Contemporary fiction Books 1327 results

Neil Blackmore

'Witty, original and clever, this tale of Jacobean power and lust is a blast' THE TIMES, Best Historical Fiction of the Year Francis Bacon, philosopher, politician, writer, is an outsider at the court of King James I. He is clever but not aristocratic, has ambition but no money. So when his political enemies form a deadly alliance against him, centred around the King's poisonou...

Virginia Feito

'Nastily good fun' Metro SET TO BECOME A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING ELIZABETH MOSS Shirley Jackson meets Ottessa Moshfegh meets My Sister the Serial Killer in a brilliantly unsettling and darkly funny debut novel full of suspense and paranoia George March's latest novel is a smash hit. None could be prouder than Mrs. March, his dutiful wife, who revels in his accolade...

Elizabeth Strout

Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband - and longtime, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marri...

Deborah Rodriguez

THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING NOVEL. A TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER. HALF A MILLION COPIES SOLD IN THE UK. 'If you love The Kite Runner you'll love The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul' Look magazine In a little coffee shop in one of the most dangerous places on earth, five very different women come together . . . SUNNY, the proud proprietor, who needs an ingenious plan - a...

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

From the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic comes a sweeping romance rich with love and betrayal, with more than a dash of magic. 'One of the most beautiful books I've read in a long time' MJ Rose, New York Times bestselling author of the Reincarnationalist series They are the Beautiful Ones, Loisail's most notable socialites, and this spring is Nina's chance ...

Elif Shafak

A rich, magical new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World - available for pre-order now Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. The taverna is the only place that Kostas and Defne can meet in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of ...

Colleen Hoover

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The #1 New York Times bestselling author of It Ends with Us--whose writing is "emotionally wrenching and utterly original" (Sara Shepard, New York Times bestselling author of the Pretty Little Liars series)--delivers a tour de force novel about a troubled marriage and the one old forgotten promise that might be able to save it. Quinn and ...

Amanda Craig

Thirty-nine, divorced, jobless: Benedick Hunter is going nowhere, heading in the exact opposite direction he expected. So when he comes across a children's book that his mother, Laura, wrote, he decides that her life and work - haunting stories replete with sinister woods, wicked witches and brave girls who battle giants - hold the key to finding out why his own life is such a ...

Mick Herron

*Now a major TV series starring Gary Oldman* 'The new king of the spy thriller' Mail on Sunday From the Intelligence Service purgatory that is Slough House, where disgraced spies are sent to see out the dregs of their careers, Jackson Lamb is on his way to Oxford, where a former spook has turned up dead on a bus. Dickie Bow was a talented streetwalker once, good at following ...

Michelle Zauner

One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2021The New York Times bestseller from the Grammy-nominated indie rockstar Japanese Breakfast, an unflinching, deeply moving memoir about growing up mixed-race, Korean food, losing her Korean mother, and forging her own identity in the wake of her loss, which brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had ...

Lucia Berlin

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKSThe world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. but then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot.With an introduction from Lydia DavisLucia Berlin's stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women make for one of the most remarkable unsung collections in twentiet...

Cormac Mccarthy

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Set in the anarchic world opened up by America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic and potent account of the barbarous violence that man visits upon man. Through the hostile lands...

Melissa Broder

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of control by way of obsessive food rituals. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Then Rachel meets Miriam, a young Orthodox Jewish woman intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam - by her sundaes and her bo...

George Saunders

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PICKED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT, IRISH TIMES, SPECTATOR, TLS, NEW STATESMAN, MAIL ON SUNDAY, I PAPER, PROSPECT, REVEW31 AND EVENING STANDARD AS A BOOK OF 2021 'A masterclass from a warm and engagingly enthusiastic companion' Guardian Summer Reading Picks 2021 'This book is a delight, and it's about delight too. How necessary, at...

Imogen Binnie

Maria, a trans woman in her thirties, is going nowhere. She spends her aimless days working in a New York bookstore, trying to remain true to a punk ethos while drinking herself into a stupor and having a variety of listless and confusing sexual encounters. After her girlfriend cheats on her, Maria steals her car and heads for the Pacific, embarking on her version of the Great ...

Alan Hollinghurst

Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador Books There was the soft glare of the flash - twice - three times - a gleaming sense of occasion, the gleam floating in the eye as a blot of shadow, his heart running fast with no particular need of courage as he grinned and said, 'Prime Minister, would you like to dance?' In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic...

Hollie Mcnish

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'An intoxicating mixture of poetry and prose, Slug is a taboo-busting delight' SCOTSMAN 'One of the best poets we have' MATT HAIG 'She writes with honesty, conviction, humour and love' KAE TEMPEST The bestselling collection of poetry and prose from the Ted Hughes Award-winning author of Nobody Told Me From Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief,...

Hanya Yanagihara

Over one million copies sold Too many broken hearts to count 'A book unlike any other' - The Guardian 'This novel challenged everything I thought I knew about love and friendship' - Dua Lipa The million-copy bestseller, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance. JB, Jude, Malcolm and W...

Taylor Jenkins Reid

***NEW NOVEL ATMOSPHERE COMING JUNE 2025 - PREORDER NOW*** From the bestselling author of DAISY JONES & THE SIX and THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO 'Thank you Taylor Jenkins Reid for the escapism we all need- a sex-on-the-beach cocktail (quite literally) of a book' PANDORA SYKES 'I LOVE it . . . I can't remember the last time I read a book that was so fun' DOLLY ALDERTON ...

Jennifer Saint

As Princesses of Crete and daughters of the fearsome King Minos, Ariadne and her sister Phaedra grow up hearing the hoofbeats and bellows of the Minotaur echo from the Labyrinth beneath the palace. The Minotaur - Minos's greatest shame and Ariadne's brother - demands blood every year. When Theseus, Prince of Athens, arrives in Crete as a sacrifice to the beast, Ariadne falls in...

Kristen Britain

After her capture at the hands of Grandmother and the Second Empire, Karigan G'ladheon is making halting progress towards recovery. Karigan takes on increasingly dangerous missions, haunted by the specter of her torturer, Nyssa, and sinking ever further into the mire of her recollections of the past and the losses she's sustained.Meanwhile, the forces of the Second Empire are m...

Susan Abulhawa

2020 Palestine Book Awards Winner 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist "Susan Abulhawa possesses the heart of a warrior; she looks into the darkest crevices of lives, conflicts, horrendous injustices, and dares to shine light that can illuminate hidden worlds for us." --Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author In this "beautiful...urgent" novel (The New York Times), Nahr...

J. G. Farrell

A classic novel by a Booker Prize-winning author. Soon to be adapted for an ITV television series by the Oscar-winning playwright behind Atonement and Dangerous Liaisons, Christopher Hampton. Singapore just before the Japanese invasion in the Second World War: the Blackett family's prosperous world of tennis parties,cocktails and deferential servants seems unchanging. But it ...

Dolly Alderton

A 21ST CENTURY LOVE STORY AND TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Utter BRILLIANCE . . . I absolutely LOVED it!' Marian Keyes, bestselling author of GROWN UPS 'I loved it' Candice Carty-Williams, bestselling author of QUEENIE __________________________________________________ Everything gets easier in your thirties, right? Though she has plenty to celebrate - successful career,...

Won-Pyung Sohn

A BTS fan favorite! A WALL STREET JOURNAL STORIES THAT CAN TAKE YOU ANYWHERE PICK * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY'S STAY HOME AND READ PICK * SALON'S BEST AND BOLDEST * BUSTLE'S MOST ANTICIPATED The Emissary meets The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime in this poignant and triumphant story about how love, friendship, and persistence can change a life forever. This story is, i...

Mieko Kawakami

'Breathtaking' - Haruki Murakami author of Norwegian Wood A beguiling novel about three women struggling to determine their own lives in contemporary Tokyo. A New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year' and one of Elena Ferrante's 'Top 40 Books by Female Authors' On a hot summer's day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsuko, her older sister Maki...

Elizabeth Jane Howard

All Change is the fifth and final volume in Elizabeth Jane Howard's bestselling The Cazalet Chronicles, where the old world begins to fade from view and a new dawn emerges.It is the 1950s and as the Duchy, the Cazalets' beloved matriarch, dies, she takes with her the last remnants of a disappearing world - houses with servants, class, and tradition - in which the Cazalets have ...

Elizabeth Jane Howard

The Second World War has finally ended and so begins a new era of freedom and opportunity for the Cazalet family. Elizabeth Jane Howard's magnificent Cazalet Chronicles continues with Casting Off, the fourth novel in the saga.The Cazalet cousins are now in their twenties, trying to piece together their lives in the aftermath of the war. Louise is faced with her father's new mis...

Elizabeth Jane Howard

The Cazalet Chronicles continues with the third in the series, Confusion, set in the height of the Second World War and where chaos has become a way of life for the Cazalet family. It's 1942 and the dark days of war seem never-ending. Scattered across the still-peaceful Sussex countryside and air-raid-threatened London, the divided Cazalets begin to find the battle for surviva...

Natalie Haynes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER"Funny, sharp explications of what these sometimes not-very-nice women were up to, and how they sometimes made idiots of . . . but read on!"--Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's TaleThe national bestselling author of A Thousand Ships returns with a fascinating, eye-opening take on the remarkable women at the heart of classical stories Greek mythol...