Contemporary fiction Books 1240 results

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

'A masterly novel' New York Times 'Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility' Guardian Read the haunting love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar. When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best frie...

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...

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...

Yevgeny Zamyatin

The exhilarating dystopian novel that inspired George Orwell's 1984 and foreshadowed the worst excesses of Soviet Russia, featuring a foreword by the National Book Award-winning New Yorker journalist Masha GessenYevgeny Zamyatin's We is a powerfully inventive vision that has influenced writers from George Orwell to Ayn Rand. In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ...

Donna Tartt

Truly deserving of the accolade Modern Classic, Donna Tartt's cult bestseller The Secret History is a remarkable achievement - both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.'A haunting, compelling and brilliant piece of fiction' The Times'So irresistible and seductive it's almost a guilty pleasure' GuardianUnder the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group...

A. S. Byatt

Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.WINNER OF THE BOOKER PR...

Kurt Vonnegut

Long, long ago, as he researched into the origin of species, Charles Darwin had been inspired by the creatures of the Galapagos. Now, a million years on, the new inhabitants of the islands - the human survivors of the 'Nature Cruise of the Century' - have quietly evolved into sleek, furry creatures with flippers, and small brains. All other forms of humankind have ceased to exi...

J.d. Salinger

The "original, first-rate, serious, and beautiful" short fiction (New York Times Book Review) that introduced J. D. Salinger to American readers in the years after World War II, including "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and the first appearance of Salinger's fictional Glass family.Nine exceptional stories from one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century. Witty, urb...

Genki Kawamura

Yuriko leads a quiet, orderly life as a piano teacher. It's New Year's Eve and her grown-up son Izumi comes to visit. Together, they look like a normal family. But Yuriko has a secret. Many years earlier, when Izumi was a boy, Yuriko suddenly disappeared for an entire year. She returned, but the lost year was never discussed ...

Rebecca F Kuang

Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about mothers, transsexuality, bereavement, kitchens, love and tragedy in contemporary Japan. It is a startlingly original first work by Japan's brightest young literary star and is now a cult film. When Kitchen was first published in Japan in 1987 it won two of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, climbed its way to the top of the bestseller l...

Irvine Welsh

Delia Owens

Elena Medel

New in paperback: an audacious, critically acclaimed debut about working-class women's livesacross two generations, heralding a new European literary star ...

Abraham Verghese

"Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water follows a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning--and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the fir...

Harper Lee

J. D. Salinger