Modern & contemporary fiction

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  • FALLOUT

    £12.99

    A radical daughter. A closeted father. A prim mother turned protester. One runaway girl sets a family on fire – and lights the way to liberation. In the bleak winter of 1982, fifteen-year-old Bridget has had enough. Enough of Thatcher’s Britain, enough of being invisible, and enough of her family’s secrets. Armed with little more than a sharp tongue and a fierce sense of justice, she runs away from her suburban life to join the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp – one of the most iconic protest movements in British history. But Bridget’s disappearance doesn’t just blow open her own life. It sends shockwaves through her fractured family: her distant, conservative mother, who’s about to fall headlong into a love affair she never saw coming, and her father – a man with secrets of his own, who’s spent a lifetime hiding in plain sight. Set at the unlikely intersection of nuclear disarmament and personal awakening, FALLOUT is a fearless, dark

  • The Wilderness

    £10.99

    Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood-overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences-swoops in and stays.

  • Honey in the Wound

    £16.99

    A sister disappears and returns as a tiger. A mother’s voice compels the truth from any tongue. A granddaughter divines secrets in others’ dreams. Spanning ninety years as one family is displaced across Asia, this novel follows Young-Ja, who finds herself struggling to survive after her family is killed by Japanese soldiers. The magical gift that once brought her joy – the ability to infuse her cooking with her feelings: love, peace, delight – transforms into something more powerful as her sorrow and anger seeps into her confections. When her talent is noticed by a Korean resistance fighter, she’s taken to Manchuria where she becomes enmeshed in a network of spies at a teahouse favoured by Japanese officials. Haunted at every turn by the spectre of Japanese soldiers, she endures horrors and brutality at the hands of the Imperial Army.

  • My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein

    My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein

    ★ STAFF PICK!
    Selected by Aude
    £18.99

    Staff Pick!

    Aude Says…

    Such a small but powerful and intense novel.
    Fictionalised biography? Auto fiction? Essay on Art and artists in 20th Century Paris? This book takes many forms and they are all fascinating. Every sentence matters, you will not want to miss a single word, a single thought.

    _______________

    Who was Gertrude Stein? Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius – a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. And why does she matter? The narrator of Deborah Levy’s novel has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first.

  • Porcupines

    £16.99

    Sonia believes she knows what is going on in her daughter’s life – some days she is consumed by the weight of all the knowledge: of permission slips, of appointments, of hurt feelings and favourite songs. However, unbeknownst to her, a little wedge of mystery inserted itself into their lives two days, four hours and thirteen minutes ago, when Mila started the computer languishing in a corner of their living room.

  • Go Gentle

    £20.00

    Adora Hazzard has it all figured out. A Stoic philosopher and contented divorcée, she relishes her teenage daughter, her job as a moral tutor for an old-money family, and the bliss of finally being solo. She’s also quietly assembling a ‘coven’ of like-minded single women on the sixth floor of the legendary Ansonia building on New York’s Upper West Side. Together, they share groceries, dog walkers – and one dirty little secret: despite their age, they’re only just getting started. Adora’s life philosophy is simple: want only what you already have. It’s her secret to happiness until a chance encounter with a charming stranger stirs long-buried passions. Soon, her carefully curated life unravels: black-market art, secret rendezvous, international intrigue and a past she’s worked hard to forget crash into her present. Suddenly, Adora finds herself wanting more and she’s willing to risk everything to get it.

  • No Such Thing as Monday

    £14.99

    Steffie spends her days working in a dry-cleaner’s, trying to scrub the world clean one garment at a time. But no matter how spotless the clothes, she can’t rid herself of the guilt and grime she feels inside. Haunted by what happened to her sister when they were children, large fragments of which she can’t fully remember, Steffie is stuck in a loop of self-destruction, defiance, and shame. When her violent, bullying father dies suddenly, it sparks a reckoning that cracks open her past. What follows is an unexpectedly redemptive journey of a woman trying to piece herself together in a world that failed to make space for her.

  • Twenty Years Together

    £20.00

    The hotly anticipated new stand-alone novel from the author of widely celebrated, Booker-longlisted debut novel Child 44

  • Yesteryear

    £16.99

    'EVERYONE IS GOING TO BE TALKING ABOUT THIS BOOK' BELLA MACKIE

    'NIGHTMARISH, SHOCKING, BRILLIANT'STYLIST

    'THE BOOK THAT WILL BE EVERYWHERE' INDEPENDENT

    'INTELLIGENT, INCISIVE, INSANELY READABLE' JENNIE GODFREY

    'BOLD, BITING. WILL LEAVE YOU GASPING' NITA PROSE

    ‘WICKEDLY FUNNY, FRIGHTENINGLY PERCEPTIVE' ABIGAIL DEAN

  • Park Avenue

    £9.99

    A junior lawyer is drawn into a billion-dollar K-beauty family’s secrets – and must fix their imploding empire before it destroys them all.

  • A Whole Life

    £9.99

    Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn’t ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, Andreas’ heart is broken. He leaves his valley just once more, to fight in WWII – where he is taken prisoner in the Caucasus – and returns to find that modernity has reached his remote haven.

  • Transcription

    £14.99

    A writer returns to his college town, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor. But after he drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device – a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate our memories, and a moving exploration of the relationships that make us who we are.

  • The Book of Records

    £9.99

    Lina and her father have arrived at an enclave called the Sea, a staging-post between migrations, with only a few possessions, among them three volumes from The Great Voyagers encyclopedia series. In this mysterious and shape-shifting building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbours: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, excommunicated for his radical thought; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China, whose brilliance goes unrecognised by the state. Their stories fuse with those of philosophers from previous centuries: Baruch Spinoza, Hannah Arendt and the Chinese poet Du Fu. And as Lina’s ailing father becomes less well, he recounts how he and Lina came to reside in the Sea, and what his betrayals cost their family and others.

  • The Usual Desire to Kill

    £9.99

    A wry, propulsive, exquisitely observed debut about a singularly eccentric family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them. This is an extraordinary novel from a seasoned playwright with a flare for dialogue and, in the end, immense empathy for the mysterious intimacies of marriage, family, and love. 

  • The Café With No Name

    £9.99

    It is 1966, and Robert Simon has just fulfilled his dream by taking over a café on the corner of a bustling Vienna market. He recruits a barmaid, Mila, and soon the customers flock in. Factory workers, market traders, elderly ladies, a wrestler, a painter, an unemployed seamstress in search of a job, each bring their stories and their plans for the future. As Robert listens and Mila refills their glasses, romances bloom, friendships are made and fortunes change. And change is coming to the city around them, to the little café, and to Robert’s dream.

  • On the Calculation of Volume IV

    £12.99

    In a sprawling villa on the outskirts of Bremen, Tara Selter is starting to settle into a new kind of eighteenth of November. Her days with Henry, Ralf and Olga revolve around the daily routines of practical chores: gathering provisions, splitting firewood. But one morning, there are five new arrivals at their wrought-iron gate. Now the villa is full of people. As their community grows, their search for answers about the eighteenth of November becomes more urgent.