Contemporary fiction Books 1422 results

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...

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...

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 Sugar Street, the climactic final book in the classic Cairo Trilogy, is the captivating story of a family struggling to change with the rise of modern Egypt. As Cairo shrugs off the final vestiges of colonialism, Ahmad Al Jawad has ...

Annie Proulx

In The Shipping News E. Annie Proulx departs from the darkly fated heroes of Heart Songs and Postcards to explore the cracked-up contemporary American family. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ... features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets ...

Kurt Vonnegut

'Black satire of the highest polish' Guardian Whilst awaiting trial for war crimes in an Israeli prison, Howard W. Campbell Jr sets down his memoirs on an old German typewriter. He has used such a typewriter before, when he worked as a Nazi propagandist under Goebbels. Though that was before he agreed to become a spy for US military. Is Howard guilty? Can a black or white verd...

Cristina Rivera Garza

Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers 'A labyrinthine masterpiece' New York Times'A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story' TIME 'Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory' Layla Martinez A city is always a cemetery. When a professor named Cristina stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the bod...

Eric Puchner

"Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her in-laws' beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a cardiac anaesthesiologist with a brilliant future. When Charlie asks Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate, Cece can't imagine anyone less appropriate for the task. Garrett doesn't believe in love, much less marriage. But as...

Lotte Jeffs

Named a BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH by the Sunday Times Style, Apple Books, Prima, Cosmopolitan, i NEWS and Stylist 'I loved This Love' Elizabeth Day 'Astute, tender and utterly joy-filled. This is the love story we've been waiting for' Elle 'This is a book I will return to again and again . . . It's beautiful' Jennie Godfrey When Mae and Ari meet their final year at the Univers...

Nikita Gill

Beginning a generation before Hekate, Styx sings the story of the goddess of the underworld river that bears her name... The firstborn child of Titans, Styx is revered as the first of her kind - until she is eclipsed and forgotten amid her scores of siblings, the Oceanids and the Potamoi. Coming of age in a world simmering with paranoia and unspoken fear of Kronos, the volatile...

Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about mothers, transsexuality, bereavement, kitchens, love and tragedy in contemporary Japan. It is a startlingly original first work by Japan's brightest young literary star and is now a cult film. When Kitchen was first published in Japan in 1987 it won two of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, climbed its way to the top of the bestseller l...

Ben Lerner

Included in the BEST OF GRANTA launch list for 2023: this story of a young American abroad and adrift is a hilarious, intelligent cult classic, from one of the most celebrated contemporary novelists. ...

Han Kang

Included in the BEST OF GRANTA launch list for 2023 and WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2016: an exhilarating, unsettling modern classic about patriarchy and rebellion, eroticism and the body, and one woman's desire for another mode of existence. ...

Shelby Van Pelt

**THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**OVER HALF A MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDEBBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICKOVER 29,000 5 STAR REVIEWSGOOD HOUSEKEEPING BEST BOOKS OF 2022GLAMOUR BEST BOOKS OF 2022'Full of heart and humour . . . I loved it.' Ruth Hogan'Will stay with you for a long time.' Anstey Harris'I defy you to put it down once you've started' Cynthia D'Aprix SweeneyAfter T...

Satoshi Yagisawa

It is the pride and joy of her uncle Ojisan, who has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife Momoki left him five years earlier. When Takano's boyfriend reveals he's marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle's offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above the shop.[Bokinfo]. ...

Han Kang

Book of the Year 2023 according to New Yorker, TIME magazine, Kirkus A powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection, from the celebrated author of The Vegetarian. 'Breathtaking . . . She is simply my favourite living writer to read, and think with, and see the world with' Max Porter In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teac...

Jenny Erpenbeck

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, pun...

Elena Ferrante

"Rarely have the foundations upon which our ideas of motherhood and womanhood rest been so candidly questioned. This compelling novel tells the story of one woman's headlong descent into what she calls an ""absence of sense"" after being abandoned by her husband." ...

Alice Winn

WINNER OF THE WATERSTONES NOVEL OF THE YEAR PRIZE 2023 'If you haven't read it, you're missing out' Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY 'One of the best debuts I've read in recent years . . . please rush out and buy it' ELIZABETH DAY ______________________ In 1914, war feels far away to Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood. They're too young to enlist, and an...

Chloe Michelle Howarth

** Shortlisted for the 2023 Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction ** ** An Evening Standard 'One to Watch in 2023 ** ** An Independent 'Best Romantic Summer Reads' ** ** A Book of the Month pick for Diva, Irish Examiner, Novellic & Sainsbury's Magazine ** ** A Most Anticipated pick for PinkNews & Queer on the Street ** It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore...

Mona Awad

From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother's unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother's fateand find a connection that is more than skin deep? For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her sk...

Dolly Alderton

Every relationship has one beginning. This one has two endings. Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can't work out why she stopped. Now he is... Without a home Waiting for his stand-up career to take off Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak at a time when everything he thought he knew about ...

Miye Lee

The first book of Miye Lee's whimsical and moving duology, translated from the Korean language by Sandy Joosun Lee.[Bokinfo]. ...

Irene Solá

A ferociously imaginative, polyphonic debut: amid the rugged beauty of the Pyrenees, the mountains' inhabitants - both human and non-human - bear witness to the tragedies that befall one family ...

James Mcbride

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by...

Kaveh Akbar

'I will carry this story, and the people in it, with me for the rest of my life' JOHN GREEN, author of The Fault in Our StarsA BOOK OF THE YEAR IN: The New York Times Time Observer USA Today Vanity Fair NPR The Atlantic Electric Lit Vox The New Yorker 'Smart, dazzling, different . . . This book is thrilling.' Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake 'Playful, soulful, kaleidoscopic, ...