Books of the month for February

General Fiction: Karen Campbell – This is Where I Am
A tender and eye-opening novel about loss and survival, and an unlikely friendship between a Glaswegian widow and a Somali asylum seeker.

British Crime: Suzette A. Hill – A Little Murder
London, early 1950s. Marcia Beasley of St John's Wood is discovered dead in her home, naked and covered with a coal scuttle… A host of colourful and comic characters leap from the pages in their hurry to identify the murderer, unravel the mystery of Marcia's life, and discover the importance of all that coal.

Tough Crime: Jeff Abbott – Downfall
When a young woman rushes into Sam Capra's San Francisco bar and whispers these desperate words, Sam feels compelled to help. A moment later she is attacked by two killers. With Sam's aid, she manages to overpower the men, saving his life in the process before vanishing into the night.

Fantasy: Guy Adams – The Good the Bad and the Infernal (Heaven's Gate #1)
A weird western, a gun-toting, cigarrillo-chewing fantasy built from hangman’s rope and spent bullets. The west has never been wilder. A Steampunk-Western-Fantasy from Guy Adams.
“You wish to meet your God?” the gunslinger asked, cocking his revolver, “well now... that’s easy to arrange.”
Every one hundred years a town appears. From a small village in the peaks of Tibet to a gathering of mud huts in the jungles of South American, it can take many forms. It exists for twenty-four hours then vanishes once more, but for that single day it contains the greatest miracle a man could imagine: a doorway to Heaven.

Science Fiction: Frank Chadwick – How Dark the World Becomes
Sasha Naradnyo is a gangster. He's a gangster with heart, sure, but Sasha sticks his neck out for no man. That's how you stay alive in Crack City, a colony stuffed deep into the crust of the otherwise unlivable planet Peezgtaan.

Paranormal/Urban Fantasy: Viehl, Lynn – Disenchanted & Co
In the Provincial Union of Victoriana, a steampunk America that lost the Revolutionary War, Charmian “Kit” Kittredge makes her living investigating crimes of magic. While Kit tries to avoid the nobs of high society, she follows mysteries wherever they lead.

Teen reading: Isaac Marion – Warm Bodies
R is a zombie, but its not so bad, he's learning to live with it. True, he can only remember the first letter of his name, and eating is not a pleasant business. He spends his time in an abandoned airport, along with hundreds of other zombies, riding the escalators, standing round and groaning.

Classic of the Month: Kate Chopin – The Awakening
Edna Pontellier struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century South… It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension.