The Paper Eater

ALSO AVAILABLE BY LIZ JENSEN

In a merciless summer of biblical heat and destructive winds, Gabrielle Fox’s main concern is to rebuild her career as a psychologist after a shattering car accident. But when she is assigned Bethany Krall, violent, delusional, cruelly intuitive and insistent that she can foresee natural disasters, she begins to fear she has made a terrible mistake. And when catastrophes begin to occur on the very dates Bethany has predicted, the apocalyptic puzzle intensifies and the stakes multiply. A haunting story of human passion and burning faith, The Rapture is an electrifying psychological thriller that explores the dark extremes of mankind’s self-destruction in a world on the brink.

Since the year all British women became infertile, Bobby Sullivan’s London veterinary clinic has been packed with primate ‘children’ and, speaking as an alpha male, he’s sick to death of them. Hoping to reincarnate himself, he moves north, but finds there is no escape from the Darwinian imperative – or from the sexual pull of the luscious twins Rose and Blanche. As the legacy of the girls’ ancestor, Victorian freak Tobias Phelps, begins to connect with a century of history, religion, and evolutionary theory, new hope looms for the nation’s future. Pointing the finger of destiny firmly at Bobby…

Nine-year-old Louis Drax is a problem child. He’s bright, precocious, deceitful and dangerously, disturbingly accident prone. On a family day out it seems almost predestined that something will happen. But this time it is worse than anyone imagined. When Louis falls over a cliff into a ravine and lapses into a deep coma, his father vanishes and his mother is paralysed by shock. In a clinic in Provence, Dr Dannachet tries to coax Louis back to consciousness, but the boy defies medical logic and the doctor is drawn into the dark heart of Louis’ buried world. Only Louis holds the key to the mystery and he can’t communicate. Or can he?

‘You know what they say about GIs and English girls’ knickers,’ ran the wartime joke, ‘One Yank and they’re off.’ When Gloria met Ron, he was an American pilot who thought nothing of getting hit by shrapnel in the cockpit. She was working in a munitions factory in Bristol during the Blitz, but still found time to grab what she wanted. Ciggies. Sex. American soldiers. But war has an effect on people. Gloria did all sorts of things she wouldn’t normally do – evil things, some of them – because she might be dead tomorrow. Or someone might. Now, fifty years on, it’s payback time. In her old folks’ home, Gloria is forced to remember the real truth about her and Ron, and confront the secret at the heart of her dramatic home front story. In a gripping, vibrant evocation of wartime Britain, Liz Jensen explores the dark impulses of women whose war crimes are committed on the home front, in the name of sex, survival, greed and love.

In fin-de-siecle Copenhagen, part-time prostitute Charlotte and her lumpen sidekick, Fru Schleswig, have taken on jobs as cleaning ladies of dubious talent to tide them over the harsh winter of 1897. But the home of their neurotic new employer, the widow Krak, soon reveals itself to be riddled with dark secrets – including the existence of a demonic machine rumoured to swallow people alive. Rudely catapulted into twenty-first-century London, the hapless duo discover a whole new world of glass, labour-saving devices and hectic, impossible romance.

With only a schizophrenic mother and a militantly hostile sister for backup, Hazel Sugden, food-splattered mum and queen of low self-esteem, is palpably unfit to save the future of mankind as we know it. But when embryology, psychiatry and religion clash over the miracle designer drug Genetic Choice, the dysfunctional trio is propelled into action with explosively comic results…