Bloomsbury Publishing

Rules for a True Love Story: There are none. It's all a lie. Jane Jackson knows that true love is a lie. Laughter is the only truth: and having spent her adolescence as the barbecue-sauce-in-her-braces punchline on America's fifth-favourite sitcom, she's still trying to shake off that role. At least now she's a Creative Executive at Clearwater Studios and living by a new mantra: fake it till you make it. Except, she might have faked it too far. Desperate to get her first project greenlit and riled up by pompous cinematographer and one-time crush Dan Finnegan, she opened her mouth and a big fat fib fell out. She claimed that Jack Quinlan, hottest popstar of the moment, has promised to write an original song for the script. Jack may have been her first kiss - and greatest source of shame - but Jane hasn't spoken to him in twenty years. Now, Jane must turn to the last man she'd ever want to owe: Dan Finnegan. Because Jack is playing a festival in Dan's beach hometown on Long Island, and Dan has an in. A week in close quarters with Dan while facing down her past is Jane's idea of hell, but Dan just might surprise her. While covering up her lie, can they find something true?

He broke her best friend's heart, so now Saachi plans to break his. May the best heartbreaker win . . . Saachi would do anything for her best friend. So when school bad boy Fahim breaks Mona's heart, Saachi is hellbent on getting revenge. It's time to put him in his place once and for all. And so begins Operation Heartbreaker: Saachi will make Fahim fall in love with her and then pull the plug on him - just like he does to every girl he's ever dated. Simple. Except as she spends more time with Fahim, against her better judgement, she finds herself falling for him. Unable to talk to Mona about her mixed emotions, and with the mission veering dangerously off course, Saachi will have to embrace her role as a heartbreaker or potentially end up with her own heart broken . . . A fiery and fun enemies to lovers romcom, for readers of Jenny Han, Joya Goffney and Adiba Jaigirdar.

Kill the pretender. Do not let it be known that there was a pretender to kill. The year is 1483 and England is in peril. The much-despised Richard III is not long for the throne, and the man who will become Henry VII stands poised to snatch the crown for himself. But for twelve-year-old John Collan, living in a remote village with his widowed father, these matters seem far away. But history has other plans for John. Stolen from his family, exiled - first to Oxford, then to Burgundy, and then Ireland - and apprenticed to a series of unscrupulous political operators, he finds himself groomed for power; not as John Collan, but as Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick - and rightful heir to the throne. Far from home at the Irish court, preparing for a war that will see him become king or die trying, John has just his wits - and the slippery counsel of his host's daughter, the unconventional Joan - to navigate the choppy waters ahead. Seething with revenge and machination, sparkling with wit and humanity, and roaring with adventure and bravado, The Pretender is the captivating true story of a young man tossed into the chaos of history as it happens.

WHEN THE ODDS ARE AGAINST YOU, IT'S TIME TO GET EVEN. Matilda, Jo, Penny and Cressy are all women at the top of their game; so imagine their surprise when they start to be personally overlooked and professionally pushed aside by less-qualified men. Only they're not going down without a fight. Society might think the women have passed their amuse-by dates but the Revenge Club have other plans. After all, why go to bed angry when you could stay up and plot diabolical retribution? Let the games begin...

When barrister Gabriel Ward steps out of his rooms one sunny May morning in 1901, his mind is so full of his latest case - the disputed authorship of bestselling children's book Millie the Temple Church Mouse - that he scarcely registers the body of the Lord Chief Justice of England on his doorstep. But even he cannot fail to notice the judge's dusty bare feet, in shocking contrast to his flawless evening dress, nor the silver carving knife sticking out of his chest. In the shaded courtyards and ancient buildings of the Inner Temple, the hidden heart of London's legal world, murder has spent centuries confined firmly to the casebooks. Until now… As the police have no authority in the Temple, who better to investigate than a man who has dedicated his life to the law? But Gabriel soon discovers that murder is much messier outside the courtroom - and that behind the Temple's heavy oak doors are stranger secrets than he could ever imagine.

Dive back into the UNIverse with Neon for another unicorn-tastic adventure from Sibéal Pounder, the bestselling author of the Witch Wars and Bad Mermaids series. Neon Gallup is a unicorn. No, not a horse thing with a horn. That's just something REAL unicorns made up to distract the humans. Until now, Neon thought she was the only person from our world who knew unicorns existed, but when she discovers her mum has been hiding a secret from her the whole time, she's got to get to the bottom of it – with a little help from her friends Moya and Geldie, some outrageous fashion choices and a whole lot of goo magic.

What are you willing to sacrifice to get to the top? What might it take to leave it all behind? Carrie Sun can't shake the feeling that she's wasting her life. At twenty-nine, she's left her job, dropped out of an MBA program and is trapped in an unhappy engagement. So when she gets the opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world - as the sole assistant to the firm's billionaire founder - she can't say no. But playing the game at the highest levels comes at a cost. Amid the ultimate winners in our winner-takes-all economy, Carrie soon finds her identity swallowed whole, struggling for balance in a world of extremes: of efficiency and excess, status and aspiration, power and fortune.

Jessica and Linda have been best friends since the first day of school. Both girls are from very different broken homes - and beautiful, wilful Jessica has always ensured their survival. Now eighteen, the two girls have come to Wilde - an elite university in the heart of Dublin, far away from their troubled childhoods. Jessica thrives immediately, and, with the faithful Linda at her side, finds herself at the heart of a new circle of friends. But then Mark enters the picture. A philosophy student a few years older than them, he has strange and compelling ideas about self-discovery. When Linda and Mark start dating, Jessica is disturbed by the change in her friend - and how quickly she seems to have fallen under this abrasive, charismatic man's control. It turns out that Mark's influence is not limited to Linda alone; and Jessica soon finds out that her whole group of friends are keeping secrets for him - culminating in a terrible tragedy that strikes at the end of their first year. Years later, Jessica is still grappling with her guilt over what happened at Wilde. And when Mark resurfaces, she knows she owes it to herself - and Linda - to set the record straight once and for all.

"A book that feels like a warm hug from your best friend." -Emily Henry, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Beach Read From the beloved mother-daughter team who brought us What to Do When I'm Gone, a poignant, funny, heartfelt, and gorgeously illustrated guide to navigating the pain and complexity of getting dumped. After Suzy Hopkins's husband of thirty years unexpectedly left her to pursue an old flame, her grief was so overwhelming that she thought her own heart might stop. How do you take the first step forward after losing such an integral part of your life? In What to Do When You Get Dumped, the mother-daughter duo of Hopkins and her New Yorker-illustrator extraordinaire daughter Hallie Bateman offer an incisive, tender, appealingly illustrated guide to "unbreaking" your heart. Using a countdown from the moment you're dumped, the book offers humor and hope as it guides readers on the journey to find new meaning and purpose in a life that's yours alone. Lighthearted, impactful, and deeply consoling, What to Do When You Get Dumped provides the wisdom to emerge from a breakup smarter, stronger, and with the unshakable knowledge that you are worthy of lasting love.

Some days are tough, some days are fine, And sometimes days are just sublime! Welcome to a family like other, where life is full of ups and downs, picnics and swimming lessons, tickles and tantrums, board games and laughter. Universal, celebratory and quietly revolutionary, this is an uplifting picture book about family, love and living with disability. Written from parent to child and inspired by the author's own family, it is a joyful story of love and family life.

The world is on fire. And what will you do? In a city rocked by global catastrophe, home-grown terrorism, shortages and wildfires, Cass is quietly raising three small children by herself. Her husband, Nathaniel, has left to serve as a medic in a war overseas. As life in the city becomes increasingly impossible, Cass knows she can no longer wait for Nathaniel's return. Packing up their lives, she and the children set off in search of a place of greater safety. But Cass will learn that not all promises and not all sanctuaries are what they seem - and as the fires around them begin to close in, she'll discover just how far she'll go for her children in a world teetering on apocalypse. Sensual, claustrophobic and vivid, Briefly Very Beautiful announces the arrival of a major new talent, painting an unforgettable portrait of a mother trying to hold her family together.

Every day we're bombarded with methods, mantras and life hacks that promise us wellness and prosperity - while time and talent remain some of our most squandered resources. The average full-time worker will spend 80,000 hours at their job: are you making the most of them? Do you truly believe in what you do, day in, day out? What if you want to do something more with your limited time on the planet? Internationally bestselling author Rutger Bregman shows us that with moral ambition - the will to make the world a wildly better place - we can be both idealistic and successful, and change the world along the way. Uncovering the qualities that made the great change-makers of history so effective, he shows how we too can lend our talents to the biggest challenges of our time, from climate change to inequality to the next pandemic. With moral ambition, we can do more than be on the right side of history: we can make history itself. This book won't make your life easier, but it should make it more meaningful. The question is: what will you do with it?

From the New York Times bestselling author of the Lightlark Saga, this is Alex Aster's debut romance novel. Twenty-seven-year-old screenwriter, Elle, has the chance of a lifetime to write a big-budget movie set in New York City. The only problem? She's had writer's block for months, and her screenplay is due by the end of the summer. Desperate for inspiration, Elle returns to NYC - the city she hates - and tries to throw herself into her writing. But then she meets her new neighbour: Parker Warren. He's the city's favourite handsome tech billionaire and he's also the guy Elle hooked up with in a stairwell two years ago. When seeing him again turns into a night of hate-fuelled writing, Elle realises Parker might just be her twisted muse. So, when Parker needs to fake a steady relationship during his company's precarious acquisition and Elle needs to research a list of classic date spots in the city for her screenplay, they suddenly find they might just be exactly what each other needs. Summers always end, and so will this agreement. It's all pretend. Until it isn't. If you like... Billionaire Forced proximity Neighbours Fake dating Enemies-to-lovers Slow burn Spice ...you'll love Summer in the City

The essays in Zero Point ask how we distinguish defeat from disaster, and how we confront despair without collapsing into it - questions never more pertinent than the current moment in the wake of electoral victories for authoritarian populists and unceasing news of violent atrocities. The 'zero-point' of the title is ground level, rock bottom, the place to which one retreats and where one regroups. Taken from Vladimir Lenin's 1922 piece 'On Ascending a High Mountain, in which Lenin considers the complexities of how one 'retreats' while keeping faith in the cause, the central simile of the climber offers a blueprint for resilience, flexibility, and the persistence of hope. This is the revolutionary as living out the Beckettian motto: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' In Zizek's hands, this becomes the formula for confronting the antagonisms of existing world order. With a particular focus on the Middle East -the point at which all our tensions threaten to explode - Zizek argues nothing can be addressed meaningfully without such a confrontation. The consequences of eschewing apolitical acts of solidarity and choosing to attempt to speak truth to power are reckoned with in the second half of Zero Point. In a unique piece assembled chronologically from unpublished writings, Zizek wrestles with the fallout from his controversial speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2023 - a speech which saw him interrupted, condemned and accused of anti-Semitism. The reader bears witness as Zizek processes the criticism, evolves his thinking and explores the full ethical, political and personal ramifications of the question: When is the right time to speak?

Paris, 1936. When Dora Maar, a talented French photographer, painter and poet, is introduced to Pablo Picasso, she is mesmerized by his dark and intense stare. Drawn to his volcanic creativity, it isn't long before she embarks on a passionate relationship with the Spanish artist that sometimes includes sadism and masochism, and ultimately pushes her to the edge. The Paris Muse is the fictionalized retelling of this disturbing love story, as we follow Dora on her journey of self-discovery and expression. Set in Paris and the French Riviera, where Dora and Pablo spent their holidays with their glamorous artist friends, it provides a fascinating insight into how Picasso was a genius who side-stepped the rules in his human relationships as he did in his art. Much to Dora's torment, he refused to divorce his wife and conducted affairs with Dora's friends. The Spanish Civil War made him depressed and violent, an angst that culminated in his acclaimed painting 'Guernica', which Dora documented as he painted. As the encroaching darkness suffocates their relationship - a darkness that escalates once the Second World War begins and the Nazis invade the country - Dora has a nervous breakdown and is hospitalized. Atmospheric, intense and moving, The Paris Muse is an astonishing read that ensures that this talented, often overlooked woman who gave her life to Picasso is no longer a footnote.

Charlotte Sauvin has always seen the world differently. At home on 33 Place Brugmann, in the heart of Brussels, her father and her closest friends and neighbours - the Raphaëls from the fourth floor, and Masha from the fifth - have ensured her secret is safe. But when the Nazis invade Belgium, and Masha and the Raphaëls disappear, Charlotte must navigate her new world alone. Over the border and across the sea, in occupied Paris and battered Blitz London, Masha and the Raphaels are reinventing themselves - as refugees, nurses, soldiers, heroes. Though scattered far and wide, they dream of only one place, one home: 33 Place Brugmann. But back at Place Brugmann, Charlotte feels impending danger closing in. Who can she trust in this world - where everyone is watching, and everyone is harbouring their own secrets? As the months pass, and the shadow of war darkens, Charlotte and her neighbours must face what - and who - truly matters to them most - and summon the courage to fight for more than just survival. With soaring imagination and profound intimacy, 33 Place Brugmann is a captivating and devastating celebration of the power of love, courage and art in times of great threat.