Modern & contemporary fiction

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  • 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.

  • Flight

    £9.99

    A stunning novel about grief, shame, art, family, and all the ways we try and fail and try again to love and care for one another, from the critically acclaimed author of Want
     

  • Antarctica

    £9.99

    This debut collection of stories opens up the lives of characters whose worlds seethe with obsession and dark tension. Set in Ireland and the deep South of America, they reveal lives where dreams, memory and chance can lead to crippling effects.

  • Before your memory fades

    £10.99

    The third novel from the author of the phenomenon Before the Coffee Gets Cold: tales from a little cafe in Hakodate, Cafe Donna Donna, where customers may travel through time – if they obey the rules. For fans of The Guest Cat and If Cats Disappeared from the World.

  • We all want impossible things

    £9.99

    Who knows you better than your best friend? Who knows your secrets, your fears, your desires, your strange imperfect self? Edi and Ash have been best friends for over 40 years. Since childhood they have seen each other through life’s milestones: stealing vodka from their parents, the Madonna phase, REM concerts, unexpected wakes, marriages, infertility, children. As Ash notes, ‘Edi’s memory is like the back-up hard drive for mine’. So when Edi is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ash’s world reshapes around the rhythms of Edi’s care, from chipped ice and watermelon cubes to music therapy; from snack smuggling to impromptu excursions into the frozen winter night. Because life is about squeezing the joy out of every moment, about building a powerhouse of memories, about learning when to hold on, and when to let go.

  • On Green Dolphin Street

    £9.99

    Part love story, part novel about America, this story tells of a solitary woman and her exhilarating attempt to face down death. The Eisenhower years end and 1960 ushers in John F. Kennedy. Mary van der Linden confronts the terror of the Cold War.

  • The whalebone theatre

    £9.99

    Cristabel Seagrave has always wanted her life to be a story, but there are no girls in the books in her dusty family library. For an unwanted orphan who grows into an unmarriageable young woman, there is no place at all for her in a traditional English manor. But from the day that a whale washes up on the beach at the Chilcombe estate in Dorset, and twelve-year-old Cristabel plants her flag and claims it as her own, she is determined to do things differently.

  • The humans

    £9.99

    Professor Andrew Martin of Cambridge University solves the world’s greatest mathematical riddle. Then he disappears. When he is found walking naked along the motorway, Professor Martin seems different. Besides the lack of clothes, he now finds normal life pointless. His loving wife and teenage son seem repulsive to him. In fact, he hates everyone on the planet. Everyone, that is, except Newton. And he’s a dog. Can a bit of Debussy and Emily Dickinson keep him from murder?

  • The Bodyguard

    £10.99

    Hannah looks more like a kindergarten teacher than someone who could kill you with her bare hands. But the truth is, she’s an Executive Protection Agent (aka. bodyguard) and she’s just been hired to protect superstar Jack Stapleton. Jack’s an impossibly handsome actor who looks like he has everything. Including a creepy, corgi-breeding stalker. When Jack’s mom gets sick, he heads home to the family’s Texas ranch to help out. Only one catch: He doesn’t want his family to know about his stalker. Or the bodyguard thing. And so Hannah – against her better judgment – finds herself pulling on her cowboy boots and pretending to be Jack’s girlfriend as a cover. It’s easy for Hannah to protect Jack. But protecting her own heart? That’s the hardest thing she’s ever done.

  • Carrie Soto is back

    £9.99

    Carrie Soto is fierce, and her determination to win at any cost has not made her popular. By the time Carrie retires from tennis, she is the best player the world has ever seen. She has shattered every record and claimed twenty Slam titles. And if you ask her, she is entitled to every one. She sacrificed nearly everything to become the best, with her father as her coach. But six years after her retirement, Carrie finds herself sitting in the stands of the 1994 US Open, watching her record be taken from her by a brutal, stunning, British player named Nicki Chan. At thirty-seven years old, Carrie makes the monumental decision to come out of retirement and be coached by her father for one last year in an attempt to reclaim her record. Even if the sports media says that they never liked the ‘Battle-Axe’ anyway. Even if her body doesn’t move as fast as it did.

  • The housemaid’s secret

    £10.99

    It’s hard to find an employer who doesn’t ask too many questions about my past. So I thank my lucky stars that the Garricks miraculously give me a job, cleaning their stunning penthouse with views across the city and preparing fancy meals in their shiny kitchen. I can work here for a while, stay quiet until I get what I want. It’s almost perfect. But I still haven’t met Mrs Garrick, or seen inside the guest bedroom. I’m sure I hear her crying. I notice spots of blood around the neck of her white nightgowns when I’m doing laundry. And one day I can’t help but knock on the door. When it gently swings open, what I see inside changes everything. That’s when I make a promise. After all, I’ve done this before. I can protect Mrs. Garrick while keeping my own secrets locked up safe. Douglas Garrick has done wrong. He is going to pay. It’s simply a question of how far I’m willing to go.

  • Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

    £10.99

    Two kids meet in a hospital gaming room in 1987. One is visiting her sister, the other is recovering from a car crash. The days and months are long there. Their love of video games becomes a shared world – of joy, escape and fierce competition. But all too soon that time is over, fades from view. When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station, they are catapulted back to that moment. The spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love – making games to delight, challenge and immerse players, finding an intimacy in digital worlds that eludes them in their real lives. Their collaborations make them superstars.

  • We Were Very Merry

    £12.00

    Twenty-three-year-old Lillie Carrigan has left behind the America of her childhood to study at Oxford, dismissing her past as she tries to write and become a woman. In the autumn of 1946, she meets a man over whiskey and cigarettes at Balliol College – a man who will become her husband. Over the course of five years, Lillie travels from England to Paris, the Cote d’Azur, New York City and the Hamptons, her marriage unravelling along the way but her memories remaining steadfast as her uninvited yet constant companions. Haunted by past tragedies and scarred by fresh misadventures, Lillie once again shares her story and lays bare her sins.

  • The satsuma complex

    £9.99

    Gary Thorn goes for a pint with a work acquaintance called Brendan. When Brendan leaves early, Gary meets a girl in the pub. He doesn’t catch her name, but falls for her anyway. When she suddenly disappears without saying goodbye, all Gary has to remember her by is the book she was reading: ‘The Satsuma Complex’. But when Brendan goes missing, Gary needs to track down the girl he now calls Satsuma to get some answers. And so begins Gary’s quest, through the estates and pie shops of South London, to finally bring some love and excitement into his unremarkable life.