Contemporary fiction Books 1497 results

Raymond Chandler

Ladybird

A classic novel by Raymond Chandler, the master of hard-boiled crime, The Long Good-Bye is the sixth novel featuring laconic PI Philip Marlowe Down-and-out drunk Terry Lennox has a problem: his millionaire wife is dead and he needs to get out of LA fast. So he turns to his only friend in the world: Philip Marlowe, Private Investigator. He's willing to help a man down on his luc...

Dan Brown

Ladybird

Famed Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon answers an unexpected summons to appear at the U.S. Capitol Building. His planned lecture is interrupted when a disturbing object - artfully encoded with five symbols - is discovered in the building. Langdon recognizes in the find an ancient invitation into a lost world of esoteric, potentially dangerous wisdom. When his mentor Peter Sol...

Jerome D. Salinger

Puffin

De lotgevallen van een broer en zuster, beiden zoekend naar een innerlijk evenwicht. ...

Jerome David Salinger

Penguin

The Catcher in Rye is the ultimate novel for disaffected youth, but it's relevant to all ages. The story is told by Holden Caulfield, a seventeen- year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Throughout, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves- the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his r...

Kathryn Stockett

Penguin

Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the silver. Some lines will never be crossed. Aibileen is a black maid: smart, regal, and raising her seventeenth white child. Yet something shifted inside Aibileen the day her own son died while his bosses looked the other way. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is by some way the sassie...

Dan Brown

Ladybird

Harvard Professor Robert Langton, visiting Paris, is called in when the curator of the Louvre is murdered. Alongside the body is a series of baffling codes. Langton and a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, are amazed to find a trail that leads to the works of Da Vinci - and beyond. This is an abridged edition aimed at young adults. ...

Thomas Mallon

Phoenix

NOW A SHOWTIME LIMITED SERIES STARRING MATT BOMER, JONATHAN BAILEY, AND ALLISON WILLIAMS • A searing historical novel set in 1950s Washington, D.C.—a world of dominated by personalities like Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Joe McCarthy—and infused with political drama, unexpected humor, and heartbreak. • From the acclaimed author of Watergate and Up With the Sun "Crisp, buoyant pros...

Paul Auster

Faber & Faber

Timbuktu. Meet Mr Bones, the canine hero of Paul Auster's remarkable novel. Bones is the sidekick of Willy G. Christmas, a brilliant but troubled poet-saint from Brooklyn. Together they sally forth to Baltimore, Maryland, on a last great adventure, searching for Willy's old teacher, Bea Swanson. Years have passed since Willy last saw his beloved mentor, who used to know him as ...

Karen Russell

Vintage

Charting loss, love, and the difficult art of growing up, these stories unfurl with wicked humour and insight. Two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab; a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to 'Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers' (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2,...

Junot Díaz

Faber & Faber

Junot Diaz Made His Remarkable Debut As A Writer With This Collection Of Stories That Move From The Barrios Of The Dominican Republic To The Struggling Urban Communities Of New Jersey. The Stories Are All Unflinching And Strong And Diaz'S Prose Crackles With An Electric Sense Of Discovery. In 'Ysrael', Two Brothers Hunt A Disfigured Boy Who Hides Behind A Mask; In 'No Face', Th...

Mary Shelley / Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Penguin

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

Hodder

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...

Djuna Barnes

Faber & Faber

"Nightwood is not only a classic of modernist literature, but was also acknowledged by T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Eliot admired Djuna Barnes' rich, evocative language. Barnes told a friend that Nightwood was written with her own blood 'while it was still running.' That flowing wound was the breakup of an eight-year relationship with the love of ...

Jonathan Franzen

Harper

25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR 'The first great American novel of the twenty-first century' ELLE 'Gluttonously fun, plotted like a museum heist' TONY TULATHIMUTTE 'Funny, poignant, soulful and savage' ELIZABETH DAY A brilliantly perceptive and moving novel that announced Jonathan Franzen as one of our greatest living writers. The Lamberts - Enid, Al...

David Foster Wallace

Abacus

'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

Faber & Faber

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

Vintage Contemporaries

A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A contemporary literary classic and "an accomplished psychological thriller ... absolutely chilling" (Village Voice), from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch.One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsUnder ...

Ernest Hemingway

Penguin

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

Vintage

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...

Marcel Proust

Penguin

One of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1: The Way by Swann's is published in a new translation from the French by Lydia Davis in Penguin Classics.The Way by Swann's is one of the great novels of childhood, depicting the impressions of a sensitive boy of his family and neighbours, brought dazzlingly...

Adolfo Bioy Casares

Penguin

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 Kurlansky

Vintage

Homer called it a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. As Mark Kurlansky so brilliantly relates here, salt has shaped civilisation from the beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of mankind. Wars have been fought over salt and, while salt taxes secured empires across Europe and Asia, they have also inspired...

Mark Dunn

Harper

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...

Gregory David Roberts

Abacus

A novel of high adventure, great storytelling and moral purpose, based on an extraordinary true story of eight years in the Bombay underworld.'In the early 80s, Gregory David Roberts, an armed robber and heroin addict, escaped from an Australian prison to India, where he lived in a Bombay slum. There, he established a free health clinic and also joined the mafia, working as a m...

Haruki Murakami

Vintage

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

Vintage

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

Vintage

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...

Ann Patchett

Harper

Winner of the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The poignant - and at times very funny - novel from the author of State of Wonder and Commonwealth. Latin terrorists storm an international gathering hosted by an underprivileged country to promote foreign interest and trade, only to find that their intended target, the President, has stayed home to watch his fa...

Maggie O'farrell

Hit

"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

Vintage

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 ...