Contemporary fiction Books 1151 results

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 ...

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...

Paulo Coelho

The spellbinding novel from one of the world's best-loved authors, Paulo Coelho, recounting the story of Brida, and her pursuit of wisdom. This is the story of Brida, a young Irish girl, and her quest for knowledge. She has long been interested in various aspects of magic, and has taken courses in astrology, tarot, and numerology, but is searching for something more. Her search...

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...

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

'A masterly novel' New York Times 'Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility' Guardian Read the haunting love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar. When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best frie...