Contemporary fiction Books 1497 results

Hanif Kureishi

Faber & Faber

One night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen, and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the noises growing louder. I am sure they are making love in Zenab's bedroom which is next to mine. Waldo, a fêted filmmaker, is confined by old age and ill health to his London apartment. Frail and frustrated, he is cared for by his lovely younger wife, Zee. But when he suspects...

Angela Carter

Abacus

'The boldest of English women writers' LORNA SAGE 'Her writing is pyrotechnic - fuelled with ideas, packed with images and spangling the night with her starry language' OBSERVER 'She can glide from ancient to modern, from darkness to luminosity, from depravity to comedy without any hint of strain and without losing the elusive power of the original tales' THE TIMES 'This cra...

Madeline Miller

Bloomsbury

From the Orange Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author of The Song of Achilles comes the powerful story of the mythological witch Circe, inspired by Homer's OdysseyChosen as must-read book of 2018 by the Guardian, Independent, Mail on Sunday, Sunday Express and StylistIn the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe ha...

Margaret Atwood

Vintage

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs. Brilliantly conceived and executed, this powerful evocation of twenty-first...

Daphne Du Maurier / Anon

Penguin

Dispatch the maimed, the old, the weak, destroy the very world itself, for what is the point of life if the promise of fulfilment lies elsewhere? On the windswept coast of rural Suffolk, a deranged scientist attempts to extract the essence of life itself. ...

Elizabeth Acevedo

Egmont

Winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award!Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth. Xiom...

Muhsin Al-Ramli

Maclehose Press

In this extraordinary novel by heralded Iraqi author Muhsin Al-Ramli, One Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Kite Runner against the backdrop of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. "A profoundly moving investigation of love, death, and injustice." --The Guardian "A standard in contemporary Middle Eastern literature." --Booklist "A stunning achievement." --The National On the third day ...

Dan Brown

Ladybird

Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconology, arrives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to attend the unveiling of a discovery that 'will change the face of science forever'. The evening's host is his friend and former student, Edmond Kirsch, a 40-year-old tech magnate whose dazzling inventions and audacious predictions have made him a controversial figu...

Stephen Fry

Penguin

STEP INTO ANOTHER WORLD - OF MAGIC, MAYHEM, MONSTERS AND MANIACAL GODS - IN STEPHEN FRY'S MOMENTOUS SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER, MYTHOS 'A romp through the lives of ancient Greek gods. Fry is at his story-telling best . . . the gods will be pleased' Times ___________ No one loves and quarrels, desires and deceives as boldly or brilliantly as Greek gods and goddesses. In Stephen F...

Genki Kawamura

Picador

The international phenomenon that has sold more than two million copies, If Cats Disappeared from the World is a heartwarming, funny, and profound meditation on the meaning of life.The young postman's days are numbered. Estranged from his family and living alone with only his cat, Cabbage, to keep him company, he was unprepared for the doctor's diagnosis that he has only months...

Cormac Mccarthy

Macmillan

In the vanishing world of the Old West, two cowboys begin an epic adventure, and their own coming-of-age stories. In All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole's search for a future takes him across the Mexican border to a job as a ranch hand and an ill-fated romance. ...

Ottessa Moshfegh

Vintage

'Razor-sharp' Zadie Smith An electrifying, prizewinning short story collection from the Booker-shortlisted author of Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous while also being delightful - and often even weirdly hilarious. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet; all yearni...

Haruki Murakami

Vintage

'I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.' Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious wom...

André Aciman

Picador

Now a Major Motion Picture from Director Luca Guadagnino, Starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, and Written by Three-Time OscarTM Nominee James IvoryThe Basis of the Oscar-Winning Best Adapted ScreenplayA New York Times BestsellerA USA Today Bestseller A Los Angeles Times BestsellerA Vulture Book Club Pick An Instant Classic and One of the Great Love Stories of Our TimeA...

Dave Eggers

Ladybird

THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER 'The mirror image of Eggers's brilliantly dystopian The Circle... [A] state of the nation novel, cleansing the spirit and lifting the heart' Guardian A hilarious and heart-warming misadventure through modern America: it's time for the family vacation... Josie's life is falling apart - lawsuits raining down, her business down the drain and a ...

Margaret Drabble

Ladybird

A celebration of the drama and intensity of the mother-child relationship, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one night stand. Although si...

Liane Moriarty

Penguin

DISCOVER THE GRIPPING NO. 1 BESTSELLER BEHIND THE AWARD WINNING HBO SENSATION STARRING REESE WITHERSPOON, NICOLE KIDMAN & MERYL STREEP____________Perfect families, perfect houses, perfect lives.Three mothers, Jane, Madeline and Celeste appear to have it all, until they find out just how easy it is for one little lie to spiral out of control . . . Single mum Jane has just moved ...

Elizabeth Strout

Ladybird

A #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE & THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION An exquisite story of mothers and daughters from the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge Lucy is recovering from an operation in a New York hospital when she wakes to find her estranged mother sitting by her bed. They have not seen one another in years. As they tal...

Deborah Levy

Penguin

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2016 SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016 Plunge into this hypnotic tale of female sexuality and power - from the author of Swimming Home and The Man Who Saw Everything 'Propulsive, uncanny, dreamlike. A feverish coming-of-age novel' Daily Telegraph 'A triumph of storytelling' Literary Review_________________________________ 'Today I dro...

Salman Rushdie

Vintage

Salman Rushdie, a self-described 'emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two', explores the true meaning of home. Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means to belong, whether roots are real and homelands imaginary, what it is like to reconfigure your past from fragments of memory and what happens when East meets West. Selected from the books Shame,...

Hisham Matar

Ladybird

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHYWINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES' TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2016 The Return is at once a un...

Jon Fosse

Dalkey Archive Press

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023One of Jon Fosse's most acclaimed novels, Boathouse features an unnamed narrator who leads a hermit-like existence until he unexpectedly encounters a long-lost childhood friend and his wife. Part stream-of-consciousness metafictive exercise, part gripping crime novel, Boathouse slowly unravels the story of a love triangle to revea...

Isabel Allende

Simon & Schuster

INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE JAPANESE LOVER A captivating collection of short fiction by one of the most beloved writers of our time Eva Luna is a young woman whose powers as a storyteller bring her friendship and love. Lying in bed with her lover, European refugee and journalist Rolf Carlé, Eva answers his request for a story 'you have never told anyone before...

Ariana Harwicz

Penguin

Now a Major Motion Picture Man Booker International Prize 2018 FinalistIn a forgotten patch of French countryside, a woman is battling her demons: embracing exclusion yet wanting to belong, craving freedom whilst feeling trapped, yearning for family life but wanting to burn the entire house down. Given surprising leeway by her family for her increasingly erratic behaviour, she ...

Alan Hollinghurst

Picador

"From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Man Booker Prize, a masterly new novel that spans seven transformative decades in England--from the 1940s to the present--as it plumbs the richly complex relationships of a remarkable family. In 1940, David Sparsholt arrives at Oxford to study engineering, though his sights are set on joining the Royal Air Force. Handsome, athle...

John Boyne

Black Swan

Forced to flee the scandal brewing in her hometown, Catherine Goggin finds herself pregnant and alone, in search of a new life at just sixteen. She knows she has no choice but to believe that the nun she entrusts her child to will find him a better life. Cyril Avery is not a real Avery, or so his parents are constantly reminding him. Adopted as a baby, he's never quite felt at ...

Min Jin Lee

Penguin

"In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Ja...

Yaa Gyasi

Ladybird

"Homegoing is an inspiration." --Ta-Nehisi Coates An unforgettable New York Times bestseller of exceptional scope and sweeping vision that traces the descendants of two sisters across three hundred years in Ghana and America. A riveting kaleidoscopic debut novel and the beginning of a major career: Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing is a novel about race, history, ancestry, love and time, ...

Fredrik Backman

Penguin

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove returns with Beartown--an instant New York Times bestseller--about a forgotten town fractured by scandal, and the amateur hockey team that might just change everything. People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by th...

John Le Carré

Ladybird

The classic Cold War thriller, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Alec Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying in Berlin for his British masters, and has seen too many good agents murdered for their troubles. Now Control wants to bring him in at last - but only after one final assignment. He must travel deep into the heart ...