Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

📚 An intriguing, twisting and heart-warming novel set in a bookshop that has an unexpected impact on people's lives. From the author of The Second Chance Book Club and Found in a Bookshop 📚 When the Lost for Words bookshop in York hosts an event for a new reading project, four strangers'...

Toby Jones and Holliday Grainger star in a new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Dodie Smith's enduringly popular coming-of-age novel In the 1930s, seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain lives in a crumbling ruin of a castle in the Suffolk countryside. Her father, an author wrestling with...

Hetty’s family was torn apart following the German invasion of the Netherlands. Rounded up by the Nazis and then separated from their parents, Hetty and her brothers were sent to the Children’s House, within Belsen concentration camp. As one of the eldest, Hetty became the ‘Little Mother’, helping to care for not only her siblings, but the other children as well.In a direct and powerful style, Hetty recalls one of the remarkable, largely untold stories of the Holocaust – the extraordinary struggle and survival of this group of children through those terrible years.

The mid-'70s: at an all-boys Catholic school in Melbourne, Timothy Conigrave falls wildly and sweetly in love with the captain of the football team. So begins a relationship that weathers disapproval, separation and ultimately death. With honesty and insight, Holding the Man explores the highs and lows of any partnership and the strength of heart both men have to find when they test positive for HIV. This is a book as refreshing and uplifting as it is moving - a funny and sad and celebratory account of growing up gay.

1962, Cornwall: Tara Jupp - vicar’s daughter, occasional thief, expert horse-rider and second fiddle to her sister ‘the beauty’ Lucy - sings at a wedding and is spotted by a record producer. With the spotlight suddenly, thrillingly shining on her alone, the roots of Tara’s country existence are shaken free and she is propelled to swinging-'60s London. Plunged into a dazzling new world of fashion, music and heartache, in a city where skirts are being hitched up as fast as the past is being pulled down, can Tara hold the limelight and hold on to who she really is?

‘The zombie novel with a heart', Guardian Now a major motion picture starring Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer and John Malkovich, Warm Bodies is the ultimate zombie read this Halloween. 'R' is a zombie. He has no name, no memories, and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from...

Brought to you by Penguin. The new novel from Salley Vickers, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Librarian Artist, Hassie Days, and her sister, Margot, buy a run down Jacobean house in Hope Wenlock on the Welsh Marches. While Margot continues her London life in high finance, Hassie is left...

'BRILLIANT . . . GLORIOUSLY VIVID' GUARDIAN 'DISARMINGLY HILARIOUS' SUNDAY TIMES 'ROLLICKING . . . CAUSTIC, WITHERING AND GENUINELY FUNNY' INDEPENDENT 'FUNNY AND TRAGIC' TLS 'SUCH AN ENTERTAINING READ' DAILY MAIL 'BOISTEROUS' NEW YORK TIMES 'A COMEDY ABOUT TRAGEDY. BRUTAL, PROFOUND AND VERY...

Now a major film written and directed by the Coen Brothers. There is no knowing what lies in a man's heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by Torn Chancy, who shoots him down for a horse, $150 cash, and two gold pieces. Ross's single-minded teenage daughter, Mattie, travels to claim his body... Then she meets Rooster - a man with grit - and persuades him to join her on a deadly quest to avenge her father's murder.

Cartes Postales from Greece is an extraordinary new book from Victoria Hislop, the Sunday Times Number One bestselling author of The Island, The Return, The Thread, and The Sunrise. It is fiction in full colour - magical and unique. 'Victoria Hislop writes so vividly about the Med, you can...

Don't miss the extraordinary new novel from Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings - published on 21st April 2020, and available to buy now. Jessie Sullivan has been married half her life, and has become accustomed to her role. But when she returns to the isolated island where she grew up to...

A whirlwind romance. A perfect marriage. Hannah Reilly has seized her chance at happiness. Until the day her husband fails to come home... The more questions Hannah asks, the fewer answers she finds. But are the secrets that Mark has been keeping designed to protect him or protect her? And can you ever really know what happened before you met?

In POP GOES THE WEASEL, James Patterson has created a formidable villain every reader will see in the shadows when the lights are out, a tender love story, a plot powered by relentless suspense and psychological thrills kicked up to an all-time high. 'It's all just a game, darling. I play with...

Astrid is the only child of a single mother, Ingrid, a brilliant, obsessed poet who wields her luminous beauty to intimidate and manipulate men. Astrid worships her mother and cherishes their private world full of ritual and mystery, but their idyll is shattered when Astrid's mother falls apart over a lover. Deranged by rejection, Ingrid murders the man, and is sentenced to life in prison.

Loretta has run the little sewing shop in Butterbury for years, while bringing up her three headstrong daughters. Her own grandmother taught her how to quilt, and Loretta always found time to sit with Daisy, Ginny and Fern, pulling together scraps of material - and their hopes and dreams - into a beautiful whole. But this Christmas the family is coming apart at the seams.

It’s high summer when Molly Pargeter drags her amiably bickering family to a rented Tuscan villa for the holidays. Molly is sure that the house is the perfect setting for their three-week getaway, but soon she becomes fascinated by the lives of the absent owners and things start to go horribly wrong.

On a beautifully restored barge on the Seine, Jean Perdu runs a bookshop - or, rather, a 'literary apothecary', for this bookseller possesses a rare gift for sensing which books will soothe the troubled souls of his customers. The only person he is unable to cure, it seems, is himself. He has nursed a broken heart ever since the night, twenty-one years ago, when the love of his life fled Paris, leaving behind a handwritten letter that he has never dared read.

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J R R Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations.

The final book in Roddy Doyle's highly acclaimed Barrytown Trilogy focuses on Jimmy Rabbitte Sr, who is facing the vicissitudes of unemployment when his friend Bimbo invites him to become his partner in a new venture: a fish and chip van.

Hidden by London’s wealth, energy and need for cheap labour, the city’s immigrant population is powerless, despised and often illegal. So when a young woman’s body is discovered on Hampstead Heath one cold morning, she could be anyone...Rich or poor, outsider or insider, five strangers are connected in undreamed-of ways as greed, courage, murder and kindness link their lives.