Contemporary fiction titles are those which focus on the present or near past. Stories rooted in the current cultural, social, and political landscape which feature characters we can all recognise.
Contemporary Fiction Books
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Secrets of the Bees
Book SynopsisA stunning and evocative novel set on a gorgeous Cornish estate packed with heart, relationships and mysteries from the past.
£17.00
Pushkin Press An Astronomer in Love
Book SynopsisIn 1760, Guillaume le Gentil, astronomer to King Louis XV, sets sail for India. He hopes to record the transit of Venus, but rough seas - and war with the British - make his quest more complicated than he could have imagined. Two hundred and fifty years later, anxious, lonely Xavier Lemercier chances upon Guillaume's telescope. As he looks out across the rooftops of Paris, he glimpses an intriguing woman with a zebra in her apartment. Then she walks into his office, and his life changes forever...
£9.49
Olympia Publishers King of Broadway
Book Synopsis
£10.44
Aurora Metro Publications The Wilder Path
Book SynopsisCaught between the cliffs and an unforgiving storm, Rosalie becomes trapped in a cave overlooking the sea. She grapples with the weight of her own losses, heartbreak, as memories of her son come back unbidden. With time slipping through her fingers, she faces the ultimate question: can she find a way back-not just to safety, but to herself?
£11.39
Peirene Press Ltd Iron Lung
Book SynopsisSet in Copenhagen during the terrifying polio epidemic of the early 1950s,Iron Lung is a poetic allegory of adolescence, and an unsettling and subtle commentary on sexuality, medicine, and technology.
£11.69
Penguin Putnam Inc Peach Tea Smash
Book Synopsis
£8.54
Scratch Books Failed Summer Vacation
Book Synopsis
£10.44
HarperCollins Publishers Liars Island
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£9.49
Penguin Publishing Group In the Company of Witches
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£15.38
Pan Macmillan Rosarita
Book SynopsisBorn and educated in India, Anita Desai is the author of many novels, including Rosarita, and short stories, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times for her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Fasting, Feasting. She is the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature.
£9.49
St Martin's Press Offside
Book Synopsis
£14.33
Simon & Schuster Ltd The Best of Intentions
Book SynopsisDon't miss the wonderful new novel from the author of Good Taste and The Photographer of the Lost . . . Welcome to a utopia in the English countryside . . . When Robert Bardsley arrives at Greenfields in the spring of 1933, it is home to a collective of writers, artists, thinkers, musicians and horticulturalists; a place of unchecked idealism and outlandish lifestyles that regularly scandalises the county. An ambitious young gardener, Robert's been offered a cottage in the grounds of Anderby Hall in return for his efforts to restore the hornbeam maze and tame the feral roses. When the residents of Greenfields discover that Mrs Fitzgerald has sold the old orchard to a property developer, who intends to build an estate of mock-Tudor bungalows, cracks start to fracture the community's façade. Told by four members of the community over the course of a year, this is a novel about the tensions between ideals and practicalities. At what price do we let go of our principles? And,
£9.49
Quercus Publishing The Black Loch
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Simon & Schuster Slanting Towards the Sea
Book SynopsisSpanning twenty years and one life-altering summer in Croatia, Slanting Towards the Sea is at once an unforgettable love story and a powerful exploration of what it means to come of age in a country younger than oneself.Ivona divorced the love of her life, Vlaho, a decade ago. They met as students at the turn of the millennium, when newly democratic Croatia was alive with hope and promise. But the challenges of living in a burgeoning country extinguished Ivona’s dreams one after another—and a devastating secret forced her to set him free. Now Vlaho is remarried and a proud father of two, while Ivona’s life has taken a downward turn. In her thirties, she has returned to her childhood home to care for her ailing father. Bewildered by life’s disappointments, she finds solace in reconnecting with Vlaho and is welcomed into his family by his spirited wife, Marina. But when a new man enters Ivona’s life, the carefully cultivated dynamic between the three is disrupted, forcing a reckoning for all involved. Set against the mesmerizing Croatian coastline, Slanting Towards the Sea is a cinematic, emotionally searing debut about the fragile nature of potential and the transcendence of love.
£23.19
Bonnier Books Ltd Getting Away
Book Synopsis
£14.44
Galley Beggar Press All My Precious Madness
Book Synopsis
£10.44
G&D Media Notes From The Underground
Book Synopsis?To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise? ? Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the UndergroundThe darkly fascinating novella Notes From The Underground was written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1864, shortly before he penned his lengthier later novels, including The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment.Considered by many to be one of the first existentialist novels it follows the complicated mind of a bitter, retired civil servant (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man), who lives alone in St. Petersburg, Russia in the mid 19th century.Able to retire after recently inheriting some money, the narrator in full retreat from society has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory rambling narrative that runs the gamut from human morality, to logic and reason and serves as a devastating attack on emerging Western and contemporary Russian philosophy, as well as social utopianism and an assertion of man?s essentially irrational nature. These memoirs or confessions describe and explain his alienation from modern society and the work can be viewed as an attack on and rebellion against determinism, the idea that everything, including the human personality and will, can be reduced to the laws of nature, science and mathematics.One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the narrator is a doubting, alienated protagonist in a novella that introduces the moral, religious, political and social themes that dominated Dostoyevsky?s later masterworks.
£10.44
Profile The Course of the Heart
Book SynopsisThe cult classic novel from the author of Climbers and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise AgainWith an introduction by bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield'A spare textual elegance and closure-denying restraint that impresses and fulfils' IAIN BANKSOn a hot May night, three Cambridge students carry out a ritualistic act that changes their lives. Decades later, none of the participants can remember what transpired; but their clouded memories bind them together. Unable to move on, Pam Stuyvesant is an epileptic haunted by strange sensual visions. Her husband Lucas believes that a dwarfish creature is stalking him, and invents histories to soothe Pam's fears. Self-styled Sorcerer Yaxley becomes obsessed with a terrifyingly transcendent reality. The narrator is seemingly the least effected participant in the ritual: he is haunted by the smell of roses, and his guilt as he attempts to help his friends escape the torment that has engulfed their lives. Strange, dreamlike and moving, The Course of the Heart is an examination of the edges of humanity where we lie, hide, hurt and heal.'A gloriously intelligent, beautifully written and thoroughly maddening book' INDEPENDENT
£10.44
Atlantic Books The Lives of Women
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£9.49
Canongate Books Ltd. Swallows
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£14.39
Rebellion Publishing Ltd. The Sludge 60th Anniversary
Book SynopsisA strange and terrible living jelly-like substance the product of nuclear weapons testing emerged from the depths of the sea near Canada in 1965. Known by the human world as The Sludge', this unique monster posed a threat to anything that stood in its way. Anything it covered became possessed of a frightening, malignant power aimed against Mankind!
£17.09
Faber & Faber Helm
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£18.00
Sourcebooks Breathe In Bleed Out
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£15.20
HarperCollins Publishers Paper Heart
Book Synopsis
£17.60
Vintage Publishing The Gilda Stories
Book SynopsisJewelle Gomez is a writer, activist and the author of the double Lambda Award-winning novel, The Gilda Stories. Her other publications include The Lipstick Papers, Flamingoes and Bears and Oral Tradition. Formerly the executive director of the Poetry Center and the American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University, she has also worked in philanthropy for many years. She is the former director of the literature programme at the New York State Council on the Arts, the director of Grants and Community Initiatives for Horizon and the President of the San Francisco Library Commission. She lives in San Francisco.
£9.49
Image Comics Spectators
£24.67
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Golgotha
Book SynopsisTwo men, decades apart, traverse the same land in search of fabled treasure in this haunting conclusion to Lavie Tidhar's epic Maror Trilogy.
£17.00
Bedford Square Publishers Blood Pact
Book SynopsisDetective Superintendent Jack Hawksworth and his team have to untangle a terrorist threat from a possible serial killer in the latest book in the series by million-copy bestseller Fiona McIntosh.
£9.49
Bedford Square Publishers People Watching
£9.49
HarperCollins Publishers Your Heart Belongs to Me
Book SynopsisDean Koontz's compelling and high-concept new thriller is the story of a young man who owes his life to a heart transplant … but confronts an imminent and far worse death because of whose heart it was.Trade ReviewPraise for Dean Koontz: ‘A terrific pursuit story … clever, up-to-the-minute, and riveting’ Guardian ‘There’s surprise after surprise, including a killer finale … a read-in-one-go novel’ Independent on Sunday ‘Velocity hits its pace from the first page and races through to a suitably climactic ending’ Sydney Sunday Telegraph ‘Dean Koontz is not just a master of our darkest dreams, but also a literary juggler’ The Times ‘Psychologically complex, masterly and satisfying’ The New York Times
£12.34
Proud Peacock Publishing LLC Afuera A Young Latinos Journey
£8.54
Muse Ink Press The Lost Traveler
£13.88
HarperCollins Publishers Inc The Dilemmas of Working Women
£16.87
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group The Confessions of Edward Day
Book SynopsisA brilliant new novel set in the bohemian, glamorous theater world of 1970s New York, by the Orange Prize-winning author of Property. • “One of the best novels I’ve ever read about the actor’s psyche.” —The New York Times Book Review It’s the 1970s in New York—rents are cheap, love is free, and with the explosion of theater venues off and off-off Broadway, aspiring actors will work for nothing in no clothes. Enter Edward Day, who wants more than anything to move an unsuspecting audience to an experience of emotional truth. But he must also contend with the drama of his own life: he is locked in a bitter rivalry with fellow actor Guy Margate, with whom he shares a marked physical resemblance and a fatal attraction to the beautiful, talented, and all-too-available Madeleine Delavergne. Edward’s pursuit of Madeleine is complicated by the fact that he owes Guy his life. In this riveting tale of para
£13.56
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group The Biographers Tale
Book SynopsisFrom the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession comes an ingenious novel about love and literary sleuthing: a dazzling fiction woven out of one man’s search for certainty.“Elegant ... witty ... intelligent.” —The Washington PostHere is the story of Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student who decides to escape the world of postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of “real life” by writing a biography of a great biographer. In a series of adventures that are by turns intellectual and comic, scientific and sensual, Phineas tracks his subject to the deserts of Africa and the maelstrom of the Arctic. Along the way he comes to rely on two women, one of whom may be the guide he needs out of the dizzying labyrinth of his research and back into his own life. A tantalizing yarn of detection and desire, The Biographer’s Tale is a provocative look at “truth” in biography
£14.40
Random House USA Inc Endling
£22.40
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Whale Fall
£13.60
Random House USA Inc Not Quite Dead Yet
£21.00
Grove Atlantic Vanishing World
£18.99
St Martin's Press We Met Like This
£12.03
