiday romance ever have a happy ending?

When Kate’s husband Matt dumps her on Friday 13th she decides enough is enough – it’s time for her to have some fun and so she hops on a plane to Rome. A week of grappa and gelato in pavement cafes under azure blue skies will be just what the doctor ordered.

What she doesn’t count on is meeting and falling for sexy policeman Alessandro. But the course of true love doesn’t run smoothly, Alessandro has five meddling sisters, a fearsome mama and a beautiful ex Orazia. They’re all certain that Kate is not the girl for him.

Can Kate and Alessandro’s love last the distance? Or will she return home with the one souvenir she doesn’t want – a broken heart.

(Publish Date: 9^th March)

Purchase Rome Is Where The Heart Is here

#18 New Attitude by Kathryn R. Biel

As if it’s not bad enough that I didn’t win the reality design TV show I was on, try coming home to a one word note indicating that my ten-year marriage is over.

So here I am, a suddenly single mother in my mid-thirties, doing what everyone advises me to do—have a fling. Except it doesn’t go as planned, so I do the next best thing, which is sit on the couch and mope. But having to provide for a five-year-old doesn’t let me stay home for too long. Before I know it, I’m back to dying my hair wild colours and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

Except Tony, the fling that wasn’t, keeps popping up in the most unlikely places and won’t leave me alone. I’d like to be strong—I’m way too old for him—but he’s cute and funny and sexy and oh, my ex is getting married to a girl named Bambi.

All I know is the way I’m doing things isn’t working. If I want to be happy again, I’m going to need to get a new attitude.

(Publish Date: 13^th March)

Purchase New Attitude here

#19 The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

When thirty-eight-year-old New Yorker writer Ariel Levy left for a reporting trip to Mongolia in 2012, she was pregnant, married, financially secure, and successful on her own terms. A month later, none of that was true.

Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she built an unconventional life and then watched it fall apart with astonishing speed. Like much of her generation, she was raised to resist traditional rules about work, about love, and about womanhood.

“I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.”

In this profound and beautiful memoir, Levy chronicles the adventure and heartbreak of being “a woman who is free to do whatever she chooses.” Her own story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed and of what is eternal.

(Publish Date: 14^th March)

Purchase The Rules Do Not Apply here

#20 Never Let You Go by Chevy Stevens

Eleven years ago, Lindsey Nash escaped into the night with her young daughter and left an abusive relationship. Her ex-husband was sent to jail and she started over with a new life.

Now, Lindsey is older and wiser, with a teenage daughter who needs her more than ever. When her ex-husband is finally released, Lindsey believes she’s cut all ties. But she gets the sense that someone is watching her. Her new boyfriend is threatened. Her home is invaded, and her daughter is shadowed. Lindsey is convinced it’s her ex-husband, even though he claims he’s a different person. But can he really change? Is the one who wants her dead closer to home than she thought?

(Publish Date: 14^th March)

Purchase Never Let You Go here

#21 The End of Oz by Danielle Paige

In this high-octane fourth book in the New York Times bestselling Dorothy Must Die series, Amy Gumm must do everything in her power to save Kansas and make Oz a free land once more.

At the end of Yellow Brick War, Amy had finally defeated Dorothy but just when she and the rest of the surviving members of the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked thought it was safe to start rebuilding the damaged land of Oz, they realized they’ve been betrayed—by one of their own. And Dorothy might not have been so easily defeated after all.

Welcome to the other side of the rainbow. Here there’s danger around every corner, and magic shoes won’t be able to save you.

(Publish Date: 14^th March)

Purchase The End of Oz here

#22 Hunted by Meagan Spooner

Beauty knows the Beast’s forest in her bones—and in her blood. Though she grew up with the city’s highest aristocrats, far from her father’s old lodge, she knows that the forest holds secrets and that her father is the only hunter who’s ever come close to discovering them.

So when her father loses his fortune and moves Yeva and her sisters back to the outskirts of town, Yeva is secretly relieved. Out in the wilderness, there’s no pressure to make idle chatter or submit to marrying a wealthy gentleman. But Yeva’s father’s misfortune may have cost him his mind, and when he goes missing in the woods, Yeva sets her sights on one prey: the creature he’d been obsessively tracking just before his disappearance.

Deaf to her sisters’ protests, Yeva hunts this strange Beast back into his own territory—a cursed valley, a ruined castle, and a world of creatures that Yeva’s only heard about in fairy tales – a world that can bring her either ruin or salvation. Who will survive: the Beauty, or the Beast?

(Publish Date: 14^th March)

Purchase Hunted here

#23 Find Me at Willoughby Close by Kate Hewitt

Welcome to Willoughby Close, a charming cluster of cozy cottages, each with a story to tell and a happy ending to deliver.

Harriet Lang had the perfect life, so she’s left reeling when everything is taken from her in one fell swoop. Suddenly, Harriet learns her beautiful farmhouse in the Cotswolds is double-mortgaged, her husband Richard’s been unceremoniously fired—and he’s become a little too close to his young, sexy assistant.

Harriet moves into Willoughby Close with her three children, trying to hold her head up high.

With the help of her neighbour and newfound friend Ellie Matthews, Harriet starts to rebuild her life–but dipping a toe in the dating pool feels strange and meanwhile her children are struggling in different ways. She wonders if starting over is really possible.

Then Willoughby Close begins to weave its healing magic on both her and her children, and Harriet begins to see a way forward. She even starts to date sexy local vet Tom Roberts–but when Richard reappears in her life, wanting to make amends, Harriet must make the painful decision about how much of the past can be forgiven—and what kind of future she is fighting for.

(Publish Date: 14^th March)

Purchase Find Me at Willoughby Close here

#24 Every Wild Heart by Meg Donohue

Passionate and funny, radio personality Gail Gideon is a true original. Nine years ago when Gail’s husband announced that he wanted a divorce, her ensuing on-air rant propelled her local radio show into the national spotlight.  Now, “The Gail Gideon Show” is beloved by millions of single women who tune-in for her advice on the power of self-reinvention. But fame comes at a price. After all, what does a woman who has staked her career on being single do when she finds herself falling in love? And is the person who is harassing her in increasingly troubling ways a misguided fan or a true danger to Gail and her daughter?

Fourteen-year-old Nic has always felt that she pales in comparison to her vibrant, outgoing mother. Plagued by a fear of social situations, she is most comfortable at the stable where she spends her afternoons. But when a riding accident lands Nic in the hospital, she awakens from her coma changed. Suddenly, she has no fear at all and her disconcerting behaviour lands her in one risky situation after another. And no one, least of all her mother, can guess what she will do next.

(Publish Date: 14^th March)

Purchase Every Wild Heart here

#25 The Forgotten Girls by Owen Laukkanen

They are the victims no one has ever cared about, until now. Agents Stevens and Windermere return in the blistering new crime novel from the fast-rising, multi-award-nominated suspense star.

She was a forgotten girl, a runaway found murdered on the High Line train through the northern Rocky Mountains and, with little local interest, put into a dead file. But she was not alone. When Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere of the joint FBI-BCA violent crime force stumble upon the case, they discover a horror far greater than anyone expected—a string of murders on the High Line, all of them young women drifters whom no one would notice.

But someone has noticed now. Through the bleak midwinter and a frontier land of forbidding geography, Stevens and Windermere follow a frustratingly light trail of clues—and where it ends, even they will be shocked.

(Publish Date: 14^th March)

Purchase The Forgotten Girls here

#26 The Paper Year by Avery Aster

Sutton Place is Manhattan’s premiere cooperative–the kind of place everyone who’s anyone desires to reside in. That’s what psychotherapist Piper Adler believes as she moves into the garden apartment with her new husband, but then she wakes up in a hospital accused of trying to take her own life. Her dreams of being a wife and mother destroyed along with her career as a mental health professional, she sets off on a mind-bending course to discover the truth.

Unravelling a web of deceit forces Piper to second-guess her family, her friends, and even herself. With each terrifying revelation, she must come to terms with the fact that those she thought she knew aren’t who they seem, and someone very close to her wants her gone. Will she beat them at their own game or die trying?

(Publish Date: 16^th March)

Purchase The Paper Year here

#27 Nemesis by Brendan Reichs

It’s been happening since Min was eight. Every two years, on her birthday, a strange man finds her and murders her in cold blood. But hours later, she wakes up in a clearing just outside her tiny Idaho hometown—alone, unhurt, and with all evidence of the horrifying crime erased.

Across the valley, Noah just wants to be like everyone else. But he’s not. Nightmares of murder and death plague him, though he does his best to hide the signs. But when the world around him begins to spiral toward panic and destruction, Noah discovers that people have been lying to him his whole life. Everything changes in an eye blink.

For the planet has a bigger problem.

The Anvil, an enormous asteroid threatening all life on Earth, leaves little room for two troubled teens. Yet on her sixteenth birthday, as she cowers in her bedroom, hoping not to die for the fifth time, Min has had enough. She vows to discover what is happening in Fire Lake and uncovers a lifetime of lies: a vast conspiracy involving the sixty-four students of her sophomore class, one that may be even more sinister than the murders.

(Publish Date: 21^st March)

Purchase Nemesis here

#28 The Hidden Memory of Objects by Danielle Mages Amato

Megan Brown’s brother, Tyler, is dead, but the cops are killing him all over again. They say he died of a drug overdose, potentially suicide—something Megan cannot accept. Determined to figure out what happened in the months before Tyler’s death, Megan turns to the things he left behind. After all, she understands the stories objects can tell—at fifteen, she is a gifted collage artist with a flair for creating found-object pieces. However, she now realizes that her artistic talent has developed into something more: she can see memories attached to some of Tyler’s belongings—and those memories reveal a brother she never knew.

Enlisting the help of an artefact detective who shares her ability and specializes in murderabilia—objects tainted by violence or the deaths of their owners—Megan finds herself drawn into a world of painful personal and national memories. Along with a trusted classmate and her brother’s charming friend, she chases down the troubling truth about Tyler across Washington, DC, while reclaiming her own stifled identity with a vengeance.

(Publish Date: 21^st March)

Purchase The Hidden Memory of Objects here

#29 The Last Chance Matinee by Mariah Stewart

When celebrated and respected agent Fritz Hudson passes away, he leaves a trail of Hollywood glory in his wake—and two separate families who never knew the other existed.

Allie and Des Hudson are products of Fritz’s first marriage to Honora, a beautiful but troubled starlet whose life ended in a tragic overdose. Meanwhile, Fritz was falling in love on the Delaware Bay with New Age hippie Susa Pratt—they had a daughter together, Cara, and while Fritz loved Susa with everything he had, he never quite managed to tell her or Cara about his West Coast family.

Now Fritz is gone, and the three sisters are brought together under strange circumstances: there’s a large inheritance to be had that could save Allie from her ever-deepening debt following a disastrous divorce, allow Des to open a rescue shelter for abused and wounded animals, and give Cara a fresh start after her husband left her for her best friend—but only if the sisters upend their lives and work together to restore an old, decrepit theatre that was Fritz’s obsession growing up in his small hometown in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains.

Guided by Fritz’s closest friend and long-time attorney, Pete Wheeler, the sisters come together—whether they like it or not—to turn their father’s dream into a reality, and might just come away with far more than they bargained for.

(Publish Date: 21^st March)

Purchase The Last Chance Matinee here

#30 The Secrets You Keep by Kate White

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Wrong Man and Eyes on You comes a harrowing new psychological thriller about a successful self-help author who suddenly finds her life spiralling dangerously out of control.

What would you do if you realized that your new husband, a man you adore, is keeping secrets from you—secrets with terrifying consequences?

Bryn Harper, an accomplished self-help author, already has plenty to deal with. She’s still recovering from a devastating car accident that has left her haunted by recurring, smoke-filled nightmares. Worse still, she can’t shake the ominous feeling her dreams contain a warning.

In the beginning, Bryn’s husband Guy couldn’t have been more supportive. But after moving into a new house together, disturbing incidents occur and Guy grows evasive, secretive. What the hell is going on, she wonders? Then, a woman hired to cater their dinner party is brutally murdered.

As Bryn’s world unravels—and yet another woman in town is slain —she must summon her old strength to find answers and protect her own life. Her nightmares may in fact hold the key to unlocking the truth and unmasking the murderer.

(Publish Date: 21^st March)

Purchase The Secrets You Keep here

#31 The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See

Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations. Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate—the first automobile any of them have seen—and a stranger arrives.

In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people. In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced the Yao people to her readers. Here she shares the customs of another Chinese ethnic minority, the Akha, whose world will soon change.

Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, translates for the stranger and is among the first to reject the rules that have shaped her existence. When she has a baby outside of wedlock, rather than stand by tradition, she wraps her daughter in a blanket, with a tea cake hidden in her swaddling, and abandons her in the nearest city.

After mother and daughter have gone their separate ways, Li-yan slowly emerges from the security and insularity of her village to encounter modern life while Haley grows up a privileged and well-loved California girl. Despite Haley’s happy home life, she wonders about her origins; and Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. They both search for and find answers in the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for generations.

(Publish Date: 21^st March)

Purchase The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane here

#32 Follow Me Down by Sherri Smith

Mia Haas has built a life for herself far from the North Dakota town where she grew up, but when she receives word that her twin brother is missing, she’s forced to return home.

Once hailed as the golden boy of their small town, Lucas Haas disappeared the same day the body of one of his high school students is pulled from the river.

Trying to wrap her head around the rumours of Lucas’s affair with the teen, and unable to reconcile the media’s portrayal of Lucas as a murderer with her own memories of him, Mia is desperate to find another suspect.

All the while, she wonders, if he’s innocent, why did he run?

As Mia re-evaluates their difficult, shared history and launches her own investigation into the grisly murder, she uncovers secrets that could exonerate Lucas—or seal his fate. In a small town where everyone’s history is intertwined, Mia will be forced to confront her own demons, placing her right in the killer’s cross-hairs.

(Publish Date: 21^st March)

Purchase Follow Me Down here

#33 Don’t Stop Me Now by Colleen Coleman

Poppy Bloom has a Life Plan: PhD in psychology, research job at her university, and a life of domestic bliss with handsome boyfriend Gregory.

But then she finishes her PhD with no job offer, no relationship, and nowhere to live. Being unemployed and living back at her mum’s house in her vampire-themed childhood bedroom was definitely not the plan.

Poppy is back to square one and miserable, so when she runs into childhood friend Leanne she jumps at the opportunity to catch up. The chance to run into Leanne’s gorgeous brother Tom is just a bonus.

Soon Poppy’s scored an internship at a radio station, a boyfriend, and a whole netball team of friends: things are on the up.

But life has a way of tripping you up when you least expect it, and Poppy soon has to decide where her priorities lie.

With new friends, a new career and a new romance, can Poppy keep everyone happy, or is everything about to tumble down around her?

(Publish Date: 22^nd March)

Purchase Don’t Stop Me Now here

#34 The Hard Truth About Sunshine by Sawyer Bennett

Despite having narrowly escaped death’s clutches, Christopher Barlow is grateful for nothing. His capacity to love has been crushed. He hates everyone and everything, completely unable to see past the gray stain of misery that coats his perception of the world. It’s only after he involuntarily joins a band of depressed misfits who are struggling to overcome their own problems that Christopher start to re-evaluate his lot in life.

What could they possibly learn from one another? How could they possibly help each other to heal? And the question that Christopher asks himself over and over again – can he learn to love again?

 He’s about to find out as he embarks upon a cross country trip with a beautiful woman who is going blind, a boy with terminal cancer, and an abuse victim who can’t decide whether she wants to live or die.

Warning: This book deals with some tough issues including suicide and sexual abuse.

(Publish Date: 28^th March)

Purchase The Hard Truth About Sunshine here

#35 The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck

Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, this is a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined.

Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once grand castle of her husband’s ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resistor murdered in the failed July, 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows.

First, Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi re-education home. Together, they make their way across the smouldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin’s mother, the beautiful and naïve Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resistor’s wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war.

As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during, and after the war—each with their own unique share of challenges.

(Publish Date: 28^th March)

Purchase The Women in the Castle here

#36 The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti

A father protects his daughter from the legacy of his past and the truth about her mother’s death in this thrilling new novel from the prize-winning author of The Good Thief.

After years spent living on the run, Samuel Hawley moves with his teenage daughter, Loo, to Olympus, Massachusetts. There, in his late wife’s hometown, Hawley finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at school and grows curious about her mother’s mysterious death.

Haunting them both are twelve scars Hawley carries on his body, from twelve bullets in his criminal past a past that eventually spills over into his daughter’s present, until together they must face a reckoning yet to come.

This father-daughter epic weaves back and forth through time and across America, from Alaska to the Adirondacks.

(Publish Date: 28^th March)

Purchase The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley here

#37 Strange The Dreamer by Laini Taylor

The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around— and Lazlo Strange, war orphan and junior librarian, has always feared that his dream chose poorly.

Since he was five years old he’s been obsessed with the mythic lost city of Weep, but it would take someone bolder than him to cross half the world in search of it. Then a stunning opportunity presents itself, in the person of a hero called the God-slayer and a band of legendary warriors, and he has to seize his chance to lose his dream forever.

What happened in Weep two hundred years ago to cut it off from the rest of the world? What exactly did the God-slayer slay that went by the name of god? And what is the mysterious problem he now seeks help in solving?

The answers await in Weep, but so do more mysteries—including the blue-skinned goddess who appears in Lazlo’s dreams. How did he dream her before he knew she existed? And if all the gods are dead, why does she seem so real?

(Publish Date: 28^th March)

Purchase Strange The Dreamer here

#38 Almost Missed You!  By Jessica Strawser

Violet and Finn were “meant to be,” said everyone, always. They ended up together by the hands of fate aligning things just so. Three years into their marriage, they have a wonderful little boy, and as the three of them embark on their first vacation as a family, Violet can’t help thinking that she can’t believe her luck. Life is good.

So no one is more surprised than Violet when Finn leaves her at the beach—just packs up the hotel room and disappears taking their son with him. Violet is suddenly in her own worst nightmare, and faced with the knowledge that the man she’s shared her life with, she never really knew at all.

Caitlin and Finn have been best friends since way back when, but when Finn shows up on Caitlin’s doorstep with the son he’s wanted for kidnapping, demanding that she hide them from the authorities, and threatens to reveal a secret that could destroy her own family if she doesn’t, Caitlin faces an impossible choice.

(Publish Date: 28^th March)

Purchase Almost Missed You! here

#39 The Night Mark by Tiffany Reisz

She has nothing to live for in the present, but finds there’s something worth dying for in the past.

From Tiffany Reisz, the international bestselling storyteller behind The Bourbon Thief and The Original Sinners series, comes an enthralling new novel about a woman swept away by the tides who awakens to find herself in 1921, reunited with the husband she’s been mourning for four years.

Fans of Kate Morton and Diana Gabaldon will fall in love with the mystery, romance and beauty of an isolated South Carolina lighthouse, where a power greater than love works its magic.

(Publish Date: 28^th March)

Purchase The Night Mark here

#40 The Promise Girls by Marie Bostwick

Every child prodigy grows up eventually and for the Promise sisters, escaping their mother’s narcissism and the notoriety that came with her bestselling book hasn’t been easy.

Minerva Promise claimed that her three “test tube” daughters – gifted pianist Joanie, artistic Meg, and storyteller Avery – were engineered and moulded to be geniuses. In adulthood, their modest lives fall far short of her grand ambitions. But now, twenty years after the book’s release, she hopes to redeem herself by taking part in a new documentary.

Meg, who hasn’t picked up a paintbrush in years, adamantly refuses to participate, until a car accident leaves her with crushing medical bills. While she recuperates in Seattle, the three sisters reluctantly meet with filmmaker Hal Seeger, another former prodigy. Like them, he’s familiar with the weight of failed potential. But as he digs deeper, he uncovers secrets they’ve hidden from each other and a revelation that will challenge their beliefs, even as it spurs them to forge their own extraordinary lives at last.

(Publish Date: 28^th March)

Purchase The Promise Girls here

#41 It Happens All The Time by Amy Hatvany

Amber Bryant and Tyler Hicks have been best friends since they were teenagers—trusting and depending on each other through some of the darkest periods of their young lives. And while Amber has always felt that their relationship is strictly platonic, Tyler has long harboured the secret desire that they might one day become more than friends.

Returning home for the summer after her college graduation, Amber begins spending more time with Tyler than she has in years. Despite the fact that Amber is engaged to her college sweetheart, a flirtation begins to grow between them. One night, fuelled by alcohol and concerns about whether she’s getting married too young, Amber kisses Tyler.

What happens next will change them forever.

(Publish Date: 28^th March)

Purchase It Happens All The Time here

#42 The Opposite of You by Rachel Higginson

I’ve sworn off men.

Famous last words, right? You’re expecting some epic tale of reluctant love and my dramatic change of heart? Well, you’re not going to get it.

I’m stubborn. And headstrong. And I’ve just survived the worst three years of my life. After escaping an abusive fiancé to live in hostels and cheap hotels while I worked my way across Europe, I’ve come to two conclusions.

The first? Now that I’m back home, I’m going to squander my expensive culinary degree on a food truck that caters to the late night drunk crowd.

The second? I’m going to prove to the bastard across the plaza that my street food is better than his fussy five course monstrosities.

Killian Quinn might be Food and Wine’s Chef to Watch Out For. He might have a Michelin Star. He might have every food critic in the city wrapped around his too-large fingers. But he’s also pretentious and unbearably arrogant and the very opposite of me.

So he can keep his unsolicited advice and his late night visits and his cocky smiles. I want none of it.

(Publish Date: 30^th March)

Purchase The Opposite of You here

#43 Passport to Happiness by Carrie Stone

An inspiring and escapist read for fans of Katy Colins and Eat, Pray, Love.

One woman’s journey from lost to found…

(Publish Date: 30^th March)

Purchase Passport to Happiness here

With so many new novels hitting the bookstands it is difficult to know where to start, and I can imagine book nerds the world over rubbing their heads as they see their ‘To Be Read’ pile growing even bigger but, if I have missed a title off of this list that you feel is going to be a best-seller and one that people really should read, I would love to know about it.

What books are you reading this month?  Have you heard about a novel that is about to take the world by storm?