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
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers Extraordinary Humans
Book Synopsis
£11.69
Red Robin Publishing Ltd. Family Organiser Floral 2026 Square Wall
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Feminist Press at The City University of New York Sweetlust: Stories
Book SynopsisThe eleven stories in Sweetlust interweave feminist critique, intertextuality, and science fiction tropes in an irreverent portrait of our past, present, and future. In a dystopian world with no men, women are “rehabilitated” at an erotic amusement park. Climate change has caused massive flooding and warming in the Balkans, where one programmer builds a time machine. And a devious reimagining of The Sorrows of Young Werther refocuses to center a sexually adventurous Charlotte. Asja Bakić deploys the speculative and weird to playfully interrogate conversations around artificial intelligence, gender fluidity, and environmental degradation. As she did in her acclaimed debut Mars, Bakić once again upends her characters’ convictions and identities—and infuses each disorienting universe with sly humor and off-kilter eroticism. Visceral and otherworldly, Sweetlust takes apart human desire and fragility, repeatedly framing pleasure as both inviting and perilous.
£12.34
Red Robin Publishing Ltd. Family Organiser At Home 2026 Square Wall
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Olympia Publishers Introspective Retrospection
£16.19
Syntell Smith Publishing Hold Circulation - A Call Numbers Novel: Trial
Book Synopsis
£20.54
Troubador Publishing The Long Shadows of War
Book SynopsisA dual timeline novel set against the historical and political events immediately after the war and in the time leading up to the reunification of Germany in 1990. It explores the tensions and stresses of wartime absences on family relationships.
£10.44
Delphinium Books Starlight and Moonshine
£21.38
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers The Accidental Victim
£6.99
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers Salvation of Souls
£8.54
Kingston Imperial Bedlam: The Life & Mind of Earl Sedgwick
Book Synopsis
£18.74
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers When the Unexpected Happens
£10.44
Vanguard Press Spirit of the Ancestor
£12.74
New Vessel Press The Words That Remain
Book Synopsis
£13.49
ACA Publishing Limited Tibetan Sky
£14.39
Everyman Love Letters
Book SynopsisThis book contains a collection of the great est love letters of all time from 200 of the world''s most ar ticulate lovers. They include Napoleon, Elinor Wylie, Byron, James Joyce, Zelda Fitzgerald and many others. '
£10.80
Girl Friday Productions Here on Earth: A Novel
Book Synopsis
£11.04
The Book Guild Ltd Borrowed Time
Book SynopsisCaught in a deadly game of power and revenge, Rico, Mary, and a gangster named Fats find themselves on the run. As the game unfolds, long-buried questions surface and with demons both personal and literal to face, only the Fates know who will survive.
£9.49
Troubador Publishing Ltd The Winkle Picker
Book SynopsisA âNorfolk Noirâ novel with a stronge sense of location, and the connection of this location to the novelâs main characters.
£9.49
Clash Books Violent Faculties
Book SynopsisA philosophy professor tests the limits of the soul and body by performing dehumanizing experiments on unwilling subjects, after the department is closed due to budget cuts. Violent Faculties follows a philosophy professor influenced by Sade and Bataille. She is ejected by university administrators aiming to impose business strategies in the interest of profit over knowledge. She designs a series of experiments to demonstrate the value of philosophy as a discipline, not because of its potential for financial benefit, but because of its relevance to life and death. The corpses proliferate as her experiments yield theoretical results and ethical conundrums. She questions why it is wrong to kill humans, what is it about them that makes their lives sacred, and then attempts to find it in their bodies, their words, their thoughts, and their souls—seeking foundational truths with a knife in her home office.
£13.29
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers Sailfish and Elephants
£12.59
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers The Duck Press
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£10.79
Fidelis Publishing, LLC Safe Spaces
Book SynopsisSafe Spaces concerns a social credit score that has been implemented across the country, creating a devastating scenario for the hero and his family. The novel's first arc concerns a mandatory sixty-day social quarantine, and is reminiscent of the novel RUN by Blake Crouch in its depiction of a father desperate to protect his family, while a bad situation continues to get worse. Safe Spaces is full of biblical and religious themes. In the climax of the book, the truth shines brightest, as The Apostles Creed is used as an antithesis to the darkness of the world.
£12.71
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers The Hole in The Sky
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£10.44
John F Blair Publisher American Ending
Book SynopsisAn Oprah Daily pick for spring 2023 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction Finalist A woman growing up in a family of Russian immigrants in the 1910s seeks a thoroughly American life. Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who are building a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. However, Yelena craves a different path. Will she find her happy American ending or will a dreaded Russian e
£12.34
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers If Truth be Told
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£13.49
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers The Third Bridge
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£12.59
Mereo Books Broken Bodies
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£9.45
Sibylline Press Eleven Stolen Horses
Book SynopsisEleanor Wooley is determined to start her life over in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.But when her new best friend suddenly disappears, Eleanor abandons her job as a crime reporter for The Gold Strike Tribune and sets off in desperate pursuit. Spurred by gut instinct, Eleanor soon leaves California and scours Northeastern Nevada during one of the hottest, driest summers on record. Obscure signs appear—an intruder’s dire warning, a casino’s mysterious graffiti, a random sighting of a killer on the run. In her search to find Rette, Eleanor discovers the dark world of today’s inhumane treatment of wild horses, and when the secrets of her trusted best friend’s past begin to surface, Eleanor finds herself in grave danger. With the backdrop of the American West’s high desert wilderness and its towering, rugged mountains and vast open range, Eleanor is forced to decide if continuing
£12.34
Catalyst Books The Wanderers
Book SynopsisAcross countries and decades, The Wanderers weaves a captivating tapestry of human lives, exploring the enduring—and sometimes contradictory—duties of blood and country. Ruru’s father, a South African freedom fighter, was exiled to Tanzania before she was born, leaving Ruru and her mother to fend for themselves in the township they called home. So when a fatal bus accident claims her mother’s life, Ruru is adrift. Haunted by her mother’s absence, another loss sits heavy on Ruru’s heart: that of her father, who never returned to the family, or country, he claimed to love. When she learns of his passing, Ruru grieves for the man she never knew, and the answers she would never find. She seeks solace in Tanzania, where she strikes up an unlikely friendship with her father’s widow, a Rwandan refugee named Efuoa. Efuoa gifts Ruru her father’s journals, and as she reads, she begins to piece together the fragments of a complicated life.
£15.19
McNally Editions Thereafter Johnnie
Book SynopsisFamily trauma, race, and the destiny of a nation corrupted by slavery, cast in the light of epic myth: “More than a saga of Black revitalization . . . Part vision, part parable, it is a story for all America.” (The New York Times Book Review) The Snowdon family stands as a pinnacle of Black excellence in Washington, D.C.: educated, affluent, and influential. John Christopher, the patriarch, saves lives as a heart surgeon and is revered by his students at Howard University. His wife, Camille, governs an elegant house overlooking Rock Creek Park and devotes herself to reading, gardening, and raising their three daughters—Cynthia, Patricia, and Eva—to attend the very best schools and roam the world on a whim. Theirs ought to be a story of success and empowerment, but something is rotten in the house of Snowdon. Years later, when John Christopher’s granddaughter Johnnie comes to seek the truth about her own parentage, she unveils a legacy of unspeakable family secrets tangled up in America’s original sin. What begins as a quest for identity spirals into an apocalyptic vision of a nation on the brink of ruin. By turns a poetic epic, a ghost story, a historical saga, and a chilling dystopian fable, Thereafter Johnnie is a unique and uniquely American fusion of myth and hard-bitten reality: an erotic, horrifying, and even hopeful reckoning with centuries of injustice.
£13.29
Unnamed Press Fanny Hill
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£12.34
Distributed Art Pub The Employee
Book SynopsisSternberg's rule-breaking, genre-defying novel upends the humdrum workday world A nameless employee stands outside the door to an office, hesitating to enter because he is five minutes late. This banal opening then launches into a frenetic narrative that switches genres, modes and universes with abandon. From an account of his feral childhood with a nymphomaniacal mother, to his early development of a third arm and a second head, the employee unspools his subsequent life as department-store wrapper, ladder-descending bureaucrat, traveling salesman, murder suspect and other occupations. Years return and reverse through a series of inflicted hellscapes as a tension builds between an untrammeled imagination willing to commit any crime and the inescapable rigidity of the mind.First published in French by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1958, The Employee was awarded the Grand Prix de l'Humour Noir in 1961. This first English-language translation presents an entropic exercise of the imagination that will leave readers bewildered and breathless.Jacques Sternberg (19232006) was a literary maverick, who wrote over 50 books that roamed freely through genre and influence without ever adhering to anything that might threaten constraint. He was briefly a member of the Panic Movement, founded by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor.
£999.99
Green City Books Stranger from Across the Sea
£14.36
Little, Brown & Company I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became
Book SynopsisYuuya has obtained the dark power of the Demons, despite being the disciple of one of the deities who protects the world. To learn to control it, he begins a harsh training regimen. On Earth, Ousei Academy goes on summer break, and that means Yuuya and his friends make plans to have the time of their life at the beach. Of course, that means he'll be surrounded by beautiful girls in swimsuitsturning up the heat on the beach! Meanwhile in the other world, a battle between Yuuya and the peerless sword princess, the Deity of Swords, is being arranged. But their contest is interrupted when the Apostle of Atrocity suddenly attacks, planning to destroy humanity. Now, the fate of the world is in Yuuya's hands!
£11.69
Simon & Schuster Love After Midnight
Book Synopsis
£17.00
Penguin Adult The Outside Man
Book Synopsis
£8.54
Invisible Publishing Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other
Book SynopsisA grossly inaccurate "memoir" about Canadian folk legends.Henry Adam Svec has been pushing boundaries in Canadian folklore since he unearthed songs by CFL players in Library and Archives Canada, thereby thrusting himself into the scene—and the media spotlight. Those spartan poems are finally included in this anthology, in addition to the fruits of his subsequent expeditions, but there is much more besides, including honest accounts of the folklorist’s myriad trials and tribulations. This experimental and genre-defying book mixes the adventurous energies of Alan Lomax and Stompin’ Tom, the intertextual conceptualism of Vladimir Nabokov and Mark Z. Danielewski, and the searing intensity of Elizabeth Smart and Chris Kraus."Comically entertaining, presented with 'performative verve', as novelist Jacob Wren puts it."—Atlantic Books Today "This book is cracking me up—and I don't even like football—but it is just so well written."—Robert Dayton, author of The Canadian RomanticTrade Review"The absurdity is turned up loud, the beauty still gets through, and this is a book I'll recommend again and again."—Megan Clark, Broken Pencil "A very funny book."—Geordie Miller, Canadian Literature "Comically entertaining, presented with 'performative verve', as novelist Jacob Wren puts it."—Atlantic Books Today "This is a clever, delightful, perplexing (in the best way) and wholly original “novel.” It is my hope that a few readers of this review will pick up and run with the ball of this book, passing it on, recommending it to friends, carrying it in whatever way they can to an audience who might not know where to place it, but will, if they let themselves, definitely enjoy reading it."—Aaron Schneider, The Temz Review "This book is cracking me up—and I don't even like football—but it is just so well written and gets into archiving and notions of authenticity, the faux footnotes got me scrambling wishing that some of the not real sources were real, like Dane Spounge, The Origin of Canadian Beat and Spoken Word Poetry, 1998."—Robert Dayton, author of The Canadian Romantic "A book that twangs and spirals—sui generis in the history of Canadian literature. Svec exhibits the acumen of Marshall McLuhan, the heart of Rita MacNeil, and the meticulous truthfulness of Farley Mowat."—Sean Michaels, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and author of The Wagers "The study of folksingers and their songs is above all a quest for authenticity—an idea fiercely debated yet rarely defined. Into this melee of currents comes Henry Adam Svec’s flagship, in the form of a book that wants to find the truth as much as anyone, but in a mirrored hall of connected folk personas that are all real in their own way: who we are, who we think we are, and who we want or need to be. It is deeply personal as much as it is a rich performance—like the best folk songs are."—Kate Beaton, author of Hark! A Vagrant "Fact and fiction blend and blur throughout the pages of the life of this intrepid folksong collector. What do seventies football players, itinerant rock musicians, bureaucratic academics and artificial intelligence all have in common? Possibly nothing, but this book—with trenchant wit and performative verve—connects these and many other dots, at the same time ensuring you’ll completely enjoy the ride. Perhaps we are all folklorists in the end, searching for an authenticity that can take us out of our comfort zones, replacing them with songs we didn’t know we needed but now will always want to sing. Henry Adam Svec shows us how."—Jacob Wren, author of Polyamorous Love Song and Authenticity Is a Feeling
£11.39
Rising Action The Fort
Book Synopsis
£15.29
Daraja Press The Second Coming
Book Synopsis
£19.54
Rising Action Leave This Off the Books
£15.29
Rising Action Sea Salt and Coffee Beans
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£15.29
Epoque Press Upperdown
Book SynopsisThings in the town of Upperdown are not as they seem. The Professor struggles with his devotion to proving the Riemann Hypothesis and he walks the streets seeking a solution whilst battling his own deeper preoccupations. The appearance of a stranger in town, the Piano Man, leads to the resolution of the long-term rat infestation but when the town's children start to go missing it is clear something darker has been set in motion.Trade Review'Unforgettable. Brennan's strikingly original voice blends myth and magic with wry observation as he evokes the liminal world of Upperdown. A dazzlingly good novel. Visceral and daring, it hums with its own dark, unsettling magic. A mesmerising read. David Brennan's fierce and lyrical writing seduces the reader with the peculiar beauty of numbers, while staring unflinchingly into the dark corners of the human heart. Whether writing about quantum physics or the jealousies of the human heart, Brennan's prose is fierce, haunting and compelling.' Danielle McLaughlin
£9.49
Lolli Editions The Dolls
Book SynopsisIn the four stories that make up The Dolls, characters are plagued by unexplained illnesses and oblique, human-made disasters and environmental losses. A big sister descends into the family basement. Another sister refuses her younger brother. A third sister with memory loss is on the run, seeking shelter at Notpla. A fourth set of siblings travel to Hungary with their late mother in a coffin. They each have a different version of their mother's story. Drawing on the likes of August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, Andrej Kurkov, Knut Hamsun, T.S. Eliot, Bela Tarr, and Hieronymus Bosch, Scavenius's universe is chilling and excruciatingly seductive. In it, nothing can be said to be true anymore. After all, anything can be propaganda today.Trade Review"Here is a writer of extremely unusual imaginative powers. I found myself completely entranced. This is one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing I've ever read." - BBC Radio 4; "These are artful, singular stories which, with rigorous inventiveness of language and technique, vividly evoke the calamities that form our nightmares." - The Irish Times; "Fiercely anti-establishment and addictively macabre. The translation is appropriately atmospheric: Jennifer Russell has done a marvellous job of weaving the narrative seamlessly between an almost dreamlike lyricism and a grisly reality." - Translating Women; "A dilute wash of watercolour exposes the terrifying images and themes underneath... Emerging from Scavenius' world, we recognise the cruelty and threat and bewilderment as not only the domain of the world she's writing from, but also a powerful and poetic compression of where we live." - Exacting Clam; "Ursula Scavenius is one of the most exciting Danish short story writers at work today. The Dolls, in Jennifer Russell's magnificent translation, is a literary page-turner: haunting, mesmerizing, and unforgettable in all its grotesque glory." - Katrine Ogaard Jensen
£11.69
Gallimard Hotel Casanova et autres textes brefs
Book Synopsis
£5.58
Fernand Nathan Medee la Magicienne
Book Synopsis
£5.79
Le Livre de poche L'Enfant sauvage
Book Synopsis
£7.32
Le Livre de poche Le probleme Spinoza (Prix des Lecteurs 2014)
Book Synopsis
£13.75
