Your Stella Duffy starter kit. 

Stella Duffy OBE is an inspiration of hard-won wisdom and appetite for learning new things.

Author of seventeen novels, over seventy short stories, including several for BBC Radio 4, and fifteen plays. She won the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2002 and 2013, was named Stonewall Writer of the Year in 2008 (The Room of Lost Things) and 2010 (Theodora), and won the Diva Literary prize for Fiction in 2017 (London Lies Beneath). Her novels The Room of Lost Things and State of Happiness were both longlisted for the Orange Prize. She wrote and presented the BBC4 documentary How to Write a Mills and Boon and has reviewed for The Review Show (BBC2), Front Row and Saturday Review (BBCRadio4) and written articles for most major newspapers in the UK. 

This bundle includes:

Lullaby Beach

First published in 2021, Lullaby Beach was Stella Duffy's seventeenth novel - a compelling story of family secrets and the legacy of trauma, set against the changing fortunes of an English seaside town.

'Lullaby Beach is about family, trauma, loss, abuse and survival. It’s about young people and the adults they – we – become. It’s about friendship across generations, the diagonal family bond between aunts and nieces, repeating family patterns – good as well as bad. It’s about learning to live with ourselves. It’s about learning, as Kitty does, to live with ourselves gloriously.' Stella Duffy on Lullaby Beach.

'Faultless storytelling . . . Wise, generous, atmospheric' Observer

Growing up after the war in Westmere, an English seaside town, Kitty has been sheltered by her parents, but meeting Danny changes all of that. She decides to leave everyone and everything she knows to follow Danny to London, in pursuit of glamour and opportunity, and this sets in motion a series of events that will echo down the generations. Over fifty years later, when Kitty's body is found in her beach hut with a suicide note by her side, her great-niece will help to unravel all the secrets which the family has kept hidden over the decades.

'Explores familial legacy, generational secrets and the effects of long-lasting trauma with a distinct tenderness' New Statesman

'A portrait of sisterhood . . . powerful' Daily Mail

The Hidden Room

Published in 2017, The Hidden Room is a gripping psychological suspense novel - riveting and hugely satisfying. The Hidden Room was Stella's fifteenth novel and, at the time, the first crime novel she had published in twelve years. 

'What a novel - dark, devious and shocking' Andrew Taylor

'Nobody turns the screw of tension tighter than Stella Duffy' Val McDermid

Life is good for Laurie and Martha. They have three great kids, a much-loved home in the countryside, and Laurie's career as an architect is finally taking off. Everything's perfect.

Except, it isn't.

Someone is about to walk into their happy family and tear it apart.

Laurie has been hiding from him for years. The question is, now that he's found her, can she keep her family safe? And just how far will she go to protect them?

'Spooky, atmospheric and as psychologically on point as it could be. If you want to be disturbed, read this book' Alex Marwood

'A haunting tale that lingers in the memory' Sunday Times

'Dark and tense with a gasp-inducing twist' Woman and Home

The Room of Lost Things

Longlisted for the Orange Prize 2008.

Humming with life, packed tight with detail, The Room of Lost Things is a hymn of love to a great and overflowing city, and a profoundly human story that holds us in its grip from the first sentence until the last. This charming novel was published in 2008.

'Stella Duffy strides into a whole new league with her lyrical, gritty, deeply affecting journey into the heart and soul of south London.' Manda Scott

Under his railway arch in Loughborough Junction, South London, Robert Sutton is taking leave of a lifetime of hard work. His dry-cleaning shop lies at the heart of a lively community, a fixed point in a changing world. And, as he explains to his successor, young East Londoner Akeel, it is also the resting place for the contents of his customers' pockets - and for their secrets and lies. As he helps Akeel to make a new life out of his old one, Robert also hands on all he knows of his world: the dirty dip of the Thames; the parks, rare green oases in a desert of high-rises and decaying mansion blocks; and the varied lives that converge at the junction.