FREE/BARGAIN — Fiction (everything else)

[pdurrant]

Sharpe's Storm by Bernard Cornwell is just £0.99 at Amazon UK and Kobo UK today.

This is the most recently published of his Sharpe books, first published 21st October 2025.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CW83M5FX
https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/sha...ries-book-19-1

"The year is 1813. France is a battlefield, and winter shows no mercy. Amidst brutal conditions, Major Richard Sharpe finds himself saddled with an unexpected burden: Rear-Admiral Sir Joel Chase, dispatched by the Admiralty with sealed orders, unshakable confidence, and a frankly terrifying enthusiasm for combat."

[salty-horse]

The Butterfly and the Axe by Omer Bartov is FREE on Amazon.com

Spring 1944. A Jewish family is murdered in a remote Ukrainian village. Who were they? Who were the killers?

Three generations later, an Israeli woman and a British man of Ukrainian origins set out to find out how their families were implicated in this crime. They also discover how this untold murder has warped their own lives.

Narrated by an unnamed historian, and based on fragments of memories, testimonies, diaries, letters and confessions, this novel seeks to fill a gap in the historical record of the Holocaust by reimagining those who were murdered and erased from memory, and to shed light on the transgenerational effects of trauma.

Omer Bartov was born in Israel and teaches history in the United States. His mother emigrated from Galicia to Palestine before World War II. Most of the rest of his family were murdered under unknown circumstances in the Holocaust.

[issybird]

A Good School by Richard Yates is $2.99 at Amazon (and Kobo), down from $11.01.

...a spare and autumnal novel about a New England prep school. At once a meditation on the twilight of youth and an examination of America's entry into World War II...

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by issybird

A Good School by Richard Yates is $2.99 at Amazon (and Kobo), down from $11.01.

(I think your link may be faulty. If it is, and you correct it, please delete my entire post.)

https://www.amazon.com/Good-School-N...s%2C297&sr=8-7

But...I don't have that, so I'm going to buy it.

Thank you!

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

(I think your link may be faulty. If it is, and you correct it, please delete my entire post.)

https://www.amazon.com/Good-School-N...s%2C297&sr=8-7

But...I don't have that, so I'm going to buy it.

Thank you!

I fixed my link; thanks.

It was on my wishlist; $11 plus a no-longer-being-produced penny was more than I was willing to pay.

[issybird]

Natalie Haynes's latest, No Friend to This House, a retelling of the Medea story, is 99p at Kobo UK and Amazon UK, down from £9.99.

[sufue]

Today's Big Deal at Kindle UK is 10 books by Elmore Leonard for £0.99 each. Mostly crime/espionage (the green covers), but there are three westerns (the yellow covers). Since they are mostly crime/espionage, I put the info in the Mystery thread, and here's a link to that post with more info: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh....php?p=4555407

[sufue]

Simon Scarrow's next-to-most-recent (2024) Cato/Macro book, Revenge of Rome, is £0.99 right now in the UK.

Kindle UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CW1BN9RN
Kobo UK: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/rev...he-empire-23-1

Spoiler:

ROME AND BOUDICA. A DUEL TO THE DEATH.

AD 61. Britannia is divided.

The rebel horde has been defeated. But the leader, Boudica, and her remaining warriors are still at large. With them is the eagle standard of the Ninth Legion, taken in ambush, flaunted as proof that Rome can yet be beaten.

The embers of rebellion are still glowing . . .

The toll has been heavy, with countless men lost, and major towns in ruins. The bodies of the dead are strewn across the streets. And for Centurion Macro, there is the scarring knowledge that his mother perished in the attack on Londinium.

As Macro's heart burns for revenge, he and his comrade-in-arms Prefect Cato are tasked with hunting down the remnants of the enemy army. There can be no peace until the queen is captured or killed. And Roman honour will only be restored when the eagle standard has been recovered.

[salty-horse]

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber is $3 on Amazon.com (only)

A teenage prostitute ascends through the many layers of Victorian London society in this highly acclaimed "big, sexy, bravura a novel" (Janet Maslin, The New York Times).

London, 1870s. At the heart of this panoramic narrative is a young woman's struggle to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. Sugar, a nineteen-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, yearns for a better life. Her ascent through the strata of Victorian society begins with the egotistical perfume magnate William Rackham. Infatuated with Sugar, William's patronage brings her into the circles of his family and milieu: his wife who barely overcomes chronic hysteria to make her appearances during "the Season"; his mysteriously hidden-away daughter, left to the care of minions; his pious brother, foiled in his devotional calling by his lust for the Widow Fox; as well as preening socialites, drunken journalists, untrustworthy servants, vile guttersnipes, and whores of all stripes and persuasions.

Twenty years in its conception, research, and writing, The Crimson Petal and the White is teeming with life, rich in texture and incident, with breathtakingly real characters. "Cocky and brilliant, amused and angry, [Faber] is rightfully earning comparisons to observer extraordinaire Charles Dickens. . . . It's hopeless to resist" ( Entertainment Weekly).

[salty-horse]

Flashman (The Flashman Papers #1) by George MacDonald Fraser is £1 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

Coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, but there is no better man to go into the jungle with. Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world.

Expelled from Rugby for drunkenness, and none too welcome at home after seducing his father’s mistress, the young Flashman embarks on a military career with Lord Cardigan’s Hussars.

En route to Afghanistan, our hero hones his skills as a soldier, duellist, imposter, coward and amorist (mastering all 97 ways of Hindu love-making during a brief sojourn in Calcutta), before being pressed into reluctant service as a secret agent. His Afghan adventures culminate in a starring role in that great historic disaster, the Retreat from Kabul.

[salty-horse]

Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin is $2 in the US (Amazon only but price-matchable on Kobo)
Literary horror. Translated by Megan McDowell.

The characters of Good and Evil find themselves at a point of no return, dazzled by the glare of impending tragedy. Vulnerable and profoundly human, they become trapped in the instant in which the uncanny has lurched into their lives. Some are transformed, some are isolated, others waver between guilt or tenderness. All of them are driven by uncertainty.

Schweblin’s prose uses tension and truth to construct a literary universe in which the monsters of everyday life come so close to us that we can almost feel their breath. Her writing provokes awe and disquiet, a state of alarm that at the same time transports us to a hypnotic world as recognizable as it is strange.

[WashWest]

I've been looking forward to reading this one since it came out so I'm happy to see it on sale!

Buckeye: A Read with Jenna Pick by Patrick Ryan is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY • “A glorious sweep of a novel” (Ann Patchett) that weaves the intimate lives of two midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century.

“Mesmerizing.”—People**
“Captivating.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A once-in-a-decade novel . . . I fell in love with these characters.”—Jenna Bush Hager

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR, People, Minnesota Star Tribune, New York Post, Chicago Public Library

LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE

One town. Two families. A secret that changes everything.

In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal’s wife, Becky, has a spiritual gift: She is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those they’ve lost. Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship, out of harm’s way—until a telegram suggests that the unthinkable might have happened.

Later, as the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie—but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Against the backdrop of some of the most transformative decades in modern America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter ripple through the next generation of both families, compelling them to reexamine who they thought they were and what the future might hold.

Sweeping yet intimate, rich with piercing observation and the warmth that comes from profound understanding of the human spirit, Buckeye captures the universal longing for love and for goodness.

[WashWest]

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE

Named one of the Washington Post's 10 Best Books of the Year

One of Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of the Year"

Named a Best of the Year by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, Vogue, Elle, Time, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, Town & Country, Alta Journal, NPR, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Book Riot, Audible

"Flournoy has delivered a future classic—the kind of novel that generations to come will read to understand the nuances and peculiarities of this time." — Harper's Bazaar

An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife—in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.

Desiree, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.

Desiree is estranged from her sister Danielle, and the two nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January’s got a relationship with a “good” man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.

As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.

The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy’s masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.

[salty-horse]

The Remains of the Day (Vintage International) by Kazuo Ishiguro is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, here is “an intricate and dazzling novel” (The New York Times) about the perfect butler and his fading, insular world in post-World War II England.

This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.

[salty-horse]

May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry is £1 in the UK (Amazon only, price-matchable on Kobo)

AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST 2026

She is a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur.

He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn't long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead.

May We Feed the King dances between the lives of a historical subject who risks the future of his kingdom and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present. Laced with desire and longing, it is a playful, stirring meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.