Contemporary fiction Books 1151 results

Cormac Mccarthy

"Blood Meridian" is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightm...

J. D. Salinger

A collection of stories of loss and unsuppressed rage - in which the children are fragile, odd, and hyper-smart and the adults beaten down by circumstances. In "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Seymour Glass floats his beach mate Sybil on a raft and tells her that these creatures have a tragic flaw; if one swims into a hole filled with bananas, it will overeat until it's too fat ...

David Nicholls

'ONE DAY is destined to be a modern classic' - Daily MirrorTwenty years, two people, ONE DAY. The multi-million copy bestseller that captures the experiences of a generation.'I can imagine you at forty,' she said, a hint of malice in her voice. 'I can picture it right now.'He smiled without opening his eyes. 'Go on then.'15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet for the first time o...

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe is considered the father of African literature in English, the writer who 'opened the magic casements of African fiction' for an international readership. Following the 50th anniversary of the publication of his ground-breaking Things Fall Apart, Everyman republish Achebe's first and most famous novel alongside No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God, under the collect...

John Le Carré

From the master of spy thrillers, John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a gripping story of love and betrayal at the height of the Cold War. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an afterword by the author and an introduction by William Boyd, author of Any Human Heart. Alec Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying in th...

Betty Friedan

When Betty Friedan produced The Feminine Mystiquein 1963, she could not have realized how the discovery and debate of her contemporaries' general malaise would shake up society. Victims of a false belief system, these women were following strict social convention by loyally conforming to the pretty image of the magazines, and found themselves forced to seek meaning in their liv...

Mikhail Bulgakov

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL GLENNY With the ink still wet on his diploma, the twenty-five-year-old Dr Mikhail Bulgakov was flung into the depths of rural Russia which, in 1916-17, was still largely unaffected by such novelties as the motor car, the telephone or electric light. How his alter-ego copes (or fails to cope) with the new and often appalling responsibilities of a lone docto...

Jerome D. Salinger

De lotgevallen van een broer en zuster, beiden zoekend naar een innerlijk evenwicht. ...

Kathryn Stockett

Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the silver. Some lines will never be crossed. Aibileen is a black maid: smart, regal, and raising her seventeenth white child. Yet something shifted inside Aibileen the day her own son died while his bosses looked the other way. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is by some way the sassie...

Thomas Mallon

NOW A SHOWTIME LIMITED SERIES STARRING MATT BOMER, JONATHAN BAILEY, AND ALLISON WILLIAMS • A searing historical novel set in 1950s Washington, D.C.—a world of dominated by personalities like Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Joe McCarthy—and infused with political drama, unexpected humor, and heartbreak. • From the acclaimed author of Watergate and Up With the Sun "Crisp, buoyant pros...

Arturo P'rez-Reverte

A man lives alone in a watchtower by the sea. On the circular walls of the tower he is painting a grand mural - the timeless landscape of a battle. He is a former war photographer and the painting is his attempt to capture the photo he was never able to take; to encapsulate, in an instant, the meaning of war. But one day a stranger knocks on his door and announces that he has c...

Karen Russell

Charting loss, love, and the difficult art of growing up, these stories unfurl with wicked humour and insight. Two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab; a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to 'Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers' (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2,...

Junot Díaz

Junot Diaz Made His Remarkable Debut As A Writer With This Collection Of Stories That Move From The Barrios Of The Dominican Republic To The Struggling Urban Communities Of New Jersey. The Stories Are All Unflinching And Strong And Diaz'S Prose Crackles With An Electric Sense Of Discovery. In 'Ysrael', Two Brothers Hunt A Disfigured Boy Who Hides Behind A Mask; In 'No Face', Th...

Mary Shelley / Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

A deluxe edition of Mary Shelley's haunting adventure about ambition and modernity run amok. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American ReadNow a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova and cover art by Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes, Mary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man a...

Charles Frazier

Inman is a wounded soldier who walks away from the ravages of the war and back home to his pre-war sweetheart, Ada. Inman's odyssey through the devastated landscape of the soon-to-be-defeated South interweaves with Ada's struggle to survive her father's death and the loss of his income by reviving the family farm in the Cold Mountain community where she is an outsider. Based on...

David Foster Wallace

'A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian ...He can do anything with a piece of prose, and it is a humbling experience to see him go to work on what has passed up till now as 'modern fiction'. He's so modern he's in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us. Goddamn him' ZADIE SMITH A recognised master of form and a brilliant recorder of human behaviour, David Foster Wal...

Sylvia Plath

Esther Greenwood is at college and is fighting two battles, one against her own desire for perfection in all things - grades, boyfriend, looks, career - and the other against remorseless mental illness. As her depression deepens she finds herself encased in it, bell-jarred away from the rest of the world. This is the story of her journey back into reality. Highly readable, witt...

Donna Tartt

Harriet grows up haunted by the murder of her brother. His killer was never identified. Harriet lives largely in the world of her imagination, alone even in company. Then one day she decides to find his murderer and exact her revenge. ...

Ernest Hemingway

Traditional Chinese edition of The Old Man and The Sea edited for young adults. The story is told with text and graphics and accompanied with Zhuying (phonetic annotation). A reading guide of this Hemingway classic helps young readers develop their writing skills. In Traditional Chinese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc. ...

Aldous Huxley

Brave new world is a novel with a science-fiction theme written by bestselling author, aldous huxley, and was first published in 1932 it is set in the far future, in 2540 ad and features a utopian view of the society at that time, with a lot of material dedicated to sleep learning, reproductive technology, and classical conditioning the title is derived from a line in shakespea...

Adolfo Bioy Casares

Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of the Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious. Inspired by Bioy Casares's fasc...

Mark Dunn

Ella Minnow Pea is a novel told through a series of letters, set on the fictional island of Nollop, home to the great Nevin Nollop, inventor of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". The islanders have erected a monument to their hero, but one day the letter 'z' falls from the statue's inscription. To the despair of the residents, the island's governing coun...

Haruki Murakami

His life was like his recurring nightmare: a train to nowhere. But an ordinary life has a way of taking an extraordinary turn. Add a girl whose ears are so exquisite that, when uncovered, they improve sex a thousand-fold, a runaway friend, a right-wing politico, an ovine-obsessed professor and a manic-depressive in a sheep outfit, implicate them in a hunt for a sheep, that may ...

Sijie Dai

1971: Mao's cultural Revolution is at its peak. Two sons of doctors, sent to 're-education' camps, forced to carry buckets of excrement up and down mountain paths, have only their sense of humour to keep them going. Although the attractive daughter of the local tailor also helps to distract them from the task at hand. The boys' true re-education starts, however, when they disc...

Ian Mcewan

Discover the modern classic that has sold over two million copies. 'A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended' On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her too is Robbie Turner who, l...

Jamie O'neill

~ The Irish contemporary classic in a beautiful new edition ~ 'Weren't you never out for an easy dip?' he asked . . . 'I don't mean the baths, I mean with a pal. For a lark like.' Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of Dublin rock where gentlemen bathe in the scandalous nude, two boys meet day after day. There they make a pact: that Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a ...

Maggie O'farrell

"Alice Raikes takes a train from London to Scotland to visit her family, but when she gets there she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London immediately. A few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt. Alice's family gathers at her bedside and as they wait, argue, and remember, long-b...

William Somerset Maugham

After a lonely boyhood, and the painful ordeal of his schooldays, Philip's yearning for adventure takes him to Germany and later Paris where he tries to make his mark as an artist before returning to London to study medicine. Here, a tortured and one-sided love affair with Mildred, a vulgar yet irresistible waitress, changes the course of his life for ever. Commenting later on ...

Elie Wiesel

The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod)A Play by Elie WieselTranslated by Marion WieselIntroduction by Robert McAfee BrownAfterword by Matthew Fox Where is God when innocent human beings suffer? This drama lays bare the most vexing questions confronting the moral imagination. Set in a Ukranian village in the year 1649, this haunting play takes place...

Paulo Coelho

The inspiring spiritual tale of self-discovery that has touched millions of lives around the world. Combining magic, mysticism, wisdom and wonder, The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selling millions of copies around the world and transforming the lives of countless readers across generations. Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian...