Contemporary fiction Books 1422 results

Claire-Louise Bennett

A woman confronts the unquenchable half-life of passion, in a new novel by one of our most acclaimed and inventive writers of fiction. ...

Claire Keegan

AN IRISH TIMES TOP 100 IRISH BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY 'Exquisite ... so intricately wrought, so strange and beguiling as to entirely bewitch.' GUARDIAN 'Pure magic.' COLM TÓIBÍN 'Lyrical, thoughtful, but with a thick, dark strain of melancholy running through.' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christ...

Niamh Mulvey

'Extraordinary. I loved it' - Jessie Burton'Engrossing and moving . . . gives voice to so much that's unspoken about Ireland' - Emma Donoghue'Wonderfully compelling . . . haunting' - Joseph O'ConnorDelving into the lives of three generations of women, The Amendments is an extraordinary novel about love and freedom, belonging and rebellion - and about how our past is a vital pre...

K. J. Charles

The lush Gothic drama of Crimson Peak meets the murderous intrigue of Knives Out with an LGBTQIA+ love story to die for from award-winning author KJ Charles. WHO WILL SURVIVE LACKADAY HOUSE? When Zeb Wyckham is summoned to a wealthy relative's remote Gothic manor, he is horrified to find all the people he least wants to see in the world: his estranged brother, his sneering cous...

Thomas Pynchon

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labour-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he's found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine ca...

Alison Espach

FROM THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE WEDDING PEOPLE Sally Holt has always been mystified by the things her older sister, Kathy, seems to have been born knowing. Kathy has answers for all of Sally's questions about life, about love and about Billy Barnes, the high school basketball star who runs the refreshment stand at the local pool. Billy's unfathomable, otherworl...

Gore Vidal

A literary cause célèbre when first published in 1948, Gore Vidal's now-classic The City and the Pillar stands as a landmark novel of the gay experience Jim Willard, former high-school athlete and clean-cut boy-next-door, is haunted by the memory of a romantic adolescent encounter with his friend Bob Ford. As Jim pursues his first love, in awe of the very same masculinity he p...

Hanya Yanagihara

Over one million copies soldToo many broken hearts to countThe 10th Anniversary Collector's Edition'A book unlike any other' The Guardian'This novel challenged everything I thought I knew about love and friendship' Dua LipaThis exclusive 10th anniversary edition of A Little Life features artwork by acclaimed artists RF. Alvarez and Linus Borgo, painted in response to the book, ...

Layne Fargo

To the world, they were a scandal. To each other, an obsession.NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An epic love story set in the sparkling, savage sphere of elite figure skating, starring a woman determined to carve her own path on and off the ice—now with bonus material including two never-before-seen chapters!"Part Wuthering Heights and part Daisy Jones & The Six, this novel is as brillian...

Kiran Desai

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her ...

Claire Adam

In the heart-aching new novel from the author of the award-winning Golden Child, a mother searches for the daughter she left behind a lifetime ago. ...

Patricia Lockwood

A WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF SEPTEMBER 2025 THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE AUTHOR OF NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS, WINNER OF THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE AND THE ONLY BOOK SHORTLISTED FOR BOTH THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE AND WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION The world might be in disarray, but for one young woman, the very weave of herself seems to have loosened. Time and memories pass straight through he...

Mona Awad

The highly-anticipated follow up to the viral sensation Bunny, a brilliantly written, laugh-out-loud funny, dark and delirious novel set in the Bunny-verse - a world that Margaret Atwood declared 'soooo genius'. In the cult classic novel Bunny, Samantha Heather Mackey, a lonely outsider student at a highly selective MFA program in New England, was first ostracised and then sed...

Andrew Miller

? Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 ? ? Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025 ? ? Winner of the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2025 ? 'One of the best writers at work today' TELEGRAPH 'Has an uncanny beauty and depth... A novel that travels into the darkest places of history and the strangest corners of the human mind' GUARDIAN 'Money, class, love...

Jung Chang

THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO WILD SWANS, THE MULTI-MILLION COPY INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING SENSATION Jung Chang's Wild Swans was a book that defined a generation, an epic personal history of Jung, her mother and grandmother - 'three daughters of China'. The book opens in 1909 with her grandmother's birth - and foot-binding - when China was under the last emperor, moving through ...

Ian Mcewan

'One of the finest writers alive' Sunday Times 2014- A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found. 2119- The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of ...

Olga Tokarczuk

A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There's the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There's the man whose death - with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech - was an inter...

John Boyne

Human life is governed by the elements - water, earth, fire and air. They are fundamental to our existence. They sustain us, but they also challenge us. In The Elements, John Boyne has created a vivid kaleidoscope to reflect that contradiction- a quartet of intertwined narratives, each providing a different perspective on cause and effect from the points of view of the enabler...

Rosie Hewlett

Praise for Rosie Hewlett 'Delightfully devastating' Bea Fitsgerald, author of Girl, Goddess, Queen 'A fiery and dramatic novel' Jennifer Saint, author of Ariadne 'Vivid and powerful' Luna McNamara, author of Psyche and Eros You know her name, you know her story. Just not the right one... Within the depths of the Underworld the formidable snake-haired Gorgon has finally had en...

Hitomi Kanehara

Vintage Classics WEIRD GIRLS- Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of women's weird fiction. Rin is flying back from her honeymoon. She's madly in love with her husband, Shin, and the future looks rosy. Then Shin disappears to the bathroom while he thinks Rin is sleeping and she starts to imagine that he has gone to seduce the flight attendant. As her thoughts spiral out ...

Ottessa Moshfegh

Vintage Classics WEIRD GIRLS- Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of women's weird fiction. 'This is a story about what might happen when a woman takes charge... A glorious visceral mystery' The Times While on her daily walk with her dog in the woods near her home, Vesta comes across a chilling handwritten note. Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. ...

Jewelle Gomez

Vintage Classics WEIRD GIRLS- Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of women's weird fiction. 'A groundbreaking work of Afrofuturism before the term was even coined' Guardian 'A lush, exciting, inspiring read' Sarah Waters In this radically reimagined vampire myth, the night hides many things... Louisiana, 1850. A young girl escapes slavery and is taken in by two myster...

Angela Carter

Vintage Classics WEIRD GIRLS- Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of women's weird fiction. Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe's capitals, part swan...or all fake? Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist...

Jonathan Coe

'My comfort read: anything by Jonathan Coe' Bob Mortimer 'Coe channels his anger and frustration at the direction his country has taken, as well as his abiding love for it, into prose of enduring beauty' Guardian --- Post-university life doesn't suit Phyl. Time passes slowly, living with her parents and working a zero-hours contract at Heathrow Airport, while her budding pla...

Damian Barr

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2025A BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK A BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2025 FOR THE GUARDIAN, THE OBSERVER, THE HERALD AND THE BBC'Crackles with creative rebellion' DOUGLAS STUART'immersive, intelligent, immensely sensual' ELIF SHAFAK'A novel that brims over with generosity and warmth' OBSERVERHe will stay like this forever, Robert's arm draped ...

Ali Smith

Ghosts don't exist. They don't. End of. Story, however. It is haunting. Everything tells it. It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost. Is it imaginary? Is it real? Then it all starts again thirty years later when Petra, now estranged from Patch, finds a phantom horse kicking the furniture ...

Yoko Ogawa

Vintage Classics WEIRD GIRLS- Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of women's weird fiction. A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster-brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool - sparking an unspoken infatuation that draws out darker possibilities. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, but rather tha...

Claire Keegan

"Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past. A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife. He finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half naked and realises the money is almost gone. A Harv...

Claire Keegan

From the bestselling author, Claire Keegan, an exquisitely written story which finds an unsatisfied man on his bus journey home reflect on the love that got away. 'A genuine once-in-a-generation writer.' THE TIMES 'Every word is the right word in the right place, and the effect is resonant and deeply moving.' HILARY MANTEL 'Claire Keegan makes her moments real - and then she m...

A. Rae Dunlap

Death is only the beginning...?? ''Breathtaking ... A new talent [in] the field of gothic historical literature'' NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS ''Devilishly macabre ... As dark as a midnight graveyard'' PATRICE McDONOUGH ''Hauntingly gothic, intimately told, and wickedly, wonderfully grotesque'' MARIELLE THOMPSON *#1 BOOK OF THE MONTH - AMAZON EDITOR''S PICK* *A USA TODAY BESTSELLE...