Contemporary fiction Books 1499 results

Jojo Moyes

Phoenix

Lou Clark knows lots of things. She knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home. She knows she likes working in The Buttered Bun tea shop and she knows she might not love her boyfriend Patrick. What Lou doesn't know is she's about to lose her job or that knowing what's coming is what keeps her sane. Will Traynor knows his motorcycle accident took away his d...

Amor Towles

Sceptre

Rules Of Civility by Amor Towles is the unforgettable debut by the million-copy bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway In a New York City jazz bar on the last night of 1937, watching a quartet because she couldn't afford to see the whole ensemble, there were certain things Katey Kontent knew: · how to sneak into the cinema, and steal silk stockings...

Anthony Burgess

Ladybird

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...

M. M. Kaye

Ladybird

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. ...

Robert Graves

Penguin

Robert Graves's controversial historical novel is a bold reworking of the story of Christ. Here Jesus is not the son of God, but the result of a secret marriage - the descendant of Herod and true King of the Jews. Written from the perspective of a lowly official at the end of the first century AD, King Jesus recounts Jesus's birth, youth, life as a charismatic 'wonder worker' a...

Paul Auster

Faber & Faber

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

Hodder

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 ...

Colm Tóibín

Penguin

Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is a devastating story of love, loss and one woman's terrible choice between duty and personal freedom. The book that inspired the major motion picture starring Saoirse Ronan. It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis ...

Chinua Achebe

Everymans

Chinua Achebe is considered the father of African literature in English, the writer who 'opened the magic casements of African fiction' for an international readership. Following the 50th anniversary of the publication of his ground-breaking Things Fall Apart, Everyman republish Achebe's first and most famous novel alongside No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God, under the collect...

Italo Calvino

Penguin

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

Penguin

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...

Alice Munro

Vintage

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

Vintage

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...

Barbara Kingsolver

Faber & Faber

The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s McCarthyite America. Born in the U.S. and reared in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salome. Making himself useful in the household of the famed Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader...

Abraham Verghese

Vintage

"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...

Paulo Coelho

Harper

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

Ladybird

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...

Arturo P'rez-Reverte

W&N

A man lives alone in a watchtower by the sea. On the circular walls of the tower he is painting a grand mural - the timeless landscape of a battle. He is a former war photographer and the painting is his attempt to capture the photo he was never able to take; to encapsulate, in an instant, the meaning of war. But one day a stranger knocks on his door and announces that he has c...

William Goldman

Bloomsbury

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

Vintage

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

Vintage

*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

Penguin

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

4Thestate

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

Abacus

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

Virago Modern Classics

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

Harper

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...

Tracy Chevalier

Harper

This book "centres on Vermeer's prosperous household in Delft in the 1660s. The appointment of the quiet, perceptive heroine of the novel, the servant Griet, gradually throws the household into turmoil as Vermeer and Griet become increasingly intimate, an increasingly tense situation that culminates in her working for Vermeer as his assistant, and ultimately sitting for him as ...

Dennis Cooper

Penguin

"Cooper deserves reassessment . . . this compelling page-turner ought to remind adventurous readers that important transgressive literature needn't be something only the French and the occasional perverted American can get behind."-LA Weekly Set largely on the pages of a website where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, emails, and con...

Daphne Du Maurier

Virago Modern Classics

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...

Donna Tartt

Penguin

Harriet grows up haunted by the murder of her brother. His killer was never identified. Harriet lives largely in the world of her imagination, alone even in company. Then one day she decides to find his murderer and exact her revenge. ...