Contemporary fiction Books 1240 results

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...

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. ...

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...

Muhsin Al-Ramli

In this extraordinary novel by heralded Iraqi author Muhsin Al-Ramli, One Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Kite Runner against the backdrop of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. "A profoundly moving investigation of love, death, and injustice." --The Guardian "A standard in contemporary Middle Eastern literature." --Booklist "A stunning achievement." --The National On the third day ...

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...

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... ...

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...

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie, a self-described 'emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two', explores the true meaning of home. Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means to belong, whether roots are real and homelands imaginary, what it is like to reconfigure your past from fragments of memory and what happens when East meets West. Selected from the books Shame,...

Chinelo Okparanta

One day in 1968, at the height of the Biafran civil war, Ijeoma's father is killed and her world is transformed forever. Separated from her grief-stricken mother, she meets another young lost girl, Amina, and the two become inseparable. Theirs is a relationship that will shake the foundations of Ijeoma's faith, test her resolve and flood her heart. In this masterful novel of fa...

Sarah Perry

London 1893. When Cora Seaborne's controlling husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness. Along with her son Francis - a curious, obsessive boy - she leaves town for Essex, in the hope that fresh air and open space will provide refuge. On arrival, rumours reach them that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming ...

David Szalay

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER PRIZE 'Increasingly looking like the masterpiece of British fiction from the past few years' Evening Standard Nine men. Each of them at a different stage of life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving - in the suburbs of Prague, beside a Belgian motorway, in a cheap Cypriot hotel - to understand just what it means to be ali...

Alice Walker

THE ICONIC CLASSIC, WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE ONE OF THE BBC '100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD' 'A lush celebration of all that it means to be a black female. I love that The Color Purple doesn't try to soften its blows but is also courageous enough to hold on to a wonderfully affirming faith in possibility, in forgiveness and kindness and hope' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 'T...

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

The slums of Buenos Aires, the government, the mafia, the Virgin Mary, corrupt police officers, prostitutes, transvestites, thieves, drug dealers, cumbia music and debauchery all combine in this sweeping novel deemed to be a "revelation for contemporary literature" and "pure dynamite" (Andraes Neuman, author of Traveller of the Century & Talking to Ourselves, Pushkin Press). Sl...

Madeline Miller

**OVER 3 MILLION COPIES SOLD** WINNER OF THE ORANGE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION THE INTERNATIONAL SENSATION A SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'Captivating' DONNA TARTT 'A book I could not put down' ANN PATCHETT 'Ravishingly vivid' EMMA DONOGHUE Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect ...

Kristin Hannah

A #1 New York Times bestseller, Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year, and soon to be a major motion picture, this unforgettable novel of love and strength in the face of war has enthralled a generation. With courage, grace, and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah captures the epic panorama of World War II and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom s...

Fredrik Backman

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove returns with Beartown--an instant New York Times bestseller--about a forgotten town fractured by scandal, and the amateur hockey team that might just change everything. People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by th...

Markus Zusak

The 10th-anniversary edition of the No. 1 international bestseller and modern classic beloved by millions of readers HERE IS A SMALL FACT - YOU ARE GOING TO DIE 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp...

Walter Tevis

NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX SERIES starring Anya Taylor-Joy from Academy-Award nominee Scott Frank and BAFTA nominee Allan Scott 'Superb' Time Out 'Mesmerizing' Newsweek 'Gripping' Financial Times 'Sheer entertainment. It is a book I reread every few years - for the pure pleasure and skill of it' Michael Ondaatje 'Don't pick this up if you want a night's sleep' Scotsman When she is s...