Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

Julian Treslove and Sam Finkler are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick. Now all three are recently widowed, in their own way, and spend sweetly painful evenings together reminiscing. Until an unexpected violent attack brings everything they thought they knew into question.

Det økonomiske kollaps og finanskrisen forårsager farlige spaendinger mellem indbyggerne i en lille by. Grådighed graver grøfter mellem tidligere venner. Arbejdsløshed, sorte penge, et mord og en barnebortførelse sender chokbølger gennem det lille samfund.

"The Man Who Would Be King" (1888) is a story by Rudyard Kipling about two British adventurers in British India who become kings of Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan. The story was first published in The Phantom Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales (1888). It also appeared in Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories (1895), and numerous later editions of that collection. It has been adapted for other media a number of times. The narrator of the story is an Indian journalist in 19th century India - Kipling himself, in all but name.

On the day that Homes was born in 1961, she was given up for adoption. Her birth parents were a twenty-two year old woman and an older married man with whom she was having an affair. Thirty years later, out of the blue, Homes was contacted by a lawyer on behalf of her birth mother and they began to correspond; her biological father contacted her soon after. These two individuals and their effect on the adult Homes are strange and unexpected and the story spirals into something utterly raw and hilarious.

On a balmy midsummer's evening in 1923, a young woman - foreign, dishevelled and heavily pregnant - is found unconscious just off the railway tracks in the tiny logging community of Woody Creek. The town midwife, Gertrude Foote, is roused from her bed when the woman is brought to her door. Try as she might, Gertrude is unable to save her, but the baby lives.

As a boy, William Bellman commits one small cruel act that appears to have unforeseen and terrible consequences. The killing of a rook with his catapult is soon forgotten amidst the riot of boyhood games. And by the time he is grown, with a wife and children of his own, he seems indeed, to be a man blessed by fortune. Until tragedy strikes, and the stranger in black comes, and William Bellman starts to wonder if all his happiness is about to be eclipsed. Desperate to save the one precious thing he has left, he enters into a bargain.

Traumatised by an accident that involves something falling from the sky and leaving him eight-and-a-half million pounds richer, our hero spends his time and money obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting memories and situations from his past. But, when this fails to quench his thirst for authenticity, he starts reconstructing more and more violent events, including hold-ups and shoot-outs.

She watches from her terrazza as the three American women carry their luggage into the stone villa down the hill. Who are they, and what brings them to this Tuscan village so far from home? An expat herself, and with her own unfinished story, she can't help but question: will they find what they came for?

Richard is a modern day everyman; a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one. His life has slowed almost to a standstill until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world. One day he wakes up with a knotty cramp in his back, which rapidly develops into an all-consuming pain. At the same time a wide hole appears outside his living room window, threatening the foundations of his house.

Paige Winterbourne is a witch. Not that you'd notice - no warts, no green skin, no cute little wiggle of the nose whenever she casts a spell. No, most of the time she's just a normal 23-year-old girl; works too hard, worries about her weight, wonders if she'll ever find a boyfriend. Okay, so she does have an adopted teenage daughter, Savannah, who wants to raise her black witch of a mother from the dead. And who is being stalked by a telekinetic half-demon and an all-powerful cabal of sorcerers.

あたしたちで真相をつかもうよ――。二人の同級生の死。マスコミによる偏向報道。当事者の生徒たちを差し置いて、ただ事態の収束だけを目指す大人。

Gavin Sasaki was a promising young journalist in New York City until the day he was fired for plagiarism. The last thing he wants is to sell foreclosed real estate for his sister Eilo's company in their Florida hometown, but he's in no position to refuse her job offer. Plus, there's another reason to go home: Eilo recently met a 10-year-old girl who looks very much like Gavin and has the same last name as his high-school girlfriend, Anna, who left town abruptly after graduation.

They lived worlds apart. Jenny was the girl from the cat-meat shop, born into squalor and defeat. Paul Tunsatall was a soldier and a gentleman, arrogant and charming with his silver-light eyes and boyish smile. And yet from the moment they met there was a spark between them.

Lisa Logan was still a girl when she learned that it was a man's world... A man's world and no place for the weak.When her beloved father deserted them, she and her mother were left with nothing. Her mother could not cope with this new and harsh reality, but Lisa swore her revenge.

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.

Irland i 50'erne: Den unge pige Eilis bor sammen med sin mor og søster i en lille by, hvor der er meget langt til resten af verden. Faren er død, og pengene er små. Storesøsteren arbejder hårdt om dagen og spiller golf om aftenen. Her møder Eilis en praest, som er hjemme på besøg fra New York, og som lover at skaffe Eilis et job "over there". Efter en hård overfart til Amerika møder den lidt sky og tilbageholdende pige den nye verden, Brooklyn og New York. I Brooklyn flytter Eilis ind i et pensionat for irske piger og begynder at arbejde bag disken i en paen tøjforretning.

In 1796, a young cabin boy, Will Martin, goes on a voyage of discovery in the Tom Thumb with Matthew Flinders and Mr. Bass: two men and a boy in a tiny boat on an exploratory journey south from Sydney Cove to the Illawarra, full of hope and dreams, daring and fearfulness. Set on the banks of Lake Illawarra and spanning four centuries, Storyland is a unique and compelling novel of people and place which tells the story of Australia. All these characters are all connected—not only through the same land and water, but also by tendrils of blood, history, memory and property.

Growing up in an Australian country town before World War I, Jackie Hanna and Cushie Moy are carefree and innocent in their love for each other, but Jackie is a dwarf, and his devotion to the beautiful Cushie is condemned by her parents. This is the story of their life-long odyssey, and of the triumph of a special kind of courage. In Swords and Crowns and Rings Ruth Park brilliantly captures the mood and tempo of Australian life from 1907 until 1931.

Summer has arrived in Barton-in-the-Dale and as a new term begins at the little primary school, it's not just the warm weather that's getting people hot under the collar. Meetings with the teachers from Urebank School to discuss the merger are producing more than a few fireworks, a disruptive new pupil arrives, set to cause trouble, and a surprising staff love affair is exposed.

"I'M A FAN" tells the story of an unnamed narrator's involvement in a seemingly unequal romantic relationship. With a clear and unforgiving eye, Sheena Patel makes startling connections between power struggles at the heart of human relationships to those in the wider world, offering a devastating critique of social media, access and patriarchal systems.