Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

This is... Denise. Married to Ray, her first and only love, Denise has never, for one moment, regretted putting the husband she idolised on a pedestal above everyone and everything else. But, after forty years of marriage, he is gone, leaving Denise to discover that their perfect marriage was fatally flawed. Now she faces a future alone. But first, she must face the betrayals of the past. This is... Claire. The estranged daughter of Denise, the woman who put her husband before her children, Claire took the opposite path and devoted her life to raising her family, sacrificing.

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. A Guardian Fiction Book of the year. Sometimes discovery brings destruction. "When We Cease to Understand the World" shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness.

An intricately woven love story about mothers and daughters, and the ties - of both nature and nurture - that can never be broken. From the bestselling author of Star-crossed.

Mia and Ben, an Australian couple in their early 30s, have relinquished one dream and embraced another, selling their Sydney flat and purchasing an old yellow house in the picturesque village of Cordes-sur-Ciel in southwest France. They soon meet sophisticated neighbours Dominic and Susannah, a British couple in their 60s who welcome them warmly but whose own relationship is in crisis. Mia and Ben are immediately starstruck and impressed by their lavish hospitality. However, things with Dominic and Susannah are not what they first seem.

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 establish why her mother has been behaving oddly, she is to find a lot more than she came looking for. A loving, exuberant character, who believes herself to be happy, she has forgotten a hidden part of her spirit - the part represented by the beautiful, vibrant and legendary mermaid carved on a chair in the island's monastery.

In the second novel in the Pop Larkin series, the Larkin family descends upon Brittany in France. Like fish out of water, they find that things don't quite turn out their way: The weather is less than ideal, the food is awful, and the hotel is in a bad state of repair. But things slowly improve as Pop manages to sweet-talk Mlle Dupont, Angela Snow and her sister, Iris; and Charley and Mariette celebrate their first wedding anniversary. A Breath of French Air is a delightful book full of nostalgia, fun, and frivolity.

A week on an island sounds like the stuff of beach dreams, but for Paisley Royce, it's a nightmare. Her little sister is marrying her ex-college sweetheart, and Paisley is serving as maid of honor. To add insult to injury, nobody will let Paisley forget she's single. Bachelorette weekend changes everything when she runs into her old college frenemy, Klein Madigan. Klein is still intelligent and funny, and somehow time has only made him more attractive.

Leningrad, September 1941. German tanks surround the city, imprisoning those who live there. The besieged people of Leningrad face shells, starvation, and the Russian winter. Interweaving two love affairs in two generations, The Siege draws us deep into the Levin's family struggle to stay alive during this terrible winter.

An ordinary family man, geologist, and Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he'll be reunited with his loved ones after death in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life. In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity.

Kate Telman is a senior executive officer in The Business, a powerful and massively discreet transglobal organisation whose origins predate the Christian Church. Financially transparent, internally democratic it wants to buy its own state in order to acquire a seat at the United Nations. Kate's job is to keep abreast of current technological developments and her global reach encompasses Silicon Valley to the remote Himalayas.

Michael is a violinist from Rochdale. He plays in a trio in Vienna with Julia, a pianist, and they are much taken with each other. But the trio splits up and they go their separate ways. One day in London, from the top of a double-decker bus, Michael catches a glimpse of Julia. They eventually meet up, and she tells him that she is contentedly married and has a child. Michael persuades her to visit Vienna and Venice with him. He discovers that Julia has become deaf, though her deafness comes and goes.

These 12 yarns are so satisfying because they are ingeniously plotted, include richly drawn characters, and have deliciously unexpected conclusions. They feature the mad, the bad, and the dangerous to know, as well as some more poignant and telling characters.

For more than three decades Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture...from a groundbreaking newspaper serial, to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of six novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales of the City is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

Born into the lowest class of her society, Flora 717 is a sanitation bee, only fit to clean her orchard hive. Living to accept, obey and serve, she is prepared to sacrifice everything for her beloved holy mother, the Queen. But Flora is not like other bees. Despite her ugliness she has talents that are not typical of her kin. While mutant bees are usually instantly destroyed, Flora is removed from sanitation duty and is allowed to feed the newborns, before becoming a forager, collecting pollen on the wing. She also finds her way into the Queen's inner sanctum, where she discovers secrets both sublime and ominous.

A murder has taken place in a tony Mumbai neighbourhood. A prime suspect, Prashanth, keeps his silence in the interrogation room as Inspector Khan plays the tapes of his therapy sessions. The explosive tapes, surreptitiously recorded by therapist Shaily Gupta, slowly reveal shocking information about Prashanth, about his relationship with his girlfriend Sonya, about the therapist and about the gruesome murder in question.

Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, 16-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles to regain her sanity, the listener is inexorably drawn into her private suffering.

Goodwood is a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone. It's a place where it's impossible to keep a secret. In 1992, when Jean Brown is 17, a terrible thing happens. Two terrible things. Rosie White, the coolest girl in town, vanishes overnight. One week later, Goodwood's most popular resident, Bart McDonald, sets off on a fishing trip and never comes home. People die in Goodwood, of course, but never like this. They don't just disappear.

2000: The wreckage of a downed WWII fighter plane is discovered in the forests near Russia's Ukrainian border.The aircraft belonged to Natalya Azarova, ace pilot and pin-up girl for Soviet propaganda, but the question of her fate remains unanswered. Was she a German spy who faked her own death, as the Kremlin claims? Her lover, Valentin Orlov, now a highly-decorated general, refuses to believe it. Lily, a young Australian woman, has moved to Moscow to escape from tragedy.

Lucy, staying in a beautiful home overlooking Venice Beach, can find no peace from her misery - not in therapy, not in Tinder hookups, not in her sister's dog's unquestioning devotion, not in ruminating on the ancient Greeks. Yet everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer one night while sitting alone on the beach rocks....

Hurt people hurt people. Say there was a novel in which Holden Caulfield was an alcoholic and Lolita was a photographer's assistant, and somehow they met in bright lights, big city. He was blinded by love. She by ambition. Diary of an Oxygen Thief is an honest, hilarious, and heartrending audiobook but, above all, a very realistic account of what we do to each other and what we allow to have done to us.