Contemporary fiction Books 1422 results

Kurt Vonnegut

Since its original publication in 1968, Welcome to the Monkey House has been one of Kurt Vonnegut's most beloved works. This special edition celebrates a true master of the short-story form by including multiple variant drafts of what would eventually be the title story. In a fascinating accompanying essay, "Building the Monkey House: At Kurt Vonnegut's Writing Table," noted Vo...

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

Clarice Lispector's sensational, prize-winning debut novel Near to the Wild Heart was published when she was just twenty-three and earned her the name 'Hurricane Clarice'. It tells the story of Joana, from her wild, creative childhood, as the 'little egg' who writes poems for her father, through her marriage to the faithless Otávio and on to her decision to make her own way in ...

Clarice Lispector

Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola and her philandering rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly and unloved. Yet telling her story is the narrator Rodrigo S.M., who tries to direct Macabéa's fate but comes to realize that, for all her outward misery, she is inwardly free. Slyly sub...

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...

Dan Brown

*NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING TOM HANKS AND FELICITY JONES* Florence: Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon awakes in a hospital bed with no recollection of where he is or how he got there. Nor can he explain the origin of the macabre object that is found hidden in his belongings. A threat to his life will propel him and a young doctor, Sienna Brooks, into a breakneck chase across th...

Takashi Hiraide

A bestseller in France and winner of Japan's Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, The Guest Cat, by the acclaimed poet Takashi Hiraide, is a subtly moving and exceptionally beautiful novel about the transient nature of life and idiosyncratic but deeply felt ways of living. A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo; they work at home, freelance ...

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...

Javier Marías

Every day, Maria Dolz stops at the same cafe. And every day she watches a couple following the same routine. Then one day they aren't there. She comes across a photograph of the man, lying stabbed in the street. When the woman returns with her children, who are then collected by a different man, a new light is shed on the death." ...

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,...

Gabriel García Márquez

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.' Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where José Arcadio Buendía and his strong-willed wife, Ursula, have started their new life. As the mysterious M...

Mercè Rodoreda

Barcelona, early 1930s: Natalia is hesitant when a stranger asks her to dance at the fiesta in Diamond Square. But Joe is charming and forceful, and she takes his hand. They marry and soon have two children; for Natalia it is an awakening, both good and bad. When Joe decides to breed pigeons, the birds delight his son and daughter - and infuriate his wife. Then the Spanish Civi...

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...

Elif Shafak

'Black Milk' is the affecting and beautifully written memoir on motherhood and writing by Turkey's bestselling female writer Elif Shafak, author of 'Honour', 'The Gaze' and 'The Bastard of Istanbu'l which was long-listed for the Orange prize. ...

Patti Smith

A great book about becoming an artist, Woolgathering tells of a youngster finding herself as she learns the noble vocation of woolgathering, a worthy calling that seemed a good job for me. She discovers often at night, often in nature the pleasures of rescuing a fleeting thought. Deeply moving, Wool- gathering calls up our own memories, as the child glimpses and gleans, piecing...

Bethan Roberts

It is in 1950s Brighton that Marion first catches sight of Tom. He teaches her to swim in the shadow of the pier and Marion is smitten - determined her love will be enough for them both. A few years later in Brighton Museum Patrick meets Tom. Patrick is besotted with Tom and opens his eyes to a glamorous, sophisticated new world. Tom is their policeman, and in this age it is sa...

Jung Chang

One of the best-selling and best-loved books of recent years, 'Wild Swans' is an epic true story of how one family lived and survived through some of China's most unsettling and violent times. The publication of 'Wild Swans' in 1991 was a worldwide phenomenon. Not only did it become the best-selling non-fiction book in British publishing history, with sales of well over two mil...

Anthony Burgess

The daring dystopian satire that inspired one of the most notorious films ever made, beautifully reimagined as part of the Penguin Essentials series'Every generation should discover this book' Time Out ________________In this nightmare vision of youth in revolt, fifteen-year-old Alex and his friends set out on a diabolical orgy of robbery, rape, torture and murder. Alex is jail...

Joseph Heller

Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage. Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not...

M. M. Kaye

From its beginning in the foothills of the towering Himalayas, M.M. Kaye's masterwork is a vast, rich and vibrant tapestry of love and war that ranks with the greatest panoramic sagas of modern fiction. ...

Robert Graves

Robert Graves's controversial historical novel is a bold reworking of the story of Christ. Here Jesus is not the son of God, but the result of a secret marriage - the descendant of Herod and true King of the Jews. Written from the perspective of a lowly official at the end of the first century AD, King Jesus recounts Jesus's birth, youth, life as a charismatic 'wonder worker' a...

Paul Auster

Paul Auster's three stories explore the nature of identity. He uses the detective, spy and friendship genres as vehicles to delve into the relationships between different groups of people. ...

Stephen King

One of the true classics of psychological suspense, about a writer and his No. 1 fan, now with a stunning new cover look. Paul Sheldon used to write for a living. Now he's writing to stay alive. Misery Chastain is dead. Paul Sheldon has just killed her - with relief, with joy. Misery made him rich; she was the heroine of a string of bestsellers. And now he wants to get on to ...

Cormac Mccarthy

"Blood Meridian" is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightm...

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe is considered the father of African literature in English, the writer who 'opened the magic casements of African fiction' for an international readership. Following the 50th anniversary of the publication of his ground-breaking Things Fall Apart, Everyman republish Achebe's first and most famous novel alongside No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God, under the collect...

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino's enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures, The Complete Cosmicomics is translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Naturally, we were all there, - dld Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that...

J. D. Salinger

A sharp and poignant snapshot of the crises of youth - from the acclaimed author of The Catcher in the Rye 'Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a differ...

Alice Munro

These are beguiling, provocative stories about manipulative men and the women who outwit them. 'Brimming with intensely believable characters and rich social detail' Sunday Times A wife and mother whose spirit has been crushed finds release from her extraordinary pain in the most unlikely of places. The young victim of a humiliating seduction finds an unusual way to get her ow...

Yoko Ogawa

He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take care of him. Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship...