Contemporary fiction Books 1240 results

Cormac Mccarthy

This is the story of a lawyer, the Counselor, a man who is so seduced by the desire to get rich, to impress his fiancee Laura, that he becomes involved in a drug-smuggling venture that quickly takes him way out of his depth. His contacts in this are the mysterious and probably corrupt Reiner and the seductive Malkina, so exotic her pets of choice are two cheetahs. As the action...

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...

Paul Auster

In 'The Brooklyn Follies' an uncle and nephew accidentally end up living in the same Brooklyn neighbourhood. When a little girl who refuses to speak comes into their lives, there is suddenly a bridge from their pasts that may offer them the possibility of redemption. ...

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. ...

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 ...

David Nicholls

'ONE DAY is destined to be a modern classic' - Daily MirrorTwenty years, two people, ONE DAY. The multi-million copy bestseller that captures the experiences of a generation.'I can imagine you at forty,' she said, a hint of malice in her voice. 'I can picture it right now.'He smiled without opening his eyes. 'Go on then.'15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet for the first time o...

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...

William S. Burroughs

Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, Burroughs' only realist love story and a montage of comic-grotesque fantasies that paved the way for his masterpiece, Naked Lunch. Set in Mexico City during the early fifties, Queer follows William Lee's hopeless pu...

Margaret Atwood

** THE SUNDAY TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER ** Discover the dystopian novel that started a phenomenon. Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford - her assigned name, Offred, means 'of Fred'. She has only one function: to breed. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she ...

Raymond Chandler

A classic novel by Raymond Chandler, the master of hard-boiled crime, The Long Good-Bye is the sixth novel featuring laconic PI Philip Marlowe Down-and-out drunk Terry Lennox has a problem: his millionaire wife is dead and he needs to get out of LA fast. So he turns to his only friend in the world: Philip Marlowe, Private Investigator. He's willing to help a man down on his luc...

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...

Abraham Verghese

"A masterly debut novel, visceral in its power, heartbreaking in its tenderness. Transporting the reader from the 1940s to the present, from a convent in India to a cargo ship bound for the Yemen, from a tiny operating theatre in Ethiopia to a hospital in the Bronx, Cutting for Stone is a thrilling epic of conjoined twins, doctors and patients, temptation and redemption, home a...

Jerome David Salinger

The Catcher in Rye is the ultimate novel for disaffected youth, but it's relevant to all ages. The story is told by Holden Caulfield, a seventeen- year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Throughout, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves- the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his r...

Dan Brown

CERN Institute, Switzerland: a world-renowned scientist is found brutally murdered with a mysterious symbol seared onto his chest. The Vatican, Rome: the College of Cardinals assembles to elect a new pope. Somewhere beneath them, an unstoppable bomb of terrifying power relentlessly counts down to oblivion. In a breathtaking race against time, Harvard professor Robert Langdon mu...

William Goldman

Over 30 years after it was first published, this popular fairy tale still sells 40,000 copies a year. Now a cult classic, this is a story of pirates, evil princes, sorcerers and true love. ...

Halldor Laxness

The great Icelandic novel by written by a Nobel prize-winner, this is a magnificent portrait of the eerie Icelandic landscape and one man's dogged struggle for independence. As seen on Inklings Book Club 'An amazing book... A stunning piece of work' Cillian Murphy 'A great Icelandic novel...It's an epic' Max Porter 'I defy anyone to finish Halldór Laxness's Independent People...

Salman Rushdie

*WINNER OF THE BOOKER AND BEST OF THE BOOKER PRIZE* **A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK** 'A wonderful, rich and humane novel... a classic' Guardian Born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India's independence, Saleem Sinai is a special child. However, this coincidence of birth has consequences he is not prepared for: telepathic powers connect him wit...

Jeanette Winterson

The Stone Gods is one of Jeanette Winterson's most imaginative novels -- an interplanetary love story; a traveller's tale; a hymn to the beauty of the world On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet - pristine and habitable, like our own 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. And off the air, Billie and Spike are falling in love. What ...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This novel is set in Nigeria in the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died, and thousands were massacred in cold blood.The three main characters in the novel get swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman,...

David Foster Wallace

Somewhere in the not-so-distant future the residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the nearby Enfield Tennis Academy are ensnared in the search for the master copy of INFINITE JEST, a movie said to be so dangerously entertaining its viewers become entranced and expire in a state of catatonic bliss . . . 'Wallace's exuberance and ...

Elizabeth Taylor

Named by the Guardian as one of 'the 100 best novels,' and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Mrs Palfrey At The Claremont is a humorous and compassionate look at friendship between an old woman and a young man from a 'magnificent...writer, the missing link between Jane Austen and John Updike' (David Baddiel, Independent)On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs Pal...

J. G. Ballard

With eighteen novels over four decades -from 'The Drowned World' in 1962 to his final novel 'Kingdom Come' in 2006- J.G. Ballard is known as one of Britain's most celebrated and original novelists. However, during his long career he was also a prolific writer of short stories; in fact, many people consider that he is at his best in the short-story format. These highly influenti...