Contemporary fiction Books 1240 results

Daphne Du Maurier

As a young guide for Sunshine Tours, Armino Fabbio leads a pleasant, if humdrum life -- until he becomes circumstantially involved in the murder of an old peasant woman in Rome. The woman, he gradually comes to realise, was his family's beloved servant many years ago, in his native town of Ruffano. He returns to his birthplace, and once there, finds it is haunted by the phantom...

Haruki Murakami

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come. This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary ...

Donna Tartt

A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A contemporary literary classic and "an accomplished psychological thriller ... absolutely chilling" (Village Voice), from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch.One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsUnder ...

David Nicholls

The debut bestseller from the author of the phenomenally successfully ONE DAY and Man Booker longlisted US. STARTER FOR TEN is a comedy about love, class, growing-up and the all-important difference between knowledge and wisdom. It's 1985 and Brian Jackson has arrived at university with a burning ambition - to make it onto TV's foremost general knowledge quiz. But no sooner has...

Truman Capote

When Joel Knox's mother dies, he is sent into the exotic unknown of the Deep South to live with a father he has never seen. But once he gets there, everyone is curiously evasive when Joel asks to see his father. Truman Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms is a brilliant, searching study of homosexuality set in a shimmering landscape of heat, mystery and decadence. ...

Hunter S. Thompson

Paul Kemp has moved from New York to the steamy heat of Puerto Rico to work at the Daily News. He starts hanging out at Al's Backyard, a local den selling booze and hamburgers to vagrant journalists who are mostly crazy drunks on the verge of quitting. Then he meets Yeamon, whose delectable girlfriend has Kemp stewing in his own lust. But the idle tension that builds up in plac...

Marcel Proust

One of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1: The Way by Swann's is published in a new translation from the French by Lydia Davis in Penguin Classics.The Way by Swann's is one of the great novels of childhood, depicting the impressions of a sensitive boy of his family and neighbours, brought dazzlingly...

Mark Kurlansky

Homer called it a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. As Mark Kurlansky so brilliantly relates here, salt has shaped civilisation from the beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of mankind. Wars have been fought over salt and, while salt taxes secured empires across Europe and Asia, they have also inspired...

Haruki Murakami

Toru Okada's cat has disappeared. His wife is growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out,...

Haruki Murakami

A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following. ...

Ann Patchett

Winner of the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The poignant - and at times very funny - novel from the author of State of Wonder and Commonwealth. Latin terrorists storm an international gathering hosted by an underprivileged country to promote foreign interest and trade, only to find that their intended target, the President, has stayed home to watch his fa...

Jamie O'neill

~ The Irish contemporary classic in a beautiful new edition ~ 'Weren't you never out for an easy dip?' he asked . . . 'I don't mean the baths, I mean with a pal. For a lark like.' Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of Dublin rock where gentlemen bathe in the scandalous nude, two boys meet day after day. There they make a pact: that Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a ...

James Baldwin

"Nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" First published in 1953, Baldwin's first novel is a short but intense, semi-autobiographical exploration of the troubled life of the Grimes family in Harlem during the Depression. ...

Zadie Smith

Chosen by the Guardian as one of the Best Books of the 21st Century From the MAN BOOKER PRIZE- and WOMEN'S PRIZE-SHORTLISTED author of Swing Time, On Beauty and Grand Union'BELIEVE THE HYPE' The Times The international bestseller and modern classic of multicultural Britain - an unforgettable portrait of LondonOne of the most talked about debut novels of all time, White Teeth is...

George Orwell

George Orwell's paean to the end of an idyllic era in British history, Coming Up for Air is a poignant account of one man's attempt to recapture childhood innocence as war looms on the horizon. George Bowling, forty-five, mortgaged, married with children, is an insurance salesman with an expanding waistline, a new set of false teeth - and a desperate desire to escape his dreary...

Chinua Achebe

Okonkwo is the greatest warrior alive, famous throughout West Africa. But when he accidentally kills a clansman, things begin to fall apart. Then Okonkwo returns from exile to find missionaries and colonial governors have arrived in the village. With his world thrown radically off-balance he can only hurtle towards tragedy. Chinua Achebe's stark novel reshaped both African and ...

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

This Is An Essay On Aesthetics By One Of The Greatest Japanese Novelists. The Text Ranges Over Architecture, Jade, Food, Toilets, And Combines An Acute Sense Of The Use Of Space In Buildings, As Well As Perfect Descriptions Of Lacquerware Under Candlelight And Women In The Darkness Of The House Of Pleasure. The Essay Forms A Classic Description Of The Collision Between The Shad...

Graham Greene

In a prison in Occupied France one in every ten men is to be shot. The prisoners draw lots among themselves - and for rich lawyer Louis Chavel, it seems that his whole life has been leading up to an agonizing and crucial failure of nerve. Hysterical with a sense of injustice, he offers to barter everything he owns for someone to take his place. ...

Bernhard Schlink

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany."A formally beautiful, disturbing and finally morally devastating novel." —Los Angeles TimesWhen he falls ill on his way home from schoo...

Bruce Chatwin

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers This is Chatwin's unforgettable novel of a man in war-torn Communist Prague, driven to protect his collection of porcelain figurines at any cost. Bruce Chatwin's bestselling novel traces the fortunes of the enigmatic and unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz. Despite the restrictions of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Utz asserts his individuality through...

Ian Mcewan

The setting is Berlin. Into this divided city, wrenched between East and West, between past and present; comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team. Though only a pawn in an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life -- and to lose his unwanted in...

Enid Blyton

Spook trains in the middle of the night! And they seem to vanish into thin air - but where do they go? The Famous Five are on to it. But the discovery of an unusual underground tunnel system, and a train-service, has them puzzled. If they follow the tracks, will they solve the mystery? ...

Toni Morrison

Discover Toni Morrison's most iconic work in this Pulitzer-prize winning novel that exemplifies her powerful and important place in contemporary American literature. 'An American masterpiece' AS Byatt It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead ba...

Mario Vargas Llosa

Set in an isolated, run down community in the Peruvian Andes, Vargas Llosa's riveting novel tells the story of a series of mysterious disappearances involving the Shining Path guerrillas and a local couple performing cannibalistic sacrifices with strange similarities to the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece. Part-detective novel and part-political allegory, it offers a panora...

Paulo Coelho

On a legendary road across Spain, travelled by pilgrims of San Tiago, we find Paulo Coelho on a contemporary quest for ancient wisdom. This journey becomes a truly initiatory experience, and Paulo Coelho is transformed forever as he learns to understand the nature of truth through the simplicity of life. 'The Pilgrimage' has a very important place in the work of Paulo Coelho, n...

Margaret Atwood

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed . If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's n ...

Alice Munro

These are stories in which women are central. They are about lovers found and lovers lost but lodged still in the subconscious, about secrets that change lives, about people whose histories are opening out or coming to an end. Their power accumulates layer by layer as time and reality shift, identities become uncertain, truths surface. A heart patient on a trip to her doctor on...

Thomas Pynchon

The first novel from the great, incomparable Thomas Pynchon. The quest for V. sweeps us through sixty years and a panorama of Alexandria, Paris, Malta, Florence, Africa and New York. But who, where or what is V.? Bawdy, sometimes sad and frequently hilarious, V. as become a modern classic. 'The greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation' Ian Rankin, Guardian...

Paulo Coelho

The inspiring spiritual tale of self-discovery that has touched millions of lives around the world. Combining magic, mysticism, wisdom and wonder, The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selling millions of copies around the world and transforming the lives of countless readers across generations. Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian...

Naguib Mahfouz / Najib Ma?Fu?

THE ACCLAIMED INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER BY THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR. 'A masterpiece' - The Times'The Arab Tolstoy' - Simon Sebag Montefiore'Shamelessly entertaining' - Guardian'Luminous' - New York TimesA sweeping and evocative portrait of both a family and a country struggling to move toward independence in a society that has resisted change for centuries. Set against the...