Eleven Minutes

'Will break your heart and open your eyes' Heather Morris, author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz

'I've never read anything quite like Songbirds - a beautifully crafted novel.' Jodi Picoult, bestselling author of Wish You Were Here.

Her courage to cross oceans.
Her hope for a better life.
Her love for a daughter, above all else.

Not all tragedies make headlines, not every voice is heard.

Nisha has crossed oceans to give her child a future. Now she spends her days caring for someone else's daughter while her own waits for her return, half a world away.

For Petra, it is only natural to hire a domestic worker to keep her house clean and her family fed. Their lives have nothing in common, except the love they feel for their daughters.

Then one day, Nisha vanishes. No one cares about the disappearance of a foreign domestic worker, except Petra and Nisha's secret lover, Yiannis, the only connection to her daughter back in Sri Lanka.

As Petra and Yiannis desperately search for Nisha, they realise how little they knew about her. What they uncover will change them both forever.

Inspired by true stories of love and loss, hope and refuge, this evocative masterpiece from the million-copy bestselling author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri, is an illuminating story of the power of the human spirit, and the enduring love of a mother for her child, that will stay with you long after you finish reading.

Praise for Christy Lefteri:

'This thought-provoking novel of love loss and redemption is thoroughly sublime.' Caroline Montague

'Lefteri is an astonishing weaver of stories.' Daljit Nagra

' . . . broke my heart and kept me turning the pages of her gorgeous novel well into the night.' Alka Joshi, NYT-bestselling author of The Henna Artist and The Secret Keeper of Jaipur

'Christy Lefteri has crafted a beautiful novel, intelligent, thoughtful, and relevant.' Benjamin Zephaniah on The Beekeeper of Aleppo

' . . . it's impossible not to be moved by Lefteri's plea for humanity and perhaps inspired too.' Observer, on The Beekeeper of Aleppo

'Courageous, proactive, haunting.' Heather Morris, on The Beekeeper of Aleppo

'Hypnotic, pitiless and told brilliantly' Bret Easton Ellis

Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across America, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other.

Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter and dark, anarchic genius. And it's only the beginning of his plans for revenge on a world where cancer support groups have the corner on human warmth.

Read the subversive, savagely funny novel that defined a generation.