Modern & contemporary fiction

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  • The Death of Us

    £9.99

    *A Book of the Year in The Times, Guardian, Good Housekeeping and iPaper*

    ‘Taut, elegant and heartbreaking’ Monica Ali

    ‘A brilliant character study of trauma, grief and survival’ Claire Fuller

    ‘Wonderful? lives up to the hype’ Stephen King

    ‘Impossibly accomplished’ Chris Whitaker

    _________________________

  • Elegy, Southwest

    £10.99

    Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American Southwest. While wildfires rage, the couple trace the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Eloise, an academic, researches the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry, while Lewis grieves his mother and struggles to find a place for himself in the desert where he never felt quite at home. Together they cruise past gaping canyons, blinking motels and lonely stretches of wilderness, trying to understand this uncanny landscape where Georgia O’Keeffe built her home and avant-garde artists dig mysterious installations in the sand. When Eloise begins to suspect she might be pregnant, she hopes to turn Lewis’s attention from the past to the future, but their relationship continues to fracture as they head towards a destination unknown.

  • Vanishing World

    £9.99

    In our near-future world, children are solely conceived by artificial insemination. Even sex between married couples is viewed as taboo. Amane’s family is irregular. Her parents copulated to create her and hope that she too will find love and have a child with the person she marries. But Amane falls in line with society’s way of thinking and wants a regular ‘clean’ marriage. Then she hears of a place that is the subject of a social experiment. Everyone in Paradise-Eden will act as one big family. Could this be the perfect third way?

  • Overdue

    £9.99

    Ingrid Dahl is a twenty-nine-year-old librarian living in the cosy mountain town of Ridgetop. She and her boyfriend since college, Cory, have never discussed marriage; they’re happy with the way things are. But when Ingrid’s sister announces her engagement to a woman she’s only been dating for two years, Ingrid and Cory suddenly feel pressured to start thinking about the inevitable: marriage and kids. The thing is, neither of them has ever been with anyone else. Shouldn’t they sow their oats before settling down? They make the unorthodox decision to separate for a month to date other people, assuming that at the end of it, they’ll reunite and start planning their nuptials. But of course the best laid plans often go awry, and when Ingrid and Cory meet at the end of the month to resume next steps in their relationship, it’s clear neither of them is ready to get back together.

  • The Tribe

    £12.99

    The Tribe chronicles a powerful Sephardic dynasty in the cosmopolitan city of Salonica during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, through the Nazi Occupation of France, to the early 1960s, when the survivors and their children confront their past, with long hidden secrets uncovered and deep-seated conflicts exposed.

  • Howl

    £20.00

    In the aftermath of a massacre from which he doubts the world will ever recover, Ferdinand Draxler finds himself at the crossroads of history. Unless it’s just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy nature. The son of a Holocaust survivor who accuses him of cowardice and the father of a daughter who accuses him of genocide, Draxler longs to be a hero for his people or the comic scourge of their enemies, but does he have the mettle to be either? He isn’t even sure he has what it takes to go mad. He wades through protests and searches London for menacing graffiti, whilst dodging the warring staff in the primary school where he is headmaster and the pleas of his non-Jewish wife to seek ‘mental health’ support. But can’t she see that the world is crumbling around them, and he is at the centre?

  • Dunbar

    £10.99

    Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he handed over care of the family firm to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan. But relations quickly soured, leaving him doubting the wisdom of past decisions. Now imprisoned in a care home in the Lake District with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. But who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate?

  • Hag-Seed

    £10.99

    Felix is at the top of his game as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His productions have amazed and confounded. Now he’s staging a Tempest like no other: not only will it boost his reputation, it will heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. And also brewing revenge. After 12 years, revenge finally arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Here, Felix and his inmate actors will put on his Tempest and snare the traitors who destroyed him. It’s magic! But will it remake Felix as his enemies fall?

  • Brawler

    £18.99

    Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region – from New England to Florida to California – these nine stories reflect and expand upon a single shared theme: the ceaseless battle between the dark and light in all of us. Among those caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling; a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult; a mother blinded by the loss of her family; and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by human fallibility, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.

  • Shylock Is My Name

    £10.99

    ‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’ With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It’s the beginning of a remarkable friendship. Elsewhere in the Golden Triangle, the rich, manipulative Plurabelle is the face of her own TV series, existing in a bubble of plastic surgery and lavish parties. She shares prejudices and a barbed sense of humour with her loyal friend D’Anton, whose attempts to play Cupid involve Strulovitch’s daughter – and put a pound of flesh on the line.

  • A Far-Flung Life

    £20.00

    Western Australia, 1958. A truck rumbles along a lonely outback road. A moment’s inattention, and in a few muddled seconds the lives of the MacBride family are shattered. Instead of leaving them to heal, fate comes back for them in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child.

  • Intelligence

    £16.99

    Oxford, 1938. Ida and Medora are two brilliant young philosophers at the heart of a group who gather in storied rooms to dance, drink and debate theories of right and wrong. But as the world spins towards war, theoretical questions of life and death become all too real. While her friends are called up to do intelligence work, Ida, the irrepressible Texan outsider, seeks academic distraction. Then she stumbles across secret Nazi information that could radically change the direction of the war. Can she and Medora capture the attention of the spymasters and mandarins in London in time to save thousands of lives?