Contemporary fiction Books 1151 results

V. E. Schwab

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERUSA TODAY BESTSELLER NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLERTHE WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLERRecommended by Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, NPR, Slate, and Oprah Magazine #1 Library Reads Pick—October 2020#1 Indie Next Pick—October 2020BOOK OF THE YEAR (2020) FINALIST—Book of The Month ClubA "Best Of" Book From: Oprah Mag * CNN * Amazon * Amazon Editors * NPR * Goodr...

Sophie Ranald

'Absolutely brilliant... I devoured it in a few hours because it was impossible to put down... Be prepared for a rollercoaster of emotions... Had me laughing all the way through... Perfect.' Goodreads Reviewer Is this all there is? I scraped the last dregs of Caramel Chew Chew ice cream out of the bottom of the tub with my finger and licked it. It left a sticky smear on my pho...

Isabella Hammad

'A sublime reading experience- delicate, restrained, surpassingly intelligent, uncommonly poised and truly beautiful' Zadie Smith **WINNER OF THE BETTY TRASK AWARD 2020** Midhat Kamal - dreamer, romantic, aesthete - leaves Palestine in 1914 to study medicine in France, under the tutelage of Dr Molineu. He falls deeply in love with Jeannette, the doctor's daughter. But Midhat ...

Taylor Jenkins Reid

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • OVER TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD! A gripping novel about the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous breakup—from the author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Malibu Rising, and Carrie Soto Is BackREESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK • NOW AN EMMY AWARD-NOMINATED ORIGINAL STREAMING SERI...

Taylor Jenkins Reid

"Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it's the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she's twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things....

Virginie Despentes

'I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the frigid, the unfucked and the unfuckables, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh, and for all those guys who don't want to be protectors, for those who would like to be but don't know how, for those who are not ambitious, competitive, or well-endowed. Because this ideal of the seductive white woman c...

Yoko Ogawa

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers. 'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times 'A dreamlike story of dystopia' Jia Tolentino __________ Hat, ribbon, bird rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in t...

Nicholson Baker

The Mezzanine is the story of one man's lunch hour. Pondering life's littlest questions - why does one shoelace always wear out before the other? Whatever happened to the paper drinking straw - our narrator interrogates the inner-workings of corporate living as he traipses his way down escalators to the first floor and through the mundaneness of office life. Mixing humour with ...

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time ... From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold comes a story of four new customers each of whom is hoping to take advantage of Cafe Funiculi Funicula's...

James Kelman

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE‘A passionate, scintillating, brilliant song of a book'GuardianSammy's had a bad week.Most of it's just a blank space in his mind, and the bits that he can remember, he'd rather not. His wallet's gone, along with his new shoes, he's been arrested then beaten up by the police and thrown out on the street - and he's just gone blind. He remembers a row wi...

Marjan Kamali

1953, Tehran. Roya loves nothing better than to while away the hours in the local stationery shop run by Mr. Fakhri. The store, stocked with fountain pens, shiny ink bottles, and thick pads of writing paper, also carries translations of literature from all over the world. And when Mr. Fakhri introduces her to his other favorite customer -- handsome Bahman, with his burning pass...

Elizabeth Hardwick

First published in 1979, 'Sleepless Nights' is a collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. It is more than the story of a life: it is Elizabeth Hardwick's experience of womanhood in the twentieth century. Escaping her childhood home of Kentucky, the narrator arrives at a bohemian hotel in Manhattan filled with 'drunks, actors, gamblers - love and ...

Fredrik Backman

The captivating and moving follow-up to the international bestseller Beartown, from the 18 million copy bestselling author of Anxious People and A Man Called Ove 'I utterly believed in the residents of Beartown, and felt ripped apart by the events in the book' Jojo Moyes on Beartown________ Can a broken town survive a second tragedy?By the time the last goal is scored, someone ...

Benjamin Myers

____________________ The inspiration for the BBC TV series, directed by Shane Meadows and starring Tom Burke, George MacKay and Thomas Turgoose WINNER OF THE 2018 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE ____________________ 'Powerful, visceral writing, historical fiction at its best. Benjamin Myers is one to watch' - Pat Barker 'Phenomenal' - Sebastian Barry 'Superb' - The Times ______________...

Akwaeke Emezi

An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that i...

Rebecca Makkai

A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gal...

Antonio Iturbe

For readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Choice: this is the story of the smallest library in the world - and the most dangerous. 'It wasn't an extensive library. In fact, it consisted of eight books and some of them were in poor condition. But they were books. In this incredibly dark place, they were a reminder of less sombre times, when words rang out more loudly th...

Sayaka Murata

Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what t...

Larry Mitchell

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is a beloved queer utopian text written by Larry Mitchell with lush illustrations by Ned Asta, published by Calamus Press in 1977. Part-fable, part-manifesto, the book takes place in Ramrod, an empire in decline, and introduces us to the communities of the faggots, the women, the queens, the queer men, and the women who love wom...

Saleem Haddad

"Set over the course of twenty-four hours, Guapa follows Rasa, a gay man living amid the political and social upheaval of an unnamed Arab country. Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. One night Rasa's grandmother - the woman who raised him - catches them in bed together. The follo...

Rachel Cusk

"Stella Benson sets off for Hilltop, a tiny Sussex village housing a family that is somewhat larger than life. Her hopes for the Maddens may be high, but her station among them, as au pair to their irascible son Martin - is undeniably low. What could possibly have driven her to leave her home, job and life in London for such rural ignominy? Why has she severed all contact with ...

Ian Mcewan

Kafka meets The Thick Of It in a bitingly funny new political satire from Ian McEwan That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature. Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain - and ...

Andrew Holleran

'Astonishingly beautiful... The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation' Harpers 'A life changing read for me. Describes a New York that has completely disappeared and for which I longed - stuck in closed-on-Sunday's London' Rupert Everett Young, divinely beautiful and tired of living a lie, Anthony Malone trades life as a seemingly straight, small town lawyer for ...

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

What would you change if you could go back in time? In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café?...

Ian Mcewan

The fortieth anniversary edition of Ian McEwan's first book, now with an introduction from the authorForty years on from first publication, these stories display McEwan's dazzling early talent. Taut, brooding and densely atmospheric, they are stories of sex and loneliness, adolescence and incest, love and murder, and they linger in the mind long after they are finished. This sp...

Fredrik Backman

Holiday novella about a man who sacrificed his family in the single-minded pursuit of success and the courageous little girl fighting for her life who crosses his path. It all begins with a father telling a story to his son on Christmas Eve. But this isn't your typical Christmas story. The father admits to his son that he's taken a life but he won't say whose--not yet. One week...

Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Written over the course of Fernando Pessoa's life, it was first published in 1982, pieced together from the thousands of individual manuscript pages left behind by Pessoa after his death in 1935. Now this fragmentary modernist masterpiece appears in a major new edition that unites Margaret Jull Co...

Dan Brown

Sunday Times #1 Bestseller New York Times #1 Bestseller The global bestseller - Origin is the latest Robert Langdon novel from the author of The Da Vinci Code. 'Fans will not be disappointed' The Times Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconology, arrives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to attend the unveiling of an astonishing scientific breakthr...

Chris Kraus

"It's 1996, and Chris Kraus is in Berlin, seeking a distributor for her film Gravity & Grace, described alternately as 'an experimental 16mm film about hope, despair, religious feeling and conviction' and 'an amateur intellectual's home video expanded to bulimic lengths'... It's 1942 in Marseille, and Simone Weil is waiting for the US entry visa that will save her from the Holo...

Penelope Fitzgerald

Soon to be a major motion film, starring Bill Nighy, Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson. In a small East Anglian town, Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop -- the only bookshop -- in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shop...