Contemporary fiction Books 1497 results

Adam Mars-Jones

Fitzcarraldo

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

Penguin

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 ...

Virginia Woolf

Penguin

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...

Ocean Vuong

Vintage

An instant New York Times Bestseller! Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award Shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Winner of the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction! Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Vulture, ...

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Picador

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...

Elena Ferrante

Europa Editions

From one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, comes this ravishing and generous-hearted novel about a friendship that lasts a lifetime. The story of Elena and Lila begins in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else, as their friendship, bea...

Elizabeth Gilbert

Bloomsbury

In 1940, Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College. Her parents send her to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg, who owns a midtown theater. There Vivian is introduced to a cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters, from the fun-chasing showgirls to a sexy male actor, a grand-dame actress and no-nonsense stage manager. But when she makes a personal mist...

James Kelman

Vintage

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE‘A passionate, scintillating, brilliant song of a book'GuardianSammy's had a bad week.Most of it's just a blank space in his mind, and the bits that he can remember, he'd rather not. His wallet's gone, along with his new shoes, he's been arrested then beaten up by the police and thrown out on the street - and he's just gone blind. He remembers a row wi...

Marjan Kamali

Simon & Schuster

1953, Tehran. Roya loves nothing better than to while away the hours in the local stationery shop run by Mr. Fakhri. The store, stocked with fountain pens, shiny ink bottles, and thick pads of writing paper, also carries translations of literature from all over the world. And when Mr. Fakhri introduces her to his other favorite customer -- handsome Bahman, with his burning pass...

Yukio Mishima

Vintage

'Mishima's greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century' The Times A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but ...

Elizabeth Hardwick

Faber & Faber

First published in 1979, 'Sleepless Nights' is a collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. It is more than the story of a life: it is Elizabeth Hardwick's experience of womanhood in the twentieth century. Escaping her childhood home of Kentucky, the narrator arrives at a bohemian hotel in Manhattan filled with 'drunks, actors, gamblers - love and ...

Jacqueline Harpman

Vintage

Discover the haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic tale of female friendship and intimacy set in a deserted world. Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus? Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollect...

Benjamin Myers

Bloomsbury

____________________ The inspiration for the BBC TV series, directed by Shane Meadows and starring Tom Burke, George MacKay and Thomas Turgoose WINNER OF THE 2018 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE ____________________ 'Powerful, visceral writing, historical fiction at its best. Benjamin Myers is one to watch' - Pat Barker 'Phenomenal' - Sebastian Barry 'Superb' - The Times ______________...

André Aciman

Faber & Faber

Enigma Variations charts the life of a man named Paul, whose loves remain as consuming and as covetous throughout his adulthood as they were in his adolescence. Whether the setting is southern Italy, where as a boy he has a crush on his parents' cabinetmaker, or a snowbound campus in New England, where his enduring passion for a girl he'll meet again and again over the years is...

Rebecca Makkai

Futura

A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gal...

Antonio Iturbe

Vintage

For readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Choice: this is the story of the smallest library in the world - and the most dangerous. 'It wasn't an extensive library. In fact, it consisted of eight books and some of them were in poor condition. But they were books. In this incredibly dark place, they were a reminder of less sombre times, when words rang out more loudly th...

Sayaka Murata

Granta

Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what t...

Larry Mitchell

Nightboat

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is a beloved queer utopian text written by Larry Mitchell with lush illustrations by Ned Asta, published by Calamus Press in 1977. Part-fable, part-manifesto, the book takes place in Ramrod, an empire in decline, and introduces us to the communities of the faggots, the women, the queens, the queer men, and the women who love wom...

Mary Gaitskill

Profile

Quin and Margot have been friends for more than twenty years.0Quin is an extrovert and a sensualist who thrives on flirtation and ambiguity. He is at his happiest when encouraging intimate confidences from the women he meets. Always clear with him about the boundaries of their own relationship, until now Margot has looked on his behaviour with a mixture of ambivalence and affec...

Rachel Cusk

Faber & Faber

"Stella Benson sets off for Hilltop, a tiny Sussex village housing a family that is somewhat larger than life. Her hopes for the Maddens may be high, but her station among them, as au pair to their irascible son Martin - is undeniably low. What could possibly have driven her to leave her home, job and life in London for such rural ignominy? Why has she severed all contact with ...

Ian Mcewan

Vintage

Kafka meets The Thick Of It in a bitingly funny new political satire from Ian McEwan That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature. Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain - and ...

Andrew Holleran

Vintage

'Astonishingly beautiful... The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation' Harpers 'A life changing read for me. Describes a New York that has completely disappeared and for which I longed - stuck in closed-on-Sunday's London' Rupert Everett Young, divinely beautiful and tired of living a lie, Anthony Malone trades life as a seemingly straight, small town lawyer for ...

Margaret Atwood

Abacus

Carmen Maria Machado

Serpents Tail

In this volume, Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. In this provocative debut, startling narratives map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited on their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the mysterious green ribbon from around her neck. A woman r...

Ian Mcewan

Vintage

The fortieth anniversary edition of Ian McEwan's first book, now with an introduction from the authorForty years on from first publication, these stories display McEwan's dazzling early talent. Taut, brooding and densely atmospheric, they are stories of sex and loneliness, adolescence and incest, love and murder, and they linger in the mind long after they are finished. This sp...

Fredrik Backman

Ladybird

Holiday novella about a man who sacrificed his family in the single-minded pursuit of success and the courageous little girl fighting for her life who crosses his path. It all begins with a father telling a story to his son on Christmas Eve. But this isn't your typical Christmas story. The father admits to his son that he's taken a life but he won't say whose--not yet. One week...

Samantha Hunt

Robinson

"The Seas took me back to how I felt as a kid, when you're newly falling in love with literature, newly shocked by its capacity to cast a spell..." Maggie Nelson "[It] blew me away because of the beauty of the language . . . I found myself highlighting about 85% of the book for the language. It is so beautifully written" Jodi Picoult Moored in a coastal fishing town so far nor...

Dan Brown

Ladybird

Sunday Times #1 Bestseller New York Times #1 Bestseller The global bestseller - Origin is the latest Robert Langdon novel from the author of The Da Vinci Code. 'Fans will not be disappointed' The Times Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconology, arrives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to attend the unveiling of an astonishing scientific breakthr...

Chris Kraus

Phoenix

"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

Harper

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...