Contemporary fiction Books 1240 results

Jack Kerouac

Tristessa is a strange fever-dream of morphine sickness and belly-deep sadness. Or, in the words of Allen Ginsberg: 'a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuahua dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, and pads at dawn in Mexico City slums'. ...

Mary Shelley

'He stretched out his two long, lank arms, that looked like spider's claws, and seemed to embrace with them the expanse before him' His inheritance squandered and engagement severed, Guido di Cortese stalks the desolate Genoese coast. A monstrous creature, shipwrecked by a ferocious storm, offers him unimaginable wealth to exchange bodies, entwining their fates. Transformation...

Pat Barker

After ten blood-filled years, the war is over. Troy lies in smoking ruins as the victorious Greeks fill their ships with the spoils of battle. Alongside the treasures looted are the many Trojan women captured by the Greeks - among them the legendary prophetess Cassandra, and her watchful maid, Ritsa. Enslaved as concubine - war-wife - to King Agamemnon, Cassandra is plagued by...

Jacqueline Harpman

SISTERHOOD. SECRETS. SURVIVAL. Discover the haunting, heart-breaking post-apocalyptic TikTok sensation, now available in a beautiful hardback gift edition. 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 n...

Katie Kitamura

A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, FINANCIAL TIMES, BBC, TIME, VOGUE, MARIE CLAIRE, ESQUIRE and ROLLING STONE BOOK TO READ IN 2025 'An original' RACHEL KUSHNER 'Gorgeously disquieting' HERNAN DIAZ 'One of our most brilliant writers' LAUREN GROFF One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilising novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love ...

Lisa Medved

Two women, a mysterious map, and a family secret spanning hundreds of years ... A stunning art history thriller set around the life, times, and feuds of the artist Peter Paul Rubens. 'An inspired blend of history and suspense ... This wonderful debut novel will inhabit your dreams' Dominic Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos and Return t...

Guadalupe Nettel

When an albatross strays too far from its home, or loses its bearings, it becomes an 'accidental', an unmoored wanderer. The protagonists of these eight stories each find the ordinary courses of their lives disrupted by an unexpected event and are pushed into unfamiliar terrain: a girl encounters her uncle in hospital, who was cast out of the family for reasons unknown; a menac...

Defne Suman

'Vivid, evocative and tender.' Elif Shafak 'In our family, secrets were buried deep like treasure, never to be spoken of...' 1974. Melike should be happy: school is shut and her parents have stopped hosting parties for their rowdy political friends. But she's scared. She can tell from her parents' urgent whispers about prison, invasion and military coups that Istanbul is chang...

Kate Folk

'Truly original . . . deeply weird, deeply funny and deeply felt' DAILY TELEGRAPH A CLASSIC STORY OF GIRL MEETS PLANE. A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN TIME, VOX, AND VULTURE'Batty and brilliant' THE TIMES 'Very strange and very funny' GUARDIAN 'Surprisingly tender. Deliciously weird' RACHEL YODER, author of NIGHTBITCH 'Wonderfully weird and worryingly convincing' CHARLOTTE MENDELSON, ...

André Aciman

In the scorching New York heat, a hundred people wait to be selected as jurors. Paul is reading a newspaper. Catherine is reading a novel. So begins a whirlwind flirtation: over cappuccinos in Manhattan and gallery trips to Chelsea, Paul and Catherine escape into the illusion of an Italian getaway. Their feelings quickly evolve into something deeper, something - as mature adult...

Amor Towles

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Feels more mythically New York than a Woody Allen storyboard painted by Edward Hopper' THE TIMES 'Wonderful' DAILY MAIL 'Storytelling of the highest order' IRISH TIMES 'Towles is a craftsman' NEW YORK TIMES Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella ...

Sosuke Natsukawa

Nanami sees nothing wrong with a library and cat combination. But a talking cat is a whole other story. Thirteen-year-old Nanami Kosaki loves reading. The local library is a home from home and books have become her best friends. When Nanami notices books disappearing from the library shelves, she's particularly curious about a suspicious man in a grey suit whose furtive behavi...

Colm Toibin

In Love in a Dark Time, Colm Tóibín looks at the life and work of some of the greatest and most influential artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Linked by the common thread of their sexualities, his subjects range from figures such as Oscar Wilde, born in the 1850s, to Pedro Almodóvar, born nearly a hundred years later. Tóibín studies how a changing world impacte...

Daphne Du Maurier

DISCOVER THE DU MAURIER DARK ROMANCE COLLECTION 'Du Maurier is mistress of the sleight of hand in fiction . . . brilliantly, marvellously chilling' MAGGIE O'FARRELL 'Moody and unnerving' GILLIAN FLYNN 'Sinuous and undeniably feral' JULIE MYERSON *** 'Every day, haunted still by doubt, I ask myself a question which I cannot answer. Was Rachel innocent or guilty?' Philip Ashl...

André Aciman

A dazzling, sunbaked Italian summer story from the global bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name. ...

Rosie Hewlett

Medea longs for a different life. Since childhood, she has been separated from her sister, shunned by her mother, and persecuted and tormented by her brother and father. All because of a unique and dangerous gift- witchcraft. But when a dashing young hero, Jason, arrives to claim the famed Golden Fleece that her father protects, Medea sees her opportunity to escape. Her offer ...

Torrey Peters

Deep in the forest, a group of restless lumberjacks plan a dance that some will volunteer to attend as women; the broadest, strongest axeman finds himself caught in a rivalry with a pretty jack that culminates in jealousy, betrayal and an astonishing spectacle of transition. Meanwhile, in other times and places, the gender apocalypse is brought about by an unstable ex-girlfrien...

Annika Norlin

"Ants live in communities, where everyone helps out. Everyone has a task for the community. Everyone is needed. No one has to know everything. One morning, Emelie can't get out of bed. Her therapist calls it burnout. Her neighbour calls it the tiny work death. She needs to get away from the brightness of the city lights, the noise of the people, the constant demands, so she goe...

Saou Ichikawa

'A must-read debut. Funny and frank, this book lingers in the mind long after you turn the final page' BBC Books of 2025 Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka Isawa has severe spine curvature and uses an electric wheelchair and ventilator. Within the limits of her care home, her life is lived online: she studies, she tweets indignantly, she posts outrageous stories on ...

Jo Hamya

A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN TIME, THE DAILY MAIL, THE INDEPENDENT, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING AND THE ATLANTIC 'Like Edward St Aubyn and Anne Enright, Hamya is so good on generational conflict, the friction of family, and the damage done by charming but complacent men' DAVID NICHOLLS 'A slippery, excellent exploration of sexual politics, creative appropriation, and family dynamics . . . It ...

Seicho Matsumoto

'An absolute classic, and a whole new world to explore ... irresistible' Lee Child 'Beautiful and melancholic, Inspector Imanishi Investigates is not just an ingenious and elegant mystery, but a fascinating window into 1960s Japan' Paula Hawkins A thrilling crime classic, from the bestselling author of Tokyo Express Tokyo, 1960. As the first rays of morning light hit the rai...

Tommy Orange

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER & NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR PICK 2024 A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 'Wandering Stars is the kind of book that saves lives' Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr! A heart-rending story of a Native American community told through the generations Colorado, 1864. Star, a young...

Elif Shafak

The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted, internationally bestselling author of The Island of Missing Trees and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World ***** There Are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel set between the 19th century and modern times, about love and loss, memory and erasure, hurt and healing, centred around three enchanting characters living on th...

Ling Ling Huang

'A meditation on how horror can lurk beneath the surface of even the most poreless skin' New York Times Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Bisexual Novel 2024 A WIRED Best Book of 2023 An Audible Best Horror Book of 2023 For fans of The Substance Our narrator produces a wondrous sound from the piano learned from her mother and father, who fled China in the wake of the...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

'Reads like a feminist War and Peace. A magnificent novel' THE SUNDAY TIMES 'A complex, multi-layered beauty of a book. Extraordinary' NEW STATESMAN A publishing event ten years in the making - a searing, exquisite new novel by the bestselling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists - the story of four women and their loves, longings and desires. '...

Curtis Garner

Set in London across a single, life-altering summer, Isaac interrogates masculinity and queerness in the digital age and offers a fresh take on desire and intimacy, adolescent obsession and dangerous first love. After inexperienced seventeen-year-old Isaac loses his virginity through a dating app - a disappointing yet addictive experience - he spends his final months before uni...

Edmund White

A wildly hilarious and irreverent novel about a rich octogenarian and the young ballerino he covets-Edmund White at his funniest and most unrestrained.Aldwych West, an eighty-year-old modern-day aristocrat living alone in his Manhattan townhouse, is used to having what he wants. And when he sets eyes on August Dupond, a strong, stunningly beautiful soloist in the New York City ...

Vincenzo Latronico

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment. Their life as young digital creatives revolves around slow cooking, Danish furniture, sexual experimentation and the city's twenty-four-hour party scene - an ideal existence shared by an entire generation and tantalizingly lived out on social media. But beyond t...

Rachel Joyce

Family is everything, even when it falls apart. Discover the brand-new novel from the multi-million-copy bestselling author. AN INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER! 'The perfect holiday read ...There's a new heft and grandeur, not only in the sophisticated characters and the fancy Italian real estate, but in the hidden darkness that can exist in a family ... Rachel Joyce is firin...

Coco Mellors

'IT MOVED ME DEEPLY' LIV LITTLE 'DEEPLY POIGNANT' HARPERS BAZAAR 'GORGEOUS' RAVEN LEILANI THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN ...