Contemporary fiction Books 1151 results

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...

Sally Rooney

"At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He's popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne's house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers--one they are determined to conceal. A year later, th...

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...

Samantha Hunt

"The Seas took me back to how I felt as a kid, when you're newly falling in love with literature, newly shocked by its capacity to cast a spell..." Maggie Nelson "[It] blew me away because of the beauty of the language . . . I found myself highlighting about 85% of the book for the language. It is so beautifully written" Jodi Picoult Moored in a coastal fishing town so far nor...

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...

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...

Mercè Rodoreda

The narrator, a fourteen-year-old boy, describes the cruel customs of a village, including the horrible death of his father, and spends time with a prisoner who explains the strange events in the village. ...

Daphne Du Maurier

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again... Working as a lady's companion, the orphaned heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. Whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to his brooding estate, Manderley, on th...

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...

Rachel Cusk

A novel about writing and talking, self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form. ...

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...

Stephen Fry

STEP INTO ANOTHER WORLD - OF MAGIC, MAYHEM, MONSTERS AND MANIACAL GODS - IN STEPHEN FRY'S MOMENTOUS SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER, MYTHOS 'A romp through the lives of ancient Greek gods. Fry is at his story-telling best . . . the gods will be pleased' Times ___________ No one loves and quarrels, desires and deceives as boldly or brilliantly as Greek gods and goddesses. In Stephen F...

Genki Kawamura

The international phenomenon that has sold more than two million copies, If Cats Disappeared from the World is a heartwarming, funny, and profound meditation on the meaning of life.The young postman's days are numbered. Estranged from his family and living alone with only his cat, Cabbage, to keep him company, he was unprepared for the doctor's diagnosis that he has only months...

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...

Khaled Hosseini

THE RICHARD & JUDY NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER'A suspenseful epic' Daily Telegraph'A triumph' Financial Times'Heartbreaking' Mail on Sunday'Deeply moving' Sunday TimesMariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Tal...

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...

Margaret Atwood

Homer's Odyssey is not the only version of the story. Mythic material was originally oral, and also local -- a myth would be told one way in one place and quite differently in another. I have drawn on material other than the Odyssey, especially for the details of Penelope's parentage, her early life and marriage, and the scandalous rumors circulating about her. I've chosen to g...

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... ...

Gerald Durrell

My Family and Other Animals is the bewitching account of a rare and magical childhood on the island of Corfu by treasured British conservationist Gerald Durrell. Escaping the ills of the British climate, the Durrell family - acne-ridden Margo, gun-toting Leslie, bookworm Lawrence and budding naturalist Gerry, along with their long-suffering mother and Roger the dog - take off f...

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...