Contemporary fiction Books 1151 results

Seon-Ran Cheon

A bestseller in Korea, a biting, fast-paced vampire murder mystery exploring queer love and the consequences of loneliness. When four isolated elderly people die back-to-back at the same hospital by jumping out of the sixth-floor window, Su-Yeon doesn't understand why she's the only one at her precinct that seems to care. But her colleagues at the police force dismiss the case...

Phoenicia Rogerson

'With its sharply witty prose, Aphrodite perfectly captures the charm and chaos of the Greek gods' Rosie Hewlett From the author of Herc, a Waterstones Best Book of the Year 'A joyful exploration of one woman's quest for home, power, identity and ultimately, freedom from fate. A genuine pleasure to read!' Clare North, author of Ithaca 'With sharp dialogue and dynamic scenes, ...

Emily Slapper

'Thought-provoking and beautifully written' Daily Mail 'Strangely compelling' The Times 'Astonishing. If you like Sally Rooney, read this book' Hattie Williams (Look at these two. They have been sure that their fate is in their own hands - they have been desperate to believe this - and now they are learning it is not. The ending is a pivotal moment in their story.) Noa is des...

Andrev Walden

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE AUGUST PRIZE 2023 'Bloody awful? Bloody brilliant, more like' Daily Telegraph I'm fizzing. I love not being his son. Yes. I can feel it in my whole body. A great thrill - as if an adventure has begun. As if I'm the boy in a book about a boy who finds out his dad is the king of a magical and distant land. Christmas, 1983. In the afte...

Yasuhiko Nishizawa

A subversively cozy Japanese crime novel with an ingenious Groundhog Day twist: a teenager's time-loop race to solve—and possibly prevent—his grandfather's murder!Contemporary Japanese legend Yasuhiko Nishizawa makes his English-language debut with this slick, funny murder mystery which adds a sci-fi twist to an age-old setup: a murder in a wealthy family with an inheritance at...

Irvine Welsh

Choose life. Choose love? The Trainspotting crew fall for rave and romance in the blazing new novel from the No.1 bestseller. * A Guardian and Standard 'Book to Look Out For' 2025 * It is the late 1980s, the closing years of Thatcher's Britain. For the Trainspotting crew, a new era is about to begin - a time for hope, for love, for raving. Leaving heroin behind and separated...

Sanaka Hiiragi

Sanaka Hiiragi's The Lantern of Lost Memories is a healing, uplifting Japanese novel about family, love, loss and humanity, and what life is really about. One photograph, one treasured memory, one chance to go back . . . Imagine waking up in a cosy photo studio in the mountains, between this world and the next. A kind man hands you a hot drink and a stack of photographs, one ...

Michael Cisco

Weird fiction icon and award-winning author Michael Cisco's Black Brane, begins with the physical pain of a bad foot and later voyages into absurdity, mad science, occultism, and existential dread. A man lying in a bed of pain flees from physical torment into his own memories, and into speculations about life and reality. He was, once, employed by the Temporary Institute for th...

Olivia Petter

'Addictive writing wrapped up in a compelling page turner that makes you deeply think and feel' YOMI ADEGOKE 'An incisive new voice in fiction' COCO MELLORS We give celebrities a power they don't deserve. Power they haven't earned. What happens when they exploit it? Imagine you've just spent the night with the most famous man on the planet. Except you don't quite remember it....

Sarah Maclean

'Deliciously impossible to put down' JODI PICOULT 'Powerful, tragic, and beautiful. Is there anything Sarah MacLean can't do?' ASHLEY POSTON From bestselling author Sarah MacLean comes a sharp, sexy novel about a family's long-overdue reckoning with hidden desires, destructive secrets . . . and one week that threatens to tear them apart. Alice Storm isn't like her siblings. W...

Tj Klune

Set in the dreamy backwoods of Oregon, Brothersong is a queer, paranormal romance of burning passion and pack loyalty, and is the fourth book in the Green Creek series. In the ruins of Caswell, Maine, Carter Bennett glimpsed the truth of what had been right in front of him the entire time. And then it was ripped away from him. Desperate for answers, Carter takes to the road, ...

Dawn O'porter

*FEARLESS, FRANK & VERY FUNNY - HONEYBEE IS THE MUST-READ BOOK OF THE SUMMER* 'A gorgeous celebration of female friendship' ELIZABETH DAY 'I love the way Dawn writes' MATT HAIG 'A lot of fun... a fabulous confection' JACQUELINE WILSON ______________________________________________________________ A woman needs her hive Renée is chasing a dream career, and feels like an impost...

Maria Reva

* LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025 * An unforgettable debut novel about the journey of three women and one extremely endangered snail through contemporary Ukraine 'A fierce and funny road-trip novel' GUARDIAN, the 50 hottest books to read right now 'Inventive and playful' SUNDAY TIMES 'A stunning debut' OBSERVER 'I was gripped . . . Brilliant' DAILY MAIL 'A thrilling ride'...

Aisha Muharrar

'THE FUNNIEST BOOK YOU'LL EVER READ ABOUT GRIEF' MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD 'PERFECTLY CAPTURES THE MESSINESS, HEARTACHE AND BEAUTY OF GRIEF' RED MAGAZINE 'For years I'd known exactly who I was to Gabe. It was a long story but I could tell it confidently, like a bartender sharing a recipe for her signature cocktail. Now things were so jumbled, I didn't know where to begin...' When Juli...

Haruki Murakami

The haunting, enigmatic love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar in Japan, and is his bestselling title throughout the world Autumn 1969, and soon I would be 20. When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student d...

Agnes Arnold-Forster

'Absorbing' - The Guardian 'Illuminating' - Vogue 'Fascinating' - Pandora Sykes In Nostalgia, historian Agnes Arnold-Forster blends neuroscience and psychology with the history of medicine and emotions to explore the evolution of nostalgia from seventeenth-century Switzerland (when it was held to be an illness that could, quite literally, kill you) to the present day (when it ...

Tom Newlands

Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2025 'Absolutely loved this. Funny and heartbreaking in equal measure' DOUGLAS STUART, Man Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain 'Glorious . . . so unusual, so moving, so memorable' GUARDIAN 'Tom Newlands may make several prize lists for his stunning debut' OBSERVER 'This isn't just a great first novel; it's a great novel. And Cora...

Elizabeth Strout

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING, BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2025 'Stunning, deeply felt and profoundly intelligent' Guardian It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing hi...

Stephen Fry

Troy has fallen. After 10 years of war, the Greeks make their way back to their own lands - but what homes now await them? Agamemnon must return to his wife Clytemnestra, who has been nursing her rage since he sacrificed their daughter to the gods for a favourable wind. Her revenge will know no bounds. Meanwhile, Odysseus has angered the god Poseidon and he is cursed to wander...

Barbara Demick

In 2000, a Chinese woman gave birth to twins in a bamboo grove, trying to avoid detection by the government because she already had two daughters. Two years later, an American couple travelled to Shaoyang to adopt a Chinese toddler they thought had been abandoned. Their understanding had been that China's brutal one-child policy was leading to hundreds of abandoned girls, despe...

Fredrik Backman

#1 New York Times bestselling author Fredrik Backman returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger's life twenty-five years later. Most people don't even notice them--three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings...

Allegra Goodman

A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in a deeply moving novel of love, faith and survival, for readers of Ariel Lawhon and Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See In sixteenth-century France, as the heiress to an aristocratic fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of privilege. Then she is orphaned, and her enigmatic and volatile guardian squanders h...

Taylor Jenkins Reid

AN EPIC NOVEL SET AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF THE 1980S SPACE SHUTTLE PROGRAM ABOUT THE EXTRAORDINARY LENGTHS WE GO TO LIVE AND LOVE BEYOND OUR LIMITS. In the summer of 1980, astrophysics professor Joan Goodwin begins training to be an astronaut at Houston's Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond; mission specialists J...

Claire Messud

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 'An epic family odyssey' Guardian, Book of the Day Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the Cassar family is buffeted by conflict, struggling to find its feet - separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History ...

Sarah Moss

'The achievement of a lifetime' - Jessie Burton, author of The House of Fortune 'A book of lasting pleasures' - Eleanor Catton, Booker Prize-winning author of Birnam Wood 'A powerful and beautifully written story of family, friendship and identity' - Guardian Just out of school and teetering on the brink of adulthood, Edith is sent alone to rural Italy. Her task is simple: sup...

Thomas Grattan

Longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Named one of the Best Books of 2024 by Glamour and one of them's Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2024. RuPaul and Eric Cervini's Allstora Book Club Pick for June."A novel that should become the touchstone of a whole generation." —Edmund WhiteIt's 2001, and twenty-four-year-old Gordon—handsome, sensitive, and eager for direction—takes a bus ...

Lisa Ridzén

WINNER OF THE SWEDISH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024 SHORTLISTED for ADLIBRIS BEST DEBUT and for BEST FICTION of the Year 'The kind of book you give to someone when you're really trying to say "I've been thinking about you" but don't know how.' Fredrik Backman, bestselling author of A Man Called Ove 'A book that will echo in your soul' Garth Stein 'As if Fredrik Backman's Ove h...

Ocean Vuong

THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER AND TIKTOK SENSATION A Most Anticipated Book in Guardian, Financial Times, Sunday Times Style, BBC, GQ, New York Times and AnOther Desperate college dropout Hai is ready to make a devastating choice until a chance meeting with elderly widow Grazina changes the course of his life, in this achingly beautiful novel about chosen family and second chanc...

Jeanine Cummins

From the internationally bestselling author of American Dirt, comes a classic novel of a family in crisis 'A riveting tale of three generations, this is storytelling at its finest' JOHN BOYNE, author of The Heart's Invisible Furies 'I loved this book... a big, sweeping story of family and identity, and what it means to belong' EDEL COFFEY, author of Breaking Point and In Her ...

Jessica Stanley

'LIKELY TO BE ONE OF THE BIG LOVE STORIES OF 2025' THE SUNDAY TIMES, Books to Look Out for in 2025 'I DIDN'T WANT IT TO END' LIANE MORIARTY, internationally bestselling author of BIG LITTLE LIES 'AS WARM AS A DAVID NICHOLLS NOVEL' STYLIST 'JOYFUL . . . I LOVED IT!' GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, Books to Watch in 2025 'CLEVER, JOYFUL AND SO FUNNY' NINA STIBBE, author of LOVE, NINA 'DEEPLY ...