Elliot Fitzpatrick

"Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix's children's school. Josie has been listening to Alix's podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her...

Thirty years after a deadly attempt to extract a Russian scientist to safety in Ukraine, master spy Lachlan Kite eludes an assassin in the streets of Dubai. After a lifetime working with BOX 88, the transatlantic counterintelligence agency so covert that not even the CIA knows of its existence, master spy Lachlan Kite has made plenty of enemies. And now, as the director of the outfit's operations in the UK, one of those past enemies has him in their...

"Two young women vanish in a seaside town. At the cliff's edge, nobody is who they seem. Desperate to escape the ghosts of his failed marriage, Cole upends his life. He leaves London behind for a remote stretch of coast, relishing the respite from the noise, drama, and relentless careerism that curdled his relationship and mental health. Leonora has made the same move for similar reasons. She's living a short walk from Cole's seaside cottage, preparing...

Seventeen-year-old social media influencer Anton starts a livestreamed and high-stakes game of Tag to find a new assistant, but four contestants have ulterior motives.

A charming and indispensable tour of two thousand years of the written word, Shady Characters weaves a fascinating trail across the parallel histories of language and typography. Whether investigating the asterisk (*) and dagger (†)-which alternately illuminated and skewered heretical verses of the early Bible-or the at sign (@), which languished in obscurity for centuries until rescued by the Internet, Keith Houston draws on myriad sources to...

"The hidden history of the pocket calculator -- a device that ushered in modern mathematics, helped build the atomic bomb, and went with us to the moon -- and the mathematicians, designers, and inventors who brought it to life." -- back cover