Contemporary fiction Books 1499 results

Jacqueline Harpman

Vintage

Discover the haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic tale of female friendship and intimacy set in a deserted world. Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus? Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollect...

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Maclehose Press

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

Bloomsbury

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...

Akwaeke Emezi

Faber & Faber

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

Fitzcarraldo

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

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...

Saleem Haddad

Europa Editions

"Set over the course of twenty-four hours, Guapa follows Rasa, a gay man living amid the political and social upheaval of an unnamed Arab country. Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. One night Rasa's grandmother - the woman who raised him - catches them in bed together. The follo...

Heinrich Böll

Penguin

'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

Charco Press

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

Vintage

** 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

Faber & Faber

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...

Ottessa Moshfegh

Vintage

"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...

Sally Rooney

Faber & Faber

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

Faber

"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...

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Picador

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

Penguin

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

Orion

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

Bloomsbury

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...

Fernando Pessoa

Serpents Tail

The Book of Disquiet is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Written over the course of Fernando Pessoa's life, it was first published in 1982, pieced together from the thousands of individual manuscript pages left behind by Pessoa after his death in 1935. Now this fragmentary modernist masterpiece appears in a major new edition that unites Margaret Jull Co...

Rachel Cusk

Faber & Faber

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

Penguin

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. ...

Lisa See

Penguin

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa See, "one of those special writers capable of delivering both poetry and plot" (The New York Times Book Review), a moving novel about tradition, tea farming, and the bonds between mothers and daughters.In their remote mountain village, Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. For the Akha p...

Gail Honeyman

Harper

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

Faber & Faber

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

Penguin

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

Hit

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

Ladybird

'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

Vagabond Voices

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

Penguin

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

Vintage

"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...