Contemporary fiction Books 1151 results

Joyce Carol Oates

"In the waning days of the 1970s, the lives of several residents of Detroit and its affluent white suburbs are drawn together following the disappearance of yet another child. Hannah, a wife and mother, begins an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger; Mikey, a young street hustler, finds himself on an unexpected mission to rectify injustice; and then there's the child seria...

Shelby Van Pelt

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Soon to be a Netflix Film A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! NAMED A BEST BOOK OF SUMMER by: Chicago Tribune * The View * Southern Living * USA Today "Remarkably Bright Creatures [is] an ultimately feel-good but deceptively sensitive debut. . . . Memorable and tender." -- Washington Post For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, w...

Guadalupe Nettel

"Still Born is the story of two friends who make diametrically opposite choices in life. Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have ever built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura has taken the drastic decision to be sterilised, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother. When ...

Hanya Yanagihara

Over one million copies sold Too many broken hearts to count 'A book unlike any other' - The Guardian 'This novel challenged everything I thought I knew about love and friendship' - Dua Lipa The million-copy bestseller, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance. JB, Jude, Malcolm and W...

Taylor Jenkins Reid

***NEW NOVEL ATMOSPHERE COMING JUNE 2025 - PREORDER NOW*** From the bestselling author of DAISY JONES & THE SIX and THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO 'Thank you Taylor Jenkins Reid for the escapism we all need- a sex-on-the-beach cocktail (quite literally) of a book' PANDORA SYKES 'I LOVE it . . . I can't remember the last time I read a book that was so fun' DOLLY ALDERTON ...

Colleen Hoover

A troubled young mother yearns for a shot at redemption in this heartbreaking yet hopeful story from #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover. After serving five years in prison for a tragic mistake, Kenna Rowan returns to the town where it all went wrong, hoping to reunite with her four-year-old daughter. But the bridges Kenna burned are proving impossible to rebuil...

Jennifer Saint

As Princesses of Crete and daughters of the fearsome King Minos, Ariadne and her sister Phaedra grow up hearing the hoofbeats and bellows of the Minotaur echo from the Labyrinth beneath the palace. The Minotaur - Minos's greatest shame and Ariadne's brother - demands blood every year. When Theseus, Prince of Athens, arrives in Crete as a sacrifice to the beast, Ariadne falls in...

Susannah Dickey

For fans of I MAY DESTROY YOU and FLEABAG and for readers who want to laugh and cry: the brave, beautiful, sometimes brutal story of a young misfit and her rocky road to womanhood, stopping at each year along the way.'I loved Tennis Lessons so much. Susannah is a phenomenally talented writer' ELIZABETH DAY'A raw, fierce, shockingly honest coming-of-age story' LOUISE O'NEILL 'In...

Heinrich Von Kleist

'I finished it in one sitting. Probably for the tenth time... it carries me along waves of wonder' Franz Kafka MICHAEL KOHLHAAS HAS BEEN WRONGED. HE WILL HAVE JUSTICE. Based on the real life of an ordinary horse-dealer cheated by a government official, Michael Kohlhaas is the darkly comical and magnificently weird story of one man's alienation from a corrupt legal system. When...

Barbara Kingsolver

A beautifully produced gift-edition of Barbara Kingsolver's luminous poetry - to appeal to her loyal fans and fiction readers more generally. ...

Charlie Kaufman

The bold and boundlessly original debut novel from the Oscar®-winning screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York. 'Riotously funny' New York Times 'Just as loopy and clever as his movies' Washington Post B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe sal...

Charlotte Mcconaghy

'An extraordinary novel... as beautiful and as wrenching as anything I've ever read' Emily St. John Mandel A dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive. Franny Stone is determined to go to the end of the earth, following the last of the Arctic terns on what may be their final migration to Antarctica. As animal populations plummet, Franny talks her way onto one of ...

Elizabeth Jane Howard

Beautifully and poignantly told, Marking Time is the second novel in Elizabeth Jane Howard's bestselling Cazalet Chronicles. Home Place, Sussex, 1939. As the shadows of the Second World War roll in, banishing the sunlit days of childish games and trips to the coast, a new generation of Cazalets take up the family's story. Louise, who dreams of becoming a great actress, finds he...

Elizabeth Jane Howard

Elegantly constructed and told with exceptional grace, The Light Years is a modern classic of twentieth-century English life and is the first novel in Elizabeth Jane Howard's extraordinary, bestselling family saga The Cazalet Chronicles.Every summer, the Cazalet brothers - Hugh, Edward and Rupert - return to the family home in the heart of the Sussex countryside with their wive...

Andrew O'hagan

"Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life. In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything tha...

Fredrik Backman

Things My Son Needs To Know About The World is a tender and funny series of letters from a new father to his son about one of life's most daunting experiences: parenthood From the 13 million copy internationally bestselling author of A Man Called Ove ________ 'You can be whatever you want to be, but that's nowhere near as important as knowing that you can be exactly who you ar...

Emily St. John Mandel

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events--the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea. "The perfect novel ... Freshly mysterious." --The Washington Post Vincent is a ba...

Lily King

#ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on TodayEmma Roberts Belletrist Book Club PickA New York Times Book Review's Group Text Selection"I loved this book not just from the first chapter or the first page but from the first paragraph... The voice is just so honest and riveting and insightful about creativity and life." --Curtis Sittenfeld An extraordinary new novel of art, l...

María Fernanda Ampuero

In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family's maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, charac...

Magda Szabó

A teenage girl's difficult journey towards adulthood in a time of war. "A school story for grownups that is also about our inability or refusal to protect children from history" SARAH MOSS "Of all Szabo's novels, Abigail deserves the widest readership. It's an adventure story, brilliantly written" TIBOR FISCHER Of all her novels, Magda Szabó's Abigail is indeed the most widel...

Claudia Piñeiro

SHORTLISTED for the International Booker Prize 2022 After Rita is found dead in a church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the s...

Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

The second, highly anticipated novel from Carnegie-shortlisted author Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock. Come on a journey across the rural American West . . . Meet the teenagers who live in the small towns across these states, separated by distance, but whose stories are woven together in the most unexpected of ways. Whether they are brought together by the spread of wildfire, by the pr...

Bolu Babalola

Bolu Babalola finds the most beautiful love stories from history and mythology and rewrites them with incredible new detail and vivacity in this debut collection. Focusing on the magical folktales of West Africa, Babalola also reimagines iconic Greek myths, ancient legends from the Middle East, and stories from countries that no longer exist in our world.A high-born Nigerian go...

Jenkins Reid, Taylor

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "If you're looking for a book to take on holiday this summer, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo has got all the glitz and glamour to make it a perfect beach read." --Bustle From the New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & the Six--an entrancing and "wildly addictive journey of a reclusive Hollywood starlet" (PopSugar) as she reflects on her ...

David Olusoga

'[A] comprehensive and important history of black Britain . . . Written with a wonderful clarity of style and with great force and passion.' - Kwasi Kwarteng, Sunday Times In this vital re-examination of a shared history, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga tells the rich and revealing story of the long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa and the...

Sally Rooney

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young - but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they de...

Ottessa Moshfegh

'When I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn.' This is the story of a woman with no name. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. Yet she longs to lose herself completely. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; w...

Kiley Reid

Laszlo Krasznahorkai

In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias - long-thought dead - returns, the villagers fall under his spell. Irimias sets about swindling the villagers out of a fortune...

Carmen Laforet

A modern Spanish classic, first published sixty years ago and translated into eighteen languages, now available in English with a preface by Mario Vargas Llosa. The novel conveys beautifully the spirit of war-torn, brutalized Barcelona. ...