Modern & contemporary fiction

Showing 513–528 of 594 resultsSorted by latest

  • Beartown

    £10.99

    Beartown is a small town in a large Swedish forest. For most of the year it is under a thick blanket of snow, experiencing the kind of cold and dark that brings people closer together – or pulls them apart. Its isolation means that Beartown has been slowly shrinking with each passing year. But now the town is on the verge of an astonishing revival. Everyone can feel the excitement. Change is in the air and a bright new future is just around the corner. Until the day it is all put in jeopardy by a single, brutal act. It divides the town into those who think it should be hushed up and forgotten and those who’ll risk the future to see justice done. At last, it falls to one young man to find the courage to speak the truth that it seems no one else wants to hear. With the town’s future at stake, no one can stand by or stay silent. Everyone is on one side or the other. Which side would you be on?

  • Chanson douce

    £10.10

    BESTSELLER. Winner of Goncourt Prize 2016. The story of two young children who are murdered by their nanny. Translated into English as “Lullaby”.

  • Heartburn

    £10.99

    Rachel Samstat is smart, successful, married to a high-flying Washington journalist – and devastated. She has discovered that her husband is having an affair with Thelma Rice.

  • Lincoln In The Bardo

    £10.99

    The American Civil War rages while President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son lies gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body. From this seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of realism, entering a thrilling, supernatural domain both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself trapped in a transitional realm – called, in Tibetan tradition, the bardo – and as ghosts mingle, squabble, gripe, and commiserate, and stony tendrils creep towards the boy, a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul. Unfolding over a single night, ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ is written with George Saunders’ inimitable humour, pathos, and grace.

  • T’choupi – Noir

    £7.80
  • Play it as it lays

    £9.99

    A profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking.

  • The Subtle Knife

    £8.99

    Will has just killed a man. He’s on the run. His escape will takehim far beyond his own world, to the eerie disquiet of a desertedcity, and to a girl, Lyra. Her fate is strangely linked to hisown, and together they must find the most powerful weapon in allthe worlds…

  • The Nightingale

    £9.99

    Two sisters. One must be brave. One should be afraid. A heartbreaking, endlessly compelling work of historical fiction from Kristin Hannah, author of The Women.

  • T’choupi – Pot

    £7.80
  • Swing Time

    £9.99

    Two girls dream of being dancers – but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either. Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, ‘Swing Time’ is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them.

  • The Underground Railroad

    £10.99

    Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North. In Whitehead’s razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can.

  • Nutshell

    £9.99

    Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She’s still in the marital home – a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse – but not with John. Instead, she’s with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, 9-month-old resident of Trudy’s womb.

  • Hot Milk

    £9.99

    Two women arrive in a Spanish village, a dreamlike place caught between the desert and the ocean, seeking medical advice and salvation. One suffers from a mysterious illness: spontaneous paralysis confines her to a wheelchair. The other, her daughter Sofia, has spent years playing the reluctant detective, struggling to understand her mother’s illness. Surrounded by the oppressive desert heat and the mesmerising figures who move through it, Sofia waits while her mother undergoes the strange programme of treatments invented by Dr Gomez. Searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, ever more entangled in the seductive, mercurial games of those around her, Sofia finally comes to confront and reconcile the disparate fragments of her identity.

  • Il Mio Palloncino

    £13.99
  • Run

    £10.99

    Full of warmth and humanity, ‘Run’ is a story about our fragile hopes and fears for our children and the lengths we will go to to protect our families.

  • Commonwealth

    £10.99

    It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited and notices a heart stoppingly beautiful woman. When he kisses Beverly Keating, his host’s wife, he sets in motion the joining of two families, whose shared fate will be defined on a day 7 years later. In 1988, Franny Keating, now 24, is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets the famous author Leon Posen one night at the bar, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story.