Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

A compassionate and surprisingly funny novel that is impossible to put down and even harder to forget, from the award-winning author of Islands. Meg and Nina are two sisters living very different lives. Meg is super organised and possibly OCD; Nina is so depressed she is living like a homeless...

“Weisman is perhaps wired more tightly into the reclusive special operations community than any other writer, and his knowledge of weaponry and field techniques is staggering.” —Washington Times “A pro who knows his stuff.” —Oliver North John Weisman, whose expertise in the field of...

Deep in a national park on the east coast of Tasmania, the Bay of Fires is an idyllic holiday community. There are no more than a dozen shacks beside the lagoon - and secrets are hard to keep; the intimacy of other people's lives is their nourishment. The fact that Sarah Avery has returned, having left her boyfriend and her job, is cause for gossip in itself. Then, the bikini-clad body of a young girl is found washed up on the beach...a year after another teenage girl went missing.

'An incredible achievement, a story of friendship, memory, loss, and moral duty unlike any I've read before' Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee What if you can no longer trust your memories? Mary is struggling with her memory. She does not have too few recollections but too many...

It's 1977 and Jack Sheffield is appointed headmaster of a small village primary school in North Yorkshire. So begins Jack's eventful journey through the school year and his attempts to overcome the many problems that face him as a young and inexperienced headmaster. The many colourful chapters...

Für die hypermaskuline Welt der Arbeiterviertel im Glasgow der 90er Jahre ist Mungo zu hübsch und zu sanft. Sein Bruder Hamish, gefürchteter Bandenführer, will ihn zum Mann machen und schleift ihn zu den brutalen Kämpfen zwischen Protestanten und Katholiken – nur wer hart genug ist, kann hier überleben. Dann trifft Mungo auf James und mit ihm kann er sein, wie er ist. Mit ihm lernt er ein Begehren kennen, das geächtet ist, das ihn mit Scham erfüllt, aber auch mit Glück, das er selbst vor seiner Schwester Jodie verleugnen muss, mit der er sonst alles teilt.

When war arrives, it brings secrets and danger – but it also brings love… France, 1939. As war looms, two women make very different choices. Marie-Louise, a headstrong young woman who sees the atrocities for what they are, is recruited into a secret intelligence service that takes her across...

Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently-absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton in the garden of their house.

Am Küchentisch eines alten Bauernhauses treffen zwei Menschen aufeinander, die unterschiedlicher nicht sein könnten. Der Erzähler dieser Geschichte führt ein gehetztes Leben, das er als endlose To-do-Liste empfindet; Karl hingegen sortiert Tag für Tag Kartoffeln – und denkt nach.

'It does not disappoint.' - The Guardian When Mina receives an urgent call from her best friend back in Melbourne, her world is turned upside down. Her reclusive mother, Elaine, has left the house for the first time in twelve years. Mina drops everything to fly home, only to discover that Elaine...

Orphaned and alone, Rachel is taken under the wing of her strict African-American grandmother and moved to a mostly black community where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and astonishing beauty start to attract a troubling level of attention. As the terrible secrets begin to emerge, Rachel...

For Tom, a counsellor struggling to rebuild his emotional life after the breakdown of his marriage, the suburbs are his world. His neighbours in Winter Close are his 'people', a kind of twenty-first century tribe. Tom, however, has a weakness for jumping to dramatic conclusions about his neighbours' relationships with each other and with him. Although he's often wrong, the truth is even more engrossing than his fantasies.

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF OUR HOUSE, WINNER OF THE CRIME & THRILLER BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD Until Darren and Jodie move in, Lowland Way is a suburban paradise. Beautiful homes. Friendly neighbours. Kids playing out in the street. But Darren and Jodie don't follow the rules and soon disputes...

LIFE-AFFIRMING STORY OF A DISABLED TEENAGER AND HIS CLUELESS CARER, NOW A NETFLIX DRAMA STARRING PAUL RUDD AND SELENA GOMEZ. The first rule of caring is Don't Get Emotionally Involved. So clueless carer Ben probably shouldn't have agreed to drive stroppy, wheelchair-bound teenager Trevor 400...

A novel about the perfect pair – or are they? Annette and Spicer make a perfect pair: he thirty-nine, wide-shouldered, square-jawed, and often likened to Harrison Ford; she slight, fair, delicately featured, and sometimes likened to Meryl Streep. He with a son (Jason, eleven) from a previous...

For Meridian Wallace - and many other smart, driven women of the 1940s - being ambitious meant being an outlier. Ever since she was a young girl, Meridian had been obsessed with birds, and she was determined to get her PhD, become an ornithologist, and make her mother's sacrifices to send her to college pay off. But she didn't expect to fall in love with her brilliant physics professor, Alden Whetstone. When he's recruited to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to take part in a mysterious wartime project, she reluctantly defers her own plans and joins him.

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.

こんなはずでなかった結婚。捨て去れない華やいだ過去。拭いきれない姉への劣等感。夫から切り出された別離。いつの間にか心が離れた恋人。……真面目に、正直に、懸命に生きてきた。なのに、なぜ? 誰に

At 18, Tom escapes ordinariness in small town Australia for Melbourne and a flat in a strange block named Cairo. There he meets the magnetic Max Cheever, and is drawn into his circle of bohemian artists and dreamers. But soon Tom is ensnared in a plot to steal a million dollar Picasso...

In a town of innumerable petrol stations, labyrinthine cul-de-sac streets, two competing shopping plazas and ubiquitous drive-thru franchises, where are these people likely to find the truth about their collective past - and can they do so before the town completely disappears?