Contemporary fiction Books 1151 results

Saou Ichikawa

'A must-read debut. Funny and frank, this book lingers in the mind long after you turn the final page' BBC Books of 2025 Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka Isawa has severe spine curvature and uses an electric wheelchair and ventilator. Within the limits of her care home, her life is lived online: she studies, she tweets indignantly, she posts outrageous stories on ...

Holly Brickley

Good songs come from love. Great songs come from heartbreak. Picked by Cosmopolitan and RED as a best book of 2025. Picked by The Bookseller as Book of the Month for March 2025 ------------------------------------------- 'Tender as a ballad and pleasurable as a pop song' COCO MELLORS 'Clever and heart-wrenching and addictive' MIRANDA COWLEY HELLER 'An incredibly special book'...

Elif Shafak

The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted, internationally bestselling author of The Island of Missing Trees and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World ***** There Are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel set between the 19th century and modern times, about love and loss, memory and erasure, hurt and healing, centred around three enchanting characters living on th...

David Szalay

'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey 'Spare, visceral, urgent, compelling. This book doesn't f**k around' Gary Stevenson 'So brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money' David Nicholls 'How do I get out of a reading slump? This is the book to do that' Rhianna Dhillon, BBC Radio 4 Through chance, luck and choice, one man's life takes him from a modest apartment in Hung...

George. Orwell

Animal Farm is one of the most famous warnings ever written. Orwell's immortal satire - 'against Stalin' as he wrote to his French translator - can be read on many levels. With its piercing clarity and deceptively simple style it is no surprise that this novel is required reading for schoolchildren and politicians alike. This fable of the steadfast horses Boxer and Clover, the ...

Laila Lalami

'A gripping, Kafkaesque foray into an all-too-plausible future ... An elegant meditation on identity, motherhood, and what we sacrifice, unthinkingly, for the sake of convenience' JENNIFER EGAN 'Extraordinary ... More than just a political warning; the book is an exploration of the psyche itself, the strange ungovernable forces of fate and emotion that make us human' RUMAAN AL...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A sweeping story about four women whose lives are shaped by love, longing, and pain. Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in the US who is unlucky in love and coping with the pandemic on her own. Zikora, is a successful lawyer living in Washington DC who finds herself, unexpectedly, a heartbroken single mother. Omelogor is a scholar researching pornography for a Master's...

Kate Atkinson

THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER THE NEW JACKSON BRODIE NOVEL, FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SHRINES OF GAIETY 'How delicious to have Jackson Brodie back, this time in a story that starts off in Agatha Christie's world but soon becomes a landscape that could only have been crafted from the pen of the incomparable Kate Atkinson' Ian Rankin 'Christie would be proud . . . I defy...

Virginia Feito

NOW BEING ADAPTED FOR A MAJOR FILM STARRING MARGARET QUALLEY'Simmering with rage, propulsive and laugh-out-loud funny' CATRIONA WARD'Weird and wonderful' LUCY MANGAN, GUARDIAN Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect Victorian governess. She'll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating chil...

Mizuki Tsujimura

THE UNFORGETTABLE MILLION-COPY JAPANESE BESTSELLER BY THE AUTHOR OF LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR 'Recalls early Murakami. An enchanting read' FT ____________ Readers are obsessed: 'Every word resonated in my heart' ***** Reader review' 'Perfect for anyone who loves to think deeply about what they have just read' ***** Reader review 'Makes you ponder about death and about life' ...

Tash Aw

'A mesmerising tale. Both heartbreaking and joyful' MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM A radiant novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer - about family, desire, and what we inherit - from celebrated author Tash Aw. 'Shimmeringly intelligent and elegiacally intimate' YIYUN LI CHOSEN AS A TIMES, GUARDIAN and FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF 2025. When his grandfath...

Ursula K. Le Guin

She chose love. The price she paid was war. A stunning combination of history and mythology - 'an intriguing, luxuriously realised novel' FINANCIAL TIMES READERS on LAVINIA: 'Utterly compelling' ????? 'Clever twist' ????? 'Super' ????? 'Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wo...

Coco Mellors

'IT MOVED ME DEEPLY' LIV LITTLE 'DEEPLY POIGNANT' HARPERS BAZAAR 'GORGEOUS' RAVEN LEILANI THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN ...

Lucy Steeds

'A blaze of a book, poetic, passionate and quietly powerful' Daily Mail 'The year's most lauded debut novelist . . . A sultry, headily perfumed portrait of monstrous male egos and oppressed overlooked women . . . The Artist uncovers its secrets by stealth' Telegraph 'Dextrous and powerful . . . a hugely accomplished portrait of ambition and self-fulfilment' Guardian 'The Art...

Sanam Mahloudji

'The word-of-mouth breakout' STYLIST 'As funny as it is moving' GUARDIAN 'A joy of a debut' DAVID MITCHELL 'Mesmerising' MONICA ALI 'Glorious' SARAH WINMAN 'Funny and profound' TASH AW 'Wonderful' MARIAN KEYES A stunning debut novel following five women from three generations of a once illustrious Iranian family as their lives are turned upside down Meet the women of the Valiat...

Tony Tulathimutte

'A thrill for the sickos among us' JIA TOLENTINO 'Utterly inimitable' RAVEN LEILANI 'Unrelentingly brutal and gut-bustingly funny and spares no one' CARMEN MARIA MACHADO 'Symbiotically serious and funny' MEGAN NOLAN 'The funniest, darkest thing' ST VINCENT LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION An audacious and original novel-in-stories following a cast of int...

Maggie Su

'Witty and wild' Harper's Bazaar 'A strange but uniquely beautiful concept of a love story that delves into care, compassion and what it is to be human' Stylist 'This is a sharp, funny and poignant look at what it means to connect with another being, and yourself' Weike Wang, New York Times A hilarious and moving debut novel about a young woman who decides to turn a sentient ...

Sarah Handyside

'We've all done this. We know what it feels like. We can write it down.'A beautiful, razor-sharp debut by Sarah Handyside, Instructions for Heartbreak is a life-affirming novel about female friendship, self-love and how to survive a broken heart.What if heartbreak came with a manual?It starts with a late-night knock on the door. Thirty-something best friends Dee, Liv and Rosa s...

Edmund White

'Trousers down from page one ... NSFW' THE TIMES 'The gayest book ever written' HENRY HOKE, author of Open Throat 'Daddy's diary fully delivers' JEREMY ATHERTON LIN, author of Gay Bar --------------------------------------------With his trademark wit, candour and relentlessly perceptive eye, Edmund White, the beloved 85-year-old 'paterfamilias of queer literature' (New York Tim...

Molly Keane

We kept our heads above the morass, stifled screaming despairs only by the exercise of Good Behaviour. Behind the gates of Temple Alice, the aristocratic St Charles family is sinking into a state of decaying grace. Aroon, the unlovely daughter of the house, silently longs for affection - which she receives neither from her icy mother nor her hunting-obsessed father.The fierce f...

Layne Fargo

To the world, they were a scandal. To each other, an obsession. 'Part Wuthering Heights and part Daisy Jones and the Six . . . As brilliantly choreographed as a gold-medal performance' JODI PICOULT Everyone thinks Heath Rocha was my first love. He wasn't. My first love was figure skating. Katarina Shaw has always known she's destined to become an Olympic skater. When she mee...

Aria Aber

A portrait of the artist as a young woman in a Berlin that can't escape its history: an electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery 'Kaleidoscopic, full of style and soul' Raven Leilani 'A must-read ... Dark, breathtaking, profound, so fresh' Guardian 'A no-bullshit must-read debut' Kaveh Akbar In Berl...

Katherine Mezzacappa

"I am dead, my Mary; the man who loved you body and soul lies in some dishonorable grave." In County Down, Ireland, in 1767, a nobleman secretly marries his servant, in defiance of law, class, and religion. Can their love survive tumultuous times? An impoverished tenant farmer sends his seventeen-year-old daughter Mary into service at the home of his Ascendancy landlord. ...

Hisham Matar

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2024 WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION FROM THE PULITZER-PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF THE RETURN 'A brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family and exile' COLM TOIBIN Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to ret...

William Hussey (Horror Fiction Writer) / Ben Tomlinson

At just nineteen, Stephen has already survived a year at the front. Now he is returning to the trenches to lead a platoon, despite his wounds. Broken-hearted from the loss of his first love, Stephen wonders what he's fighting for. Then he meets Private Danny McCormick, a smart, talented young recruit whose strong opinions will surely get him into trouble. From their first meeti...

Dylin Hardcastle

1972. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, Australia, two teenage girls must each make a choice: to act upon their desires or suppress them? To live an openly queer life or to try desperately not to? Over the following three decades, these girls grow into women and live out their decisions, always almost crossing paths at pivotal moments. In an era that spans Australia's first...

Kate. Folk

Taylor Jenkins Reid

Susan Choi

'Ferociously smart and full of surprises' Eleanor Catton 'Instantly bewitching' Jennifer Egan 'A rich generational saga that teems with intelligence' Financial Times The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, ranging from post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father ta...

Susan Muaddi Darraj

Behind You Is the Sea is a compelling debut that fearlessly challenges stereotypes surrounding Palestinian culture. 'Intergenerational differences ... are explored from both sides with keen-eyed humanity and understanding' Marie Claire 'Funny and beautifully written' Stylist Magazine 'A rich panoply of a community' Crack Magazine Book of the Month 'Wonderful ... A novel abo...