Contemporary fiction Books 1422 results

Douglas Stuart

Winner of the Booker Prize Winner of 'Book of the Year' and 'Debut of the Year' at the British Book Awards The Million-Copy Bestseller 'An amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.' - The judges of the Booker Prize 'Shuggie Bain means so much to me. It is such a powerfully written story . . . I love a heartbreak book but there is so ...

Agustin Fernandez Mallo

In The Things We've Seen, his most ambitious and accomplished novel to date, Agustín Fernández Mallo captures the strangeness and interconnectedness of human existence in the twenty-first century. A writer travels to the small uninhabited island of San Simón, used as a Franquist concentration camp during the Spanish Civil War, and witnesses events which impel him on a wild goos...

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...

Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Nearing the end of his life, Baron Bela Wenckheim flees his gambling debts in Buenos Aires and decides to return to the small Hungarian town where he wishes to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart. News of his arrival travels fast, and the town's conmen and politicians sense a rare opportunity. ...

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 ...

Matt Haig

"'Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices... Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?' A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well liv...

Richard Osman

'Smart, compassionate, warm, moving and so VERY funny' Marian Keyes 'So smart and funny. Deplorably good' Ian Rankin 'Thrilling, moving, laugh-out-loud funny' Mark Billingham 'A gripping read' Sunday Times THE FIRST BOOK IN THE #1 BESTSELLING, MULTI MILLION COPY SELLING SERIES BY TV PRESENTER RICHARD OSMAN ---------------------------------------------- In a peaceful retireme...

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...

Kiley Reid

William Gaddis

A postmodern masterpiece about fraud and forgery by one of the most distinctive, accomplished novelists of the last century.The Recognitions is a sweeping depiction of a world in which everything that anyone recognizes as beautiful or true or good emerges as anything but: our world. The book is a masquerade, moving from New England to New York to Madrid, from the art world to t...

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. ...

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...

David Nicholls

? Now in paperback: David Nicholls's new novel You Are Here ? Sweet Sorrow: a novel of first love, set during a long, hot summer where life changes forever... 'Fizzing' GUARDIAN 'A glorious escape' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Exquisite' DAILY TELEGRAPH It's summer 1997, school is over and Charlie Lewis's life is in shambles. His family is breaking up, his father is falling apart and...

Lisa See

The beautiful novel of female friendship and family secrets on a small Korean island, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends that come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village's all-fema...

Julia Armfield

THE ELECTRIFYING DEBUT FROM THE WINNER OF THE WHITE REVIEW SHORT STORY PRIZE 2018'Thrilling . . . A writer whose next move you wouldn't want to miss.' Observer'Wickedly clever prose and a sense of humour that seems to loom up like a character in itself' M JOHN HARRISON, GuardianIn her brilliantly inventive and haunting debut collection of stories, Julia Armfield explores bodies...

Andrea Lawlor

It's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul's also got a secret: he's a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Women's Studies major to trade, Paul transforms his bod...

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 ...

Khaled Khalifa

Death Is Hard Work is a tale of three people embarking on an absurd quest - an unforgettable journey into a contemporary heart of darkness. At a hospital in Damascus, Syria, Abdel Latif's final wish is to be buried in the family plot near Aleppo - just a two-hour drive away. Bolbol, his youngest son, persuades his estranged brother and sister to accompany him and their father's...

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...

Adam Mars-Jones

On the Sunday of his eighteenth birthday, in 1975, Colin takes a walk on Box Hill, a biker hang-out. There he accidentally trips over Ray, a biker napping under a tree - and that's where it all starts. This transgressive, darkly affecting love story between men, winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize, is a stunning novel of desire and domination by one of Britain'...

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 ...

Elif Shafak

"In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila's consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore. Her brain cells, having run out of blood, were now completely deprived of oxygen. But they did not shut down. Not right away...' For Leila, each minute after her death brings a sensuous memory: the taste of spiced goat stew, sacrificed ...

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Carlotte Brontë to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and...

Min Jin Lee

* The million-copy bestseller* * National Book Award finalist * * One of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2017 * * Selected for Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club * 'This is a captivating book... Min Jin Lee's novel takes us through four generations and each character's search for identity and success. It's a powerful story about resilience and compassion' BARACK ...

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...