Contemporary fiction Books 1327 results

Maggie O'farrell

'She's like no one I've ever met... She's like fire and water all at once.' Warwickshire, 1582. Agnes Hathaway, a natural healer, meets the Latin tutor, William Shakespeare. Drawn together by powerful but hidden impulses, they create a life together and make a family. As William moves to London to discover his place in the world of theatre, Agnes stays at home to raise their th...

Tomasz Jedrowski

Poland, 1980. Anxious, disillusioned Ludwik Glowacki, soon to graduate university, has been sent along with the rest of his class to an agricultural camp. Here he meets Janusz - and together, they spend a dreamlike summer swimming in secluded lakes, reading forbidden books - and falling in love. ...

Kate Elizabeth Russell

An era-defining novel about the relationship between a fifteen-year-old girl and her teacher ALL HE DID WAS FALL IN LOVE WITH ME AND THE WORLD TURNED HIM INTO A MONSTER Vanessa Wye was fifteen-years-old when she first had sex with her English teacher. She is now thirty-two and in the storm of allegations against powerful men in 2017, the teacher, Jacob Strane, has just b...

Madeline Miller

**OVER 1.5 MILLION COPIES SOLD****A 10th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL EDITION, FEATURING A NEW FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR**WINNER OF THE ORANGE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTIONTHE INTERNATIONAL SENSATIONA SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'Captivating' DONNA TARTT'I loved it' J K ROWLING'Ravishingly vivid' EMMA DONOGHUEGreece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has be...

L. C. Rosen / Lev Ac Rosen

A Lambda Award Finalist, A Today Show Best Book, A Forbes Best Book, and an ALA Rainbow List Top Ten selection Set in a summer camp, this sweet and sharp screwball comedy set in a summer camp for queer teens examines the nature of toxic masculinity and self-acceptance. Sixteen-year-old Randy Kapplehoff loves spending the summer at Camp Outland, a camp for queer teens. It'...

Jenkins Reid, Taylor

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "If you're looking for a book to take on holiday this summer, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo has got all the glitz and glamour to make it a perfect beach read." --Bustle From the New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & the Six--an entrancing and "wildly addictive journey of a reclusive Hollywood starlet" (PopSugar) as she reflects on her ...

Garth Greenwell

Written in precise, elegant prose, Garth Greenwell's Cleanness is an almost unbearably poignant book about a man whose life, like so many, has been transformed by the discovery and loss of love. 'This is an exceptional work of fiction, which places Greenwell among the very best contemporary novelists' - The i Bulgaria's capital, Sofia, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. ...

Matt Haig

"'Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices... Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?' A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well liv...

Richard Osman

'Smart, compassionate, warm, moving and so VERY funny' Marian Keyes 'So smart and funny. Deplorably good' Ian Rankin 'Thrilling, moving, laugh-out-loud funny' Mark Billingham 'A gripping read' Sunday Times THE FIRST BOOK IN THE #1 BESTSELLING, MULTI MILLION COPY SELLING SERIES BY TV PRESENTER RICHARD OSMAN ---------------------------------------------- In a peaceful retireme...

Ali Smith

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021 LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2021 A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now. 'A maestra's portrait of her age . . . remarkable' Guardian In the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother a...

Brit Bennett

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP BESTSELLER #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'An utterly mesmerising novel..I absolutely loved this book' Bernardine Evaristo, winner of the Booker Prize 2019 'Epic' Kiley Reid, O, The Oprah Magazine The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just ...

Ottessa Moshfegh

'When I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn.' This is the story of a woman with no name. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. Yet she longs to lose herself completely. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; w...

Emma Cline

'Taut, beautiful and savage' GuardianA man travels to his son's school to deal with the fallout of a violent attack and to make sure his son will not lose his college place. But what exactly has his son done? And who is to blame? A young woman trying to make it in LA, working in a clothes shop while taking acting classes, turns to a riskier way of making money but will be forc...

Carmen Laforet

A modern Spanish classic, first published sixty years ago and translated into eighteen languages, now available in English with a preface by Mario Vargas Llosa. The novel conveys beautifully the spirit of war-torn, brutalized Barcelona. ...

Kurt Vonnegut

Dr Felix Hoenikker - a father of the atomic bomb - has another creation. Far more dangerous than that which levelled Hiroshima is ice-nine, a chemical that could freeze the world's oceans solid. The search for Hoenikker leads first to his three children, each in possession of the chemical, and then to the Republic of San Lorenzo, a mysterious island in thrall to a bizarre relig...

David Nicholls

? Now in paperback: David Nicholls's new novel You Are Here ? Sweet Sorrow: a novel of first love, set during a long, hot summer where life changes forever... 'Fizzing' GUARDIAN 'A glorious escape' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Exquisite' DAILY TELEGRAPH It's summer 1997, school is over and Charlie Lewis's life is in shambles. His family is breaking up, his father is falling apart and...

Lisa See

The beautiful novel of female friendship and family secrets on a small Korean island, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends that come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village's all-fema...

Hisham Matar

FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AND MAN BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR 'Sparkles with brilliant observations on art and architecture, friendship and loss' Guardian 'Everybody should get to spend a month with Mr. Matar, looking at paintings' Zadie Smith, Wall Street Journal, Books of the Year_______________________________________________ Matar was nineteen years old when his father ...

Édouard Louis

Who Killed My Father is the story of a tough guy - the story of the little boy I never was. The story of my father. 'What a beautiful book' MAX PORTER In Who Killed My Father, douard Louis explores key moments in his father's life, and the tenderness and disconnects in their relationship. Told with the fire of a writer determined on social justice, and with the compassion of ...

Patrick Suskind

'Witty, stylish and ferociously absorbing' Observer Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is abandoned on the filthy streets of eighteenth-century Paris as a baby, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human's. Gradually he learns how to exploit this gift in the art of creating the most sublime perfumes in France. Yet there is o...

Taylor Jenkins Reid

"Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it's the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she's twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things....

Bernardine Evaristo

THE SUNDAY TIMES 1# BESTSELLER & BOOKER PRIZE WINNER This is Britain as you've never read it.This is Britain as it has never been told. From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're eac...

André Aciman

In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio's father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, now a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train upends Sami's visit and changes his life forever. Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a...

Elif Shafak

"In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila's consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore. Her brain cells, having run out of blood, were now completely deprived of oxygen. But they did not shut down. Not right away...' For Leila, each minute after her death brings a sensuous memory: the taste of spiced goat stew, sacrificed ...

Margaret Atwood

Fifteen years after the events of "The Handmaid's Tale", the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this moment, the lives of three different women converge, with potentially explosive results.Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these women are j...

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Carlotte Brontë to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and...

Ocean Vuong

An instant New York Times Bestseller! Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award Shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Winner of the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction! Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Vulture, ...

Min Jin Lee

* The million-copy bestseller* * National Book Award finalist * * One of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2017 * * Selected for Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club * 'This is a captivating book... Min Jin Lee's novel takes us through four generations and each character's search for identity and success. It's a powerful story about resilience and compassion' BARACK ...

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time ... From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold comes a story of four new customers each of whom is hoping to take advantage of Cafe Funiculi Funicula's...

Carmen Maria Machado

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds even...