Modern & contemporary fiction

  • Down Cemetery Road

    £22.00

    When a house explodes in a quiet Oxford suburb and a young girl disappears in the aftermath, Sarah Tucker – a young married woman, bored and unhappy with domestic life – becomes obsessed with finding her. Accustomed to dull chores in a childless household and hosting her husband’s wearisome business clients for dinner, Sarah suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew, as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead. What begins in a peaceful neighbourhood reaches its climax on a remote, unwelcoming Scottish island as the search puts Sarah in league with a man who finds himself being hunted down by murderous official forces.

  • The figurine

    £9.99

    Of all the ancient art that captures the imagination, none is more appealing than the Cycladic figurine. An air of mystery swirls around these statuettes from the Bronze Age and they are highly sought after by collectors – and looters – alike. When Helena inherits her grandparents’ apartment in Athens, she is overwhelmed with memories of the summers she spent there as a child, when Greece was under a brutal military dictatorship. Her remote, cruel grandfather was one of the regime’s generals and as she sifts through the dusty rooms, Helena discovers an array of valuable objects and antiquities. How did her grandfather amass such a trove? What human price was paid for them? Her desire to find answers about her heritage dovetails with a growing curiosity for archaeology, ignited by a summer spent with volunteers on a dig on an Aegean island.

  • Olive Kitteridge

    £10.99

    Acclaimed author Elizabeth Strout gives us thirteen rich, luminous narratives centred on a singular and formidable heroine, Olive Kitteridge.

  • Minor disturbances at Grand Life Apartments

    £9.99

    Grand Life Apartments is a middle-class apartment block surrounded by lush gardens in the coastal city of Chennai, India. It is the home of Kamala, a pious, soon-to-be retired dentist who spends her days counting down to the annual visits from her daughter who is studying in the UK. Her neighbour, Revathi, is a thirty-two-year-old engineer who is frequently reminded by her mother that she has reached her expiry date in the arranged marriage market. Jason, a British chef, has impulsively moved to India to escape his recent heartbreak in London. The residents have their own complicated lives to navigate, but what they all have in common is their love of where they live, so when a developer threatens to demolish the apartments and build over the gardens, the community of Grand Life Apartments are brought even closer together to fight for their beautiful home.

  • An absence of cousins

    £9.99

    Ilka Weisz is in need not just of friends but ‘elective cousins’. She has left her home in New York to accept a junior teaching post at the prestigious Concordance Institute, a liberal college in bucolic Connecticut. But how can she, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, find a new set to belong to – a surrogate family? Might the Shakespeares – the institute’s director and his wry, acerbic wife – hold the key? In these interlinked New Yorker stories, Lore Segal evokes the comic melancholy of the outsider and the ineffectual ambitions of a progressive, predominantly WASP-ish institution. Tragedy and loss haunt characters as they plan an academic symposium on genocide, while their privileged lives contrast starkly with those on a derelict housing project next door.

  • Hello beautiful

    £9.99

    Best friends and sisters, the four Padavano girls are seen as inseparable by everyone in their close-knit Italian-American neighbourhood. From childhood, the four sisters complete each other. When Julia falls in love with William Waters, a history student and college sports star, she’s delighted by the way her plans for adulthood are coming to fruition: a husband, a house, a family of her own. But when darkness from William’s past begins to block the light of his future, it is Sylvie, not Julia, who becomes his closest confidante – and the ensuing betrayal tears the sisters apart.

  • Land of milk and honey

    £9.99

    A smog has spread. Food crops are disappearing. A chef escapes her career in London to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles. There, her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch and her own body. In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the centre of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

  • How Can I Help You

    £9.99

    Taut and compelling, How Can I Help You explores the dark side of human nature and the dangerous pull of artistic obsession….

  • Gloria

    £12.99

    The Alencar Costa e Oliveira family talk to each other in inside jokes, often saying the opposite of what they mean, or repeating the same sentence until it acquires new meaning. But the family has another characteristic: they all die of acute melancholy.

  • Goodnight Tokyo

    £14.99

    A symphony of interconnected lives and a reflection on isolation and intimacy set in Tokyo.

  • The mystery guest

    £9.99

    **This summer’s 5* escape – the unmissable new mystery from the multi-million-copy bestselling author of THE MAID**

  • The centre

    £9.99

    A darkly comic, boundary-pushing debut following an adrift Pakistani translator in London who attends a mysterious language school which boasts complete fluency in just ten days, but at a secret, sinister cost.