Contemporary fiction Books 1499 results

Ali Smith

Ladybird

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

Bloomsbury

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

Harper

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

Penguin

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

Vintage

'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

Hodder

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

Scholastic

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

Faber & Faber

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

Bloomsbury

______________ '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...

Nick Hornby

Ladybird

Nick Hornby's internationally bestselling first novel, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time.Do you know your desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups? Rob does. He keeps a list, in fact. But Laura isn't on it - even though she's just become his latest ex. He's got his life back, you see. He can just do what he wants when he wants: like listen to...

Chinelo Okparanta

Granta

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

Serpents Tail

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

Vintage

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

W & N

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

Charco Press

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

Bloomsbury

**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 ...

Ali Smith

Penguin

Selling more than 30K copies in hardback, this is the first title in Smith's }Seasonal{ series, with }Winter{ to follow. 'The novel of the year is obviously Ali Smith's }Autumn{ ... Expansive, shape-shifting, at once more stringent and more consoling than anything I've read this year' Olivia Laing, }Observer{ SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSEL...

Kristin Hannah

Macmillan

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...

M. L. Rio

Titan Books

If We Were Villains is a smart, upmarket literary page-turner in the tradition of The Secret History Oliver Marks has just served ten years for the murder of one of his closest friends - a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he's released, he's greeted by the detective who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know wh...

Leonard Gardner

Pushkin Press

Stockton, California. When two men meet in the gym - the ex-boxer Billy Tully and the novice Ernie Munger - their brief sparring session sets in motion their hidden fates, initiating young Munger into the 'company of men' and luring Tully back into training. 'Fat City' tells of their anxieties and hopes, their loves and losses, and the stubborn determination of their manager, R...

Markus Zusak

Penguin

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

W&N

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...

Kakuzo Okakura

Penguin

'Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle.' In this charming book from 1906, Okakura explores Zen, Taoism, Tea Masters and the significance of the Japanese tea ceremony. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celeb...

Liz Tuccillo

Simon & Schuster

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...

Hanya Yanagihara

Anchor Books

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning "portrait of the enduring grace of friendship" (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZEA Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoy...

László Krasznahorkai

Phoenix

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

Bloomsbury

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

Phoenix

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

Penguin

""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

Vintage

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 ...