Contemporary fiction Books 1240 results

Khaled Khalifa

Death Is Hard Work is a tale of three people embarking on an absurd quest - an unforgettable journey into a contemporary heart of darkness. At a hospital in Damascus, Syria, Abdel Latif's final wish is to be buried in the family plot near Aleppo - just a two-hour drive away. Bolbol, his youngest son, persuades his estranged brother and sister to accompany him and their father's...

Yoko Ogawa

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers. 'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times 'A dreamlike story of dystopia' Jia Tolentino __________ Hat, ribbon, bird rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in t...

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...

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...

Elena Ferrante

From one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, comes this ravishing and generous-hearted novel about a friendship that lasts a lifetime. The story of Elena and Lila begins in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else, as their friendship, bea...

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...

Marjan Kamali

1953, Tehran. Roya loves nothing better than to while away the hours in the local stationery shop run by Mr. Fakhri. The store, stocked with fountain pens, shiny ink bottles, and thick pads of writing paper, also carries translations of literature from all over the world. And when Mr. Fakhri introduces her to his other favorite customer -- handsome Bahman, with his burning pass...

Hilary Mantel

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012, the 2012 Costa Book of the Year and shortlisted for the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction. An astounding literary accomplishment, Bring Up the Bodies is the story of this most terrifying moment of history, by one of our greatest living novelists. 'Our most brilliant English writer' Guardian Bring Up the Bodies unlocks the darkly glitteri...

Philippe Besson

THE NO.1 FRENCH BESTSELLER 'Stunning and heart-gripping' André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name 'A beautiful, shattering novel about desire and shame, about passionate youth and the regrets of age' Olivia Laing, bestselling author of Crudo Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe, a famous writer, chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first lo...

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski lays bare Hollywood, revealing the absurdity and egotism behind the glamour. ...

Lucy Vine

'Totally relatable and hilarious - one of the best books I've read' - Heat'Laugh-out-loud funny. Truly, the Bridget Jones for our generation' - Louise O'NeillWhat do you get if you cross a dozen drunk hens with one shiny Butler in the Buff?Meet Lilah Fox. She's on the hen do from hell. Then she gets a message (44 of them, actually) from her best friend with big news: she's gett...

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk's controversial, funny and moving account of her first few years of motherhood. ...

Fredrik Backman

The captivating and moving follow-up to the international bestseller Beartown, from the 18 million copy bestselling author of Anxious People and A Man Called Ove 'I utterly believed in the residents of Beartown, and felt ripped apart by the events in the book' Jojo Moyes on Beartown________ Can a broken town survive a second tragedy?By the time the last goal is scored, someone ...

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019 "Like Don DeLillo's JFK-themed Libra, the novel is an intoxicating blend of fact and fiction" Glasgow Herald "A masterful writer" Nicole Krauss "Vasquez has succeeded García Márquez as the literary grandmaster of Colombia" Ariel Dorfman, New York Review of Books "A dazzlingly choreographed network of echoes and mirrori...

Melissa Broder

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019 'Of all the books that I read this summer I think this was my absolute favourite. It really blew me away' DOLLY ALDERTON 'Frank, provocative and brilliant' INDEPENDENT 'Utterly mesmerising' TATLER 'Hilarious, poignant, sexy. A brilliant story about why we crave connection and how to find ourselves' ELLE 'Laugh-out-loud funny' i...

André Aciman

Enigma Variations charts the life of a man named Paul, whose loves remain as consuming and as covetous throughout his adulthood as they were in his adolescence. Whether the setting is southern Italy, where as a boy he has a crush on his parents' cabinetmaker, or a snowbound campus in New England, where his enduring passion for a girl he'll meet again and again over the years is...

Olga Tokarczuk

WINNER OF THE 2018 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE With Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, International Booker Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk returns with a subversive, entertaining noir novel. In a remote Polish village, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. She is reclusive, preferring the comp...

Basma Ghalayini

Palestine + 100 poses a question to twelve Palestinian writers: what might your country look like in the year 2048 - a century after the tragedies and trauma of what has come to be called the Nakba? How might this event - which, in 1948, saw the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes - reach across a century of occupation, oppression, and political isolati...

Mary Gaitskill

Quin and Margot have been friends for more than twenty years.0Quin is an extrovert and a sensualist who thrives on flirtation and ambiguity. He is at his happiest when encouraging intimate confidences from the women he meets. Always clear with him about the boundaries of their own relationship, until now Margot has looked on his behaviour with a mixture of ambivalence and affec...

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020 1872. The pampas of Argentina. China is a young woman eking out an existence in a remote gaucho encampment. After her no-good husband is conscripted into the army, China bolts for freedom, setting off on a wagon journey through the pampas in the company of her new-found friend Liz, a settler from Scotland. While Liz provides C...

Ottessa Moshfegh

"From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a shocking and tender novel about a young woman's efforts to sustain a state of deep hibernation over the course of a year on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apart...

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

What would you change if you could go back in time? In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café 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. In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café?...

Eve Babitz

Sophie, a twenty-something Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A., and Lola, a German immigrant who has settled in Hollywood, know that while Los Angeles is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal. The two women dazzle, one with the promises of youth, the other with the fulfilment of nostalgia as they wend their way through the pink sunsets and t...

Lucy Vine

Hot Mess [n.] - someone attractive, who is often in disarray.Have you ever shown up to Sunday brunch still smelling of Saturday night?Chosen bed, Netflix and pizza over human contact?Stayed in your mould-ridden flat because it's cheap?Meet your spirit animal, Ellie Knight. Her life isn't turning out exactly as she planned. She hates her job, her friends are coupling up and sett...

Khaled Hosseini

Afghanistan, 1975: Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to...

Angela Carter

'The boldest of English women writers' LORNA SAGE 'Her writing is pyrotechnic - fuelled with ideas, packed with images and spangling the night with her starry language' OBSERVER 'She can glide from ancient to modern, from darkness to luminosity, from depravity to comedy without any hint of strain and without losing the elusive power of the original tales' THE TIMES 'This cra...