Contemporary fiction Books 1497 results

Meg Wolitzer

Vintage

On a warm July night in 1974, six teenagers play at being cool. The friendships they make this summer will be the most important of their lives. But decades later not everyone can sustain in adulthood what had seemed so special in adolescence. As their fortunes tilt precipitously over the years, some of them dealing with great struggle, others enjoying wealth and success, frien...

Mercè Rodoreda

Virago Modern Classics

Barcelona, early 1930s: Natalia is hesitant when a stranger asks her to dance at the fiesta in Diamond Square. But Joe is charming and forceful, and she takes his hand. They marry and soon have two children; for Natalia it is an awakening, both good and bad. When Joe decides to breed pigeons, the birds delight his son and daughter - and infuriate his wife. Then the Spanish Civi...

Sylvia Plath

Faber & Faber

I was supposed to be having the time of my life. When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a ...

Philip Pullman

Penguin

The Kinder- und Hausmärchen have been, Pullman reminds us, a staple for Western readers for the past two centuries. He impresses all the more by turning these classics into short, taut tales which seethe with dark energy and offer a new punch with their stripped down telling, their curtly delivered savagery and their mix of the comic and the macabre. ...

Alice Munro

Vintage

**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature** Alice Munro captures the essence of life in her brilliant new collection of stories. Moments of change, chance encounters, the twist of fate that leads a person to a new way of thinking or being: the stories in Dear Life build to form a radiant, indelible portrait of just how dangerous and strange ordinary life can be. ...

Cormac Mccarthy

Pan

This is the story of a lawyer, the Counselor, a man who is so seduced by the desire to get rich, to impress his fiancee Laura, that he becomes involved in a drug-smuggling venture that quickly takes him way out of his depth. His contacts in this are the mysterious and probably corrupt Reiner and the seductive Malkina, so exotic her pets of choice are two cheetahs. As the action...

Ben Lerner

Granta

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his attitude towards art. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, Adam's 'research' soon becomes a meditation on the possibility of authenticity, as he finds himself increasingly troubled by the uncrossab...

Margaret Atwood

Abacus

From the Publisher: The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners-a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life-has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we...

Maria Duenas

Penguin

The inspiring international bestseller of a seemingly ordinary woman who uses her talent and courage to transform herself first into a prestigious couturier and then into an undercover agent for the Allies during World War II.Between youth and adulthood... At age twelve, Sira Quiroga sweeps the atelier floors where her single mother works as a seamstress. At fourteen, she quiet...

Patti Smith

Bloomsbury

A great book about becoming an artist, Woolgathering tells of a youngster finding herself as she learns the noble vocation of woolgathering, a worthy calling that seemed a good job for me. She discovers often at night, often in nature the pleasures of rescuing a fleeting thought. Deeply moving, Wool- gathering calls up our own memories, as the child glimpses and gleans, piecing...

Julian Barnes

Vintage

The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past, Julian Barnes's new novel is laced with his trademark precision, dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world's most distinguished writers. Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affect...

Bethan Roberts

Vintage

It is in 1950s Brighton that Marion first catches sight of Tom. He teaches her to swim in the shadow of the pier and Marion is smitten - determined her love will be enough for them both. A few years later in Brighton Museum Patrick meets Tom. Patrick is besotted with Tom and opens his eyes to a glamorous, sophisticated new world. Tom is their policeman, and in this age it is sa...

James Joyce

Wordsworth Classics

Finnegans Wake is the book of Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle and their family - their book, but in a curious way the book of us all as well as all our books. Joyce's last great work, it is not comprised of many borrowed styles, like Ulysses, but, rather, formulated as one dense, tongue-twisting soundscape. This 'language' is based on English vocabulary and synt...

John Boyne

Vintage

Discover an extraordinary tale of innocence, friendship and the horrors of war. 'Some things are just sitting there, minding their own business, waiting to be discovered. Like America. And other things are probably better off left alone' Nine-year-old Bruno has a lot of things on his mind. Who is the 'Fury'? Why did he make them leave their nice home in Berlin to go to 'Out-W...

Paulo Coelho

Harper

Another stunning novel by the author of The Alchemist. Aleph marks a return to Paulo Coelho's beginnings. In a frank and surprising personal story, one of the world's most beloved authors embarks on a remarkable and transformative journey of self-discovery. Facing a grave crisis of faith, and seeking a path of spiritual renewal and growth, Paulo decides to start over: to travel...

Kingsley Amis

Ladybird

'His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as a mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.' Jix Dixon has a terrible job at a second-rate university. His life is full of things he could happily do without: the tedious and ridiculous Professor...

Jung Chang

Harper

One of the best-selling and best-loved books of recent years, 'Wild Swans' is an epic true story of how one family lived and survived through some of China's most unsettling and violent times. The publication of 'Wild Swans' in 1991 was a worldwide phenomenon. Not only did it become the best-selling non-fiction book in British publishing history, with sales of well over two mil...

Joseph Heller

Vintage

Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage. Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not...

Paul Auster

Faber & Faber

In 'The Brooklyn Follies' an uncle and nephew accidentally end up living in the same Brooklyn neighbourhood. When a little girl who refuses to speak comes into their lives, there is suddenly a bridge from their pasts that may offer them the possibility of redemption. ...

Roald Dahl

Ladybird

In the Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, seven tales of the bizarre and unexpected are told by the grand master of the short story, Roald Dahl. Enter a brilliant, sinister and wholly unpredictable world. Here you will find the suggestion of other-worldly goings on in a dark story about a swan and a boy; the surprising tale of a wealthy young wastrel who suddenly develops a remark...

Joan Didion

Harper

An engrossing examination of political and personal life in Central America, from the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking. Writing with the economical swiftness and concentrated perception that has made her one of America's most distinguished writers, Joan Didion creates a gleaming novel of innocence and evil. Set in the ruined Central American nation of Boca...

David Lodge

Vintage

'One of the very best English comic novelists of the post-war era' Time Out The plot lines of The Campus Trilogy, radiating from its hub at the redbrick University of Rummidge, trace the comic adventures of academics who move outside familiar territory. Beginning in the late 60s Changing Places follows the undistinguished English lecturer Philip Swallow and hotshot American pr...

Cormac Mccarthy

Pan

"Blood Meridian" is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightm...

J. D. Salinger

Ladybird

A collection of stories of loss and unsuppressed rage - in which the children are fragile, odd, and hyper-smart and the adults beaten down by circumstances. In "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Seymour Glass floats his beach mate Sybil on a raft and tells her that these creatures have a tragic flaw; if one swims into a hole filled with bananas, it will overeat until it's too fat ...

David Nicholls

Hooder

'ONE DAY is destined to be a modern classic' - Daily MirrorTwenty years, two people, ONE DAY. The multi-million copy bestseller that captures the experiences of a generation.'I can imagine you at forty,' she said, a hint of malice in her voice. 'I can picture it right now.'He smiled without opening his eyes. 'Go on then.'15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet for the first time o...

William S. Burroughs

Penguin

Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, Burroughs' only realist love story and a montage of comic-grotesque fantasies that paved the way for his masterpiece, Naked Lunch. Set in Mexico City during the early fifties, Queer follows William Lee's hopeless pu...

John Le Carré

Penguin

From the master of spy thrillers, John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a gripping story of love and betrayal at the height of the Cold War. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an afterword by the author and an introduction by William Boyd, author of Any Human Heart. Alec Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying in th...

Betty Friedan

Penguin

When Betty Friedan produced The Feminine Mystiquein 1963, she could not have realized how the discovery and debate of her contemporaries' general malaise would shake up society. Victims of a false belief system, these women were following strict social convention by loyally conforming to the pretty image of the magazines, and found themselves forced to seek meaning in their liv...

Margaret Atwood

Vintage

** THE SUNDAY TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER ** Discover the dystopian novel that started a phenomenon. Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford - her assigned name, Offred, means 'of Fred'. She has only one function: to breed. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she ...

Mikhail Bulgakov

Vintage

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL GLENNY With the ink still wet on his diploma, the twenty-five-year-old Dr Mikhail Bulgakov was flung into the depths of rural Russia which, in 1916-17, was still largely unaffected by such novelties as the motor car, the telephone or electric light. How his alter-ego copes (or fails to cope) with the new and often appalling responsibilities of a lone docto...