Modern & contemporary fiction

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  • The running grave

    £10.99

    Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organisation that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths. In order to try to rescue Will, Strike’s business partner Robin Ellacott decides to infiltrate the cult and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito amongst them. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her.

  • The burnout

    £9.99

    Sasha is well and truly over it all: work (all-consuming), friendships (on the back burner), sex-life (non-existent). Armed with good intentions to cleanse and relax, she heads to the Devon resort she loved as a child. But it’s off-season, the hotel is falling apart and she has to share the beach with a grumpy, stressed-out guy called Finn. How can she commune with nature when he’s sitting on a rock, watching her suspiciously? But when curious messages start appearing on the beach, Sasha and Finn are forced to begin talking – about everything. What’s the mystery? Why are they both burned out? And what exactly is ‘manifesting’, anyway? They might discover that they have more in common than they think.

  • August blue

    £9.99

    ‘If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? That summer, the air was electric between us as we transmitted our feelings to each other across three countries’. Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live? Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm. A vivid portrait of a long-held identity coming apart, ‘August Blue’ expands our understanding of the ways in which we seek to find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.

  • Empire Of The Sun

    £10.99

    The classic, heartrending story of a British boy’s four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Newly reissued with an introduction by John Lanchester.

  • Before we say goodbye

    £10.99

    The fourth novel in the sensational ‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold’ series featuring cafe regulars, with the same time-travelling offer, back in the Tokyo cafe – if customers follow the rules.

  • Yellowface

    £9.99

    The Number One Global Sensation

    *Foyle’s Fiction Book of the Year*

    *Amazon Book of the Year*

    *Shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year*

    *Fiction Book of the Year 2024 – British Book Awards*

  • Watch us dance

    £9.99

    As she stands at the window, the spring sunshine streaming in, Mathilde reflects on the opportunities before her – it’s April 1968 and Morocco is changing. Looking out at her garden, the roses – brought in from Marrakech – have bloomed and their sweet, fresh scent pervades the garden. The world is opening up and anything feels possible. Work on the pool has just begun and she imagines diving in to cool off from the summer’s baking heat. Indecency. That’s her husband’s word for it, the flagrant display of their glittering success, on show for their labourers to wonder at. But Mathilde has prevailed. Times have changed, and she is determined to celebrate it. Only Mathilde is blissfully unaware of the consequences for her family, her country and its future. Her babies are now grown up, and they are all about to learn how life can take wild and unexpected turns.

  • The list

    £9.99

    The instant Top 5 Sunday Times bestseller

    ‘The Book Of The Summer’ VOGUE

    ‘A page-turning read about the dark side of social media’STYLIST

    ‘Topical, heartfelt, provocative’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO

  • Biography of X

    £9.99

    When X – an iconoclastic artist, writer and polarizing shape-shifter – dies suddenly, her widow, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognised as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals and destruction. All the while she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

  • Normal People

    £9.99

    Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years. This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person’s life – a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel. It tells us how difficult it is to talk about how we feel and it tells us – blazingly – about cycles of domination, legitimacy and privilege.

  • The covenant of water

    £10.99

    Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, ‘The Covenant of Water’ follows a family in southern India that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning – and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century a twelve-year-old girl, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this poignant beginning, the young girl and future matriarch – known as Big Ammachi – will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life, full of the joys and trials of love and the struggles of hardship.

  • Birnam Wood

    £9.99

    Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, but Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike.