Contemporary fiction Books 1422 results

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...

Akwaeke Emezi

An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that i...

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...

Heinrich Böll

'Böll's novel blows a stent in the human heart. . . It feels more necessary than ever.' Anna Funder, from the introduction'This is the best book I have read this year; not by miles, but by whole astronomical units; I am stunned by it as if by a blow. It is *astonishing* to the extent that I cannot convey to you its power' Sarah Perry, bestselling author of The Essex Serpent and...

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...

Edouard Louis

** Shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award ** The radical, urgent new novel from the author of The End of Eddy - a personal and powerful story of violence. I met Reda on Christmas Eve 2012, at around four in the morning. He approached me in the street, and finally I invited him up to my apartment. He told me the story of his childhood and how his father had...

Barbara Kingsolver

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'Magnificent.' The Times, 'Books of the Year' 'Gripping.' Grazia 'Peerless.' Daily Mail 'Wise.' Sunday Times Meet Willa Knox, a woman who stands braced against a world which seems to hold little mercy for her and her family - or their old, crumbling...

Sally Rooney

My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.0Years ago, Sukie moved in with Nathan because her mother was dead and her father was difficult, and she had nowhere else to go. Now they are on the brink of the inevitable.0Sally Rooney is one of the most acclaimed young talents of recent years. With her minute atten...

Carmen Maria Machado

In this volume, Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. In this provocative debut, startling narratives map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited on their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the mysterious green ribbon from around her neck. A woman r...

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...

Rachel Cusk

In the wake of her family's collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions - personal, moral, artistic, and practical - as she endeavours to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of...

Margaret Atwood

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs. Brilliantly conceived and executed, this powerful evocation of twenty-first...

Gail Honeyman

Over 2.5 million copies sold 'Funny, touching and unpredictable' Jojo Moyes 'Heartwrenching and wonderful' Nina Stibbe Winner of Costa First Novel Award, a No.1 Sunday Times bestseller and the Book of the Year Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal d...

Chigozie Obioma

In a small town in western Nigeria, four young brothers - the youngest is nine, the oldest fifteen - use their strict father's absence from home to go fishing at a forbidden local river. They encounter a dangerous local madman who predicts that the oldest brother will be killed by another. This prophecy breaks their strong bond and unleashes a tragic chain of events of almost m...

Alicia Kopf

Longlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award Longlisted for the 2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation She thought that it was precisely when things get uncomfortable or can't be shown that something interesting comes to light. That is the point of no return, the point that must be reached, the point you reach after crossing the border of what has already be...

Cesare Pavese

'An astonishing portrait of an innocent on the verge of discovering the cruelties of love... there are whispers here of the future work of Elena Ferrante' Elizabeth Strout, from the introduction'Life was a perpetual holiday in those days...' It's the height of summer in 1930s Italy and sixteen-year-old Ginia is desperate for adventure. So begins a fateful friendship with Amelia...

Antanas ŠKema

White Shroud (Balta drobule, 1958) is considered by many as the most important work of modernist fiction in Lithuanian. Drawing heavily on the author's own refugee and immigrant experience, this psychological, stream-of-consciousness work tells the story of an émigré poet working as an elevator operator in a large New York hotel during the mid-1950s. Using multiple narrative vo...

James Baldwin

Baldwin's fourth novel recounts a lifetime of grappling with love, loss and identity 'Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it' At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, we see the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerab...

Elif Batuman

"A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begi...

Ali Smith

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. Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today - written as a letter to a friend. A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie's letter of response. Here are fifteen inv...

Haruki Murakami

'I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.' Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious wom...

Jodi Picoult

THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'Picoult is a master manipulator, weaving gripping, dramatic plotlines. We defy you not to be gripped.' Glamour For eighteen years the Hartes and the Golds have lived next door to each other, sharing everything from takeaways to school drop-offs. So it's no surprise when teenagers Chris and Emily, soul mates since they were born, start da...

Philip Pullman

Will has just killed a man. He's on the run. His escape will take him far beyond his own world, to the eerie disquiet of a deserted city, and to a girl, Lyra. Her fate is strangely linked to his own, and together they must find the most powerful weapon in all the worlds... ...

Barbara Kingsolver

The drama of a U.S. missionary family in Africa during a war of decolonization. At its center is Nathan Price, a self-righteous Baptist minister who establishes a mission in a village in 1959 Belgian Congo. The resulting clash of cultures is seen through the eyes of his wife and his four daughters. By the author of Pigs in Heaven. ...

Edmund White

______________ 'One of the best writers of my generation' - John Irving 'A playful yet searching novel of gay life in the New York of Ed Koch and Studio 54' - Kirkus 'Smart, worldly, erudite, well-connected, and funny' - New York Review of Books 'Remarkable ... America's most significant gay writer' - Literary Review ______________ 'Has everyone always been in love with yo...