Contemporary fiction Books 1240 results

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...

Hanif Kureishi

One night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen, and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the noises growing louder. I am sure they are making love in Zenab's bedroom which is next to mine. Waldo, a fêted filmmaker, is confined by old age and ill health to his London apartment. Frail and frustrated, he is cared for by his lovely younger wife, Zee. But when he suspects...

Madeline Miller

From the Orange Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author of The Song of Achilles comes the powerful story of the mythological witch Circe, inspired by Homer's OdysseyChosen as must-read book of 2018 by the Guardian, Independent, Mail on Sunday, Sunday Express and StylistIn the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe ha...

Margaret Atwood

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs. Brilliantly conceived and executed, this powerful evocation of twenty-first...

Mercè Rodoreda

The narrator, a fourteen-year-old boy, describes the cruel customs of a village, including the horrible death of his father, and spends time with a prisoner who explains the strange events in the village. ...

Lisa See

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa See, "one of those special writers capable of delivering both poetry and plot" (The New York Times Book Review), a moving novel about tradition, tea farming, and the bonds between mothers and daughters.In their remote mountain village, Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. For the Akha p...

Clarice Lispector

'The morning became a long, drawn-out afternoon that became depthless night dawning innocently through the house' Tales of desire and madness from this giant of Brazilian literature. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavou...

Daphne Du Maurier / Anon

Dispatch the maimed, the old, the weak, destroy the very world itself, for what is the point of life if the promise of fulfilment lies elsewhere? On the windswept coast of rural Suffolk, a deranged scientist attempts to extract the essence of life itself. ...

Elizabeth Acevedo

Winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award!Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth. Xiom...

Chigozie Obioma

In a small town in western Nigeria, four young brothers - the youngest is nine, the oldest fifteen - use their strict father's absence from home to go fishing at a forbidden local river. They encounter a dangerous local madman who predicts that the oldest brother will be killed by another. This prophecy breaks their strong bond and unleashes a tragic chain of events of almost m...

Elif Batuman

"A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begi...

Cormac Mccarthy

In the vanishing world of the Old West, two cowboys begin an epic adventure, and their own coming-of-age stories. In All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole's search for a future takes him across the Mexican border to a job as a ranch hand and an ill-fated romance. ...

Ottessa Moshfegh

'Razor-sharp' Zadie Smith An electrifying, prizewinning short story collection from the Booker-shortlisted author of Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous while also being delightful - and often even weirdly hilarious. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet; all yearni...

Dave Eggers

THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER 'The mirror image of Eggers's brilliantly dystopian The Circle... [A] state of the nation novel, cleansing the spirit and lifting the heart' Guardian A hilarious and heart-warming misadventure through modern America: it's time for the family vacation... Josie's life is falling apart - lawsuits raining down, her business down the drain and a ...

Margaret Drabble

A celebration of the drama and intensity of the mother-child relationship, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one night stand. Although si...

Liane Moriarty

DISCOVER THE GRIPPING NO. 1 BESTSELLER BEHIND THE AWARD WINNING HBO SENSATION STARRING REESE WITHERSPOON, NICOLE KIDMAN & MERYL STREEP____________Perfect families, perfect houses, perfect lives.Three mothers, Jane, Madeline and Celeste appear to have it all, until they find out just how easy it is for one little lie to spiral out of control . . . Single mum Jane has just moved ...

Elizabeth Strout

A #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE & THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION An exquisite story of mothers and daughters from the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge Lucy is recovering from an operation in a New York hospital when she wakes to find her estranged mother sitting by her bed. They have not seen one another in years. As they tal...

Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby's internationally bestselling first novel, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time.Do you know your desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups? Rob does. He keeps a list, in fact. But Laura isn't on it - even though she's just become his latest ex. He's got his life back, you see. He can just do what he wants when he wants: like listen to...

Deborah Levy

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2016 SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016 Plunge into this hypnotic tale of female sexuality and power - from the author of Swimming Home and The Man Who Saw Everything 'Propulsive, uncanny, dreamlike. A feverish coming-of-age novel' Daily Telegraph 'A triumph of storytelling' Literary Review_________________________________ 'Today I dro...

Hisham Matar

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHYWINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES' TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2016 The Return is at once a un...

Jon Fosse

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023One of Jon Fosse's most acclaimed novels, Boathouse features an unnamed narrator who leads a hermit-like existence until he unexpectedly encounters a long-lost childhood friend and his wife. Part stream-of-consciousness metafictive exercise, part gripping crime novel, Boathouse slowly unravels the story of a love triangle to revea...

Isabel Allende

INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE JAPANESE LOVER A captivating collection of short fiction by one of the most beloved writers of our time Eva Luna is a young woman whose powers as a storyteller bring her friendship and love. Lying in bed with her lover, European refugee and journalist Rolf Carlé, Eva answers his request for a story 'you have never told anyone before...

Ariana Harwicz

Now a Major Motion Picture Man Booker International Prize 2018 FinalistIn a forgotten patch of French countryside, a woman is battling her demons: embracing exclusion yet wanting to belong, craving freedom whilst feeling trapped, yearning for family life but wanting to burn the entire house down. Given surprising leeway by her family for her increasingly erratic behaviour, she ...

Alan Hollinghurst

"From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Man Booker Prize, a masterly new novel that spans seven transformative decades in England--from the 1940s to the present--as it plumbs the richly complex relationships of a remarkable family. In 1940, David Sparsholt arrives at Oxford to study engineering, though his sights are set on joining the Royal Air Force. Handsome, athle...

John Boyne

Forced to flee the scandal brewing in her hometown, Catherine Goggin finds herself pregnant and alone, in search of a new life at just sixteen. She knows she has no choice but to believe that the nun she entrusts her child to will find him a better life. Cyril Avery is not a real Avery, or so his parents are constantly reminding him. Adopted as a baby, he's never quite felt at ...

Min Jin Lee

"In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Ja...

M. L. Rio

If We Were Villains is a smart, upmarket literary page-turner in the tradition of The Secret History Oliver Marks has just served ten years for the murder of one of his closest friends - a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he's released, he's greeted by the detective who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know wh...

Yaa Gyasi

"Homegoing is an inspiration." --Ta-Nehisi Coates An unforgettable New York Times bestseller of exceptional scope and sweeping vision that traces the descendants of two sisters across three hundred years in Ghana and America. A riveting kaleidoscopic debut novel and the beginning of a major career: Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing is a novel about race, history, ancestry, love and time, ...

Leonard Gardner

Stockton, California. When two men meet in the gym - the ex-boxer Billy Tully and the novice Ernie Munger - their brief sparring session sets in motion their hidden fates, initiating young Munger into the 'company of men' and luring Tully back into training. 'Fat City' tells of their anxieties and hopes, their loves and losses, and the stubborn determination of their manager, R...