Modern & contemporary fiction

Showing 265–276 of 479 resultsSorted by latest

  • Wild Dark Shore

    £9.99

    Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place. Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore.

  • Service

    £14.99

    Is there a restroom? Do you have gluten-free bagels? Do you work here? Do you have a restroom? Do I buy books or rent books or what? The worst thing about a bookshop is the customers. Then there’s the gift-wrapping, the invoicing, the stock takes. The Yelp reviews that inevitably contribute to self-loathing. In his late forties, Sean is still a frustrated bookseller who should have written his novel already. Instead, he spends his days drowning in his overwhelming sense of contempt – for LA, for its readers, for its casual disdain for service. And what, or whom, is he serving anyway?

  • The Eleventh Hour

    £18.99

    Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of ‘Midnight’s Children’, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English college, an undead academic can’t rest until he avenges his former tormentor.

  • Heart the Lover

    £18.99

    Our narrator understands good love stories – their secrets, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules. She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined – with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love. Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth. Written with the precision of poetry and the emotional tide of an epic, ‘Heart the Lover’ is a celebration of literature and the life-long echoes of young love.

  • The Party

    £9.99

    Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She’d have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn’t explain it. On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students’ party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and Moira accepts despite Evelyn’s misgivings. As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives.

  • Shadow Ticket

    £22.00

    Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labour-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he finds himself on a liner, eventually ending up in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, & enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement – & of course no sign of the heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, & the troubles that come with each of them.

  • The Proof of My Innocence

    £9.99

    When Phyl, a young literature graduate, moves back home with her parents, she soon finds herself frustrated by the narrow horizons of English country life. But the chance discovery of a forgotten novelist from the 1980s stirs her into action, as does a visit from a family friend, Chris – especially when he tells her that he’s working on a political story that could put his life in danger. Chris has been following the progress of an opaque think-tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, which has been steadily pushing the British government in a more extreme direction. After years in the political wilderness, they are finally poised to put their ideas into action. As Britain finds itself under the leadership of a new Prime Minister whose tenure will only last for seven weeks, Chris pursues his story to a conference being held deep in the Cotswolds, where events take a sinister turn.

  • Days at the Torunka Café

    £10.99

    Tucked away on a narrow side street in Tokyo is the Torunka Café, a neighbourhood nook where the passersby are as likely to be local cats as tourists. Its regulars include Chinatsu Yukimura, a mysterious young woman who always leaves behind a napkin folded into the shape of a ballerina; Hiroyuki Yumata, a middle-aged man who’s returned to the neighbourhood searching for the happy life he once gave up; and Shizuku, the café owner’s teenage daughter, who is still coming to terms with her sister’s death as she falls in love for the first time. While Café Torunka serves up a perfect cup of coffee, it provides these sundry souls with nourishment far more lasting.

  • The Mires

    £9.99

    Three women give birth in different countries and different decades. In the near future, they become neighbours in a coastal town in Aotearoa New Zealand. Single parent Keri has her hands full with four-year-old tearaway Walty and teen Wairere, a strange and gifted child, who always picks up on things that aren’t hers to worry about. They live next door to Janet, a white woman with an opinion about everything, and new arrival Sera, whose family are refugees from ecological devastation in Europe. When Janet’s son Conor arrives home without warning, sporting a fresh buzzcut and a new tattoo, the quiet tension between the neighbours grows, but no one suspects just how extreme Conor has become. No one except Wairere who can feel both the danger, and the swamp beneath their street, watching and waiting.

  • The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

    £25.00

    A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years – an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity.

  • The Last Dream

    £9.99

    A wildly inventive story collection from legendary film director Pedro Almodóvar. ‘The Last Dream’ brings together twelve unpublished stories from Almodóvar’s personal archive, written between the late sixties and the present day.

  • The Land in Winter

    £10.99

    December 1962, a small village near Bristol. Eric and Irene and Bill and Rita. Two young couples living next to each other, the first in a beautiful cottage – suitable for a newly appointed local doctor – the second in a run-down, perennially under-heated farm. Despite their apparent differences, the two women (both pregnant) strike an easy friendship – a connection that comes as a respite from the surprising tediousness of married life, with its unfulfilled expectations, growing resentments and the ghosts of a recent past. But as one of the coldest winters on record grips England in a never-ending frost and as the country is enveloped in a thick, soft, unmoving layer of snow, the two couples find themselves cut off from the rest of the world. And without the small distractions of daily existence, suddenly old tensions and shocking new discoveries threaten to change the course of their lives forever.