Charlaine Harris

The bestselling author best-known for her Southern Vampire Mysteries and Harper Connelly Mysteries series of ghost and vampire novels reveals some bedtime reading to get your teeth into...

“I’ve always been a voracious reader, my parents revered books more than any other object in our household. My brother and I were both early readers and we’ve retained that habit throughout our lives; that’s been my hobby really is reading.  I read anywhere in my home, I read before I go to bed, I read while I’m drinking my morning coffee, I read at lunchtime when I’m on my break from working. I can’t envision a life without reading.”

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
“I’ve recently really enjoyed this. Atkinson is a British writer, and this book contains one of the most startling opening chapters I’ve ever read, I love the full development of the characters, the complexity of the story and the way she drew the whole thing to a conclusion. I thought I understood what this book was going to be, but suddenly Atkinson just yanked the rug out from under me and I just loved it.”
In a quiet corner of rural Devon, six-year-old Joanna Mason witnesses an appalling crime. Thirty years later the man convicted of the crime, Andrew Decker, is released from prison. In Edinburgh, sixteen-year-old Reggie, wise beyond her years, works as a nanny for a GP. But Dr Hunter has gone missing and Reggie seems to be the only person who is worried. Across town, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe is also looking for a missing person, unaware that hurtling towards her is an old friend – Jackson Brodie – himself on a journey that is about to be fatally interrupted.
In an extraordinary virtuoso display, Kate Atkinson produces one of the most engrossing, brilliantly written and piercingly insightful novels of this or any year. When Will There Be Good News? sheds new light on to the nature of fate, and on to the human condition itself.

Sleepless by Charlie Huston
“This is completely different, but it’s also a very surprising book about a disease that hits Los Angeles in which some people are afflicted with a virus that will not let them sleep. They are doomed to death from the moment the virus hits them, but the sleeplessness also gives them a heightened sense of awareness, much like a drug. It’s an amazingly horrible, terrifying, beautiful book.”
Parker T. Haas is a straight-arrow LAPD cop whose cast-iron sense of right and wrong has made him a lone wolf on the force. But when a plague of sleeplessness attacks Los Angeles and the world beyond, his philosophical certainties are tested to destruction. Sent undercover to pose as a dealer, Haas is on the trail of a black-market drug that is the one thing providing relief to the sleepless - if you can penetrate the arcane code of its mysterious supplier. But as Haas negotiates the increasingly chaotic and dangerous world of a city slowly going mad, he crosses the path of an equally fanatical amoralist, a hired killer whose extreme sense of aesthetic perfection admits not the slightest humanity. But as their collision course accelerates (two men: one of the old world; one of the newly emerging), Parker must decide not only where the moral centre is located in this frightening new landscape, but also how he is going to save his wife Rose - herself a victim of the disease - and their newborn baby, whose uncertain future is coming into being before their eyes.