Contemporary fiction Books 1240 results

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...

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...

Miye Lee

'Readers can't get enough of this enchanting story' The Sun 'A delightful journey into a fantasy realm where dreams make everything better' Daily Mail 'Hugely inventive and wise, we adored this heart-lifting adventure' Heat Magazine THE NO.1 KOREAN BESTSELLER WITH OVER A MILLION COPIES SOLD It has been a year since Penny first walked through the doors of DallerGut Dr...

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'...

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...

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...

Larry Mcmurtry

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Immerse yourself in the gritty realism of the American Frontier in Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty - a powerful, triumphant tribute to the American West and a masterful epic from the screenwriter of Brokeback Mountain. This is the story of a group of audacious cowboys on a perilous cattle drive across the sprawling wilderness, from Texa...

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...

Fredrik Backman

The beautiful new novel that will make you laugh and cry, from the global bestselling author of Anxious People and A Man Called Ove. 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... * ONE OF GOODREADS READERS' MOST ANTICIPAT...

Matt Haig

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'A beautiful novel full of life-affirming wonder and imagination' BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH'What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don't understand yet . . .'When retired Maths teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way tick...

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...

Jeremy Atherton Lin

A Book of the Year for The New Yorker and Electric Lit and a Time Out 10 Best Books of 2025 From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Gay Bar comes a rule-breaking, genre-busting story of outlaw love. It's 1996, and Jeremy, a young American, has met the British boy of his dreams -- just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage ...

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...

Taylor Jenkins Reid

'Thrilling ... heartbreaking ... uplifting. Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel Atmosphere is the fast-paced, emotionally-charged story of one ambitious young woman, finding both her voice and her passion ... I loved it' KRISTIN HANNAH, author of The Women 'NASA? Space missions? The 80s? This is a collection of all the things I love. Great story, excellent research and accuracy, and a...

Hiro Arikawa

THE INSTANT TIMES BESTSELLER DISCOVER YOUR NEXT FEELGOOD JAPANESE NOVEL, BY THE AUTHOR OF THE TRAVELLING CAT CHRONICLES Over 1.4 million copies sold in Japan 'You will be wrapped in laughter and tears' Reader review***** 'What I love about it is its Kindness' Reader review***** 'I wanted to tap the shoulders of the characters' Reader review***** 'Imagine Murder on the Orient...

Daniel Kehlmann

An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen. G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks ...

Sally Rooney

THE GLOBAL #1 BESTSELLER AN IRISH TIMES TOP 100 IRISH BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY A BEST BOOK OF 2024 IN THE GUARDIAN, TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, IRISH TIMES, LONDON STANDARD, INDEPENDENT, OBSERVER, NEW STATESMAN, iNEWS, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, THE SKINNY, CITY AM, DAILY MAIL, AND THE CONVERSATION 'I read it in a state of rapture.' SUNDAY TIMES 'A tender, funny page-turner.' OBSERVER 'Co...

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...