Contemporary fiction Books 1240 results

Liz Tuccillo

It's the most annoying question and they just can't help asking you. You'll be asked it at family gatherings, particularly weddings. Men will ask you on first dates. Therapists will ask you over and over again. It's the question that has no good answer. It's the question that when people stop asking it, makes you feel even worse: WHY ARE YOU SINGLE? 'A DELICIOUS FEAST OF A FIRS...

Kang Han

Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma. Hu...

Ruta Sepetys

World War II is drawing to a close in East Prussia and thousands of refugees are on a desperate trek toward freedom, many with something to hide. Among them are Joana, Emilia, and Florian, whose paths converge en route to the ship that promises salvation, the Wilhelm Gustloff. Forced by circumstance to unite, the three find their strength, courage, and trust in each other teste...

László Krasznahorkai

A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find - music, cosmology, fascism. ...

Susan Abulhawa

From the author of the international bestseller Mornings in Jenin comes a powerful, passionate story of a family separated by conflict, and the tragedy they endure 'The story Susan Abulhawa tells in this marvellous novel is hard to bear but impossible to ignore ... precise, courageous, and dazzling' Teju Cole 'Gripping and deeply moving ... Suffering and resilience are diffic...

Elfriede Jelinek

One of Elena Ferrante's Top 40 Best Books by Women'One of my all time favourites' ELIZA CLARKErika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. By night she trawls the city's porn shows while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her. Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student and ladies' man Walter Klemmer.With Walter as he...

Amor Towles

""In all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight.this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility."--Kirkus Reviews (starred) From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility--a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxur...

Ottessa Moshfegh

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016 SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2016 SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA NEW BLOOD DAGGER AWARD 2016 Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in The Times, Observer and Daily Telegraph Fully lives up to the hype. A taut psychological thriller, rippled with comedy as black as a raven's wing, Eileen is effortlessly stylish and compelling. - Robert ...

Kazuo Ishiguro

*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available* The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards - some strange and other-worldly - bu...

Colleen Hoover

Beloved No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover returns with an unforgettable love story between a writer and his unexpected muse. Fallon meets Ben, an aspiring novelist, the day of her scheduled cross-country move. Their untimely attraction leads them to spend Fallon's last day in LA together, and her eventful life becomes the creative inspiration Ben has always...

Maria Duenas

Declared "a writer to watch" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), New York Times bestselling author María Dueñas pours heart and soul into this story of a woman who discovers the power of second chances.A talented college professor in Madrid, Blanca Perea seems to have it all. But her world is suddenly shattered when her husband of twenty years leaves her for another woman. Que...

Alan Hollinghurst

Young, gay, William Beckwith spends his time, and his trust fund, idly cruising London for erotic encounters. When he saves the life of an elderly man in a public convenience an unlikely job opportunity presents itself. The man is Lord Nantwich, a gay peer of the realm and in the market for a biographer. Reluctantly accepting the commission, Will receives the first of Nantwich'...

Rita Mae Brown

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RITA MAE BROWN Molly Bolt is a young lady with a big character. Beautiful, funny and bright, Molly figures out at a young age that she will have to be tough to stay true to herself in 1950s America. In her dealings with boyfriends and girlfriends, in the rocky relationship with her mother and in her determination to pursue her career, she will fight for ...

Elif Shafak

Shortlisted for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace is a moving and highly original novel about a group of individuals who live in the same building and who together become embroiled in a mystery. By turns comic and tragic, The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice. Bonbon Palace was ...

Larry Mcmurtry

The final novel in Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet, Streets of Laredo is an exhilarating and achingly poignant tale of heroism and friendship, set in the American West. Captain Woodrow Call, Gus McCrae's old partner, once a youthful Texas Ranger, is now a bounty hunter hired to track down a brutal young Mexican bandit. Riding with Call are an Eastern city slicker, a wit...

Han Kang

Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more 'plant-like' existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism is al...

Alice Munro

The only novel from bestselling author Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Catching frogs, grazing knees, singing songs to save England from Hitler - that was childhood for Del Jordan, and now she's impatient for more. More than she can find in the encyclopedias sold by her mother, or in the half-understood innuendos dispensed by best friend Naomi, or in the wh...

Elif Shafak

From Booker-shortlisted author Elif Shafak, Honour is a gripping tale of love, betrayal and clashing cultures. 'My mother died twice. I promised myself I would not let her story be forgotten' Pembe and Adem Toprak leave Turkey for London. There they make new lives for their family. Yet the traditions and beliefs of their home come with them - carried in the blood of their chi...

Azar Nafisi

For the first time, the phenomenal bestselling literary memoir will be published in Penguin Modern Classics Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. As they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice, gradually they come to share th...

Ali Smith

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015 WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014 WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD 'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversat...

Anthony Doerr

WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTIONNATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II 'Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close...

Anthony Marra

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A searing debut about the transcendent power of love in wartime, hailed as "an absolute masterpiece" (Sarah Jessica Parker, Entertainment Weekly)—from the renowned author of Mercury Pictures Presents "Extraordinary . . . a twenty-first century War and Peace."—The New York Times Book Review NATIONAL BOOK CRITIC...

Anthony Burgess

Fully restored edition of Anthony Burgess' original text of A Clockwork Orange, with a glossary of the teen slang 'Nadsat', explanatory notes, pages from the original typescript, interviews, articles and reviewsEdited by Andrew Biswell With a Foreword by Martin Amis'It is a horrorshow story ...'Fifteen-year-old Alex likes lashings of ultraviolence. He and his gang of friends ro...

Clarice Lispector

In Água Viva Clarice Lispector aims to 'capture the present'. Her direct, confessional and unfiltered meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it one hundred and eleven times. Despite its apparent sponta...

Donna Tartt

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that ...

Celeste Ng

'There is much here that might impress Pulitzer and Man Booker judges...Ng brilliantly depicts the destruction that parents can inflict on their children and on each other' Mark Lawson, Guardian Lydia is the favourite child of Marilyn and James Lee; a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fu...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

As teenagers in Lagos, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country if they can. The self-assured Ifemelu departs for America. There she suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze had hoped to join her,...

Kazuo Ishiguro

It is 1948. Japan is rebuilding her cities after the calamity of World War II, her people putting defeat behind them and looking to the future. The celebrated painter Masuji Ono fills his days attending to his garden, his house repairs, his two grown daughters and his grandson, and his evenings drinking with old associates in quiet lantern-lit bars. His should be a tranquil ret...

Thomas Pynchon

Discover Thomas Pynchon's brilliant writing in this postmodern literature classic. 'The greatest, wildest author of his generation' Guardian We could tell you the year is 1944, that the main character is called Tyrone Slothrop and that he has a problem because bombs are falling across Europe and crashing to the earth at the exact locations of his sexual conquests. But that does...

Alice Munro

**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature** Alice Munro captures the essence of life in her brilliant new collection of stories. Moments of change, chance encounters, the twist of fate that leads a person to a new way of thinking or being: the stories in Dear Life build to form a radiant, indelible portrait of just how dangerous and strange ordinary life can be. ...