Showing titles in Literary Fiction

Brought to you by Penguin. BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick. Everyone thinks Heath Rocha was my first love. He wasn't. My first love was figure skating. Katarina Shaw has always known she’s destined to become an Olympic skater. When she meets Heath Rocha, a lonely kid stuck in the foster care system...

On a hot day in 1960s Maine, six-year-old Joe watches his little sister, Ruthie, sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields, while their family, Mi’kmaq people from Nova Scotia, pick fruit. That afternoon, Ruthie vanishes without a trace. As the last person to see her, Joe will be forever haunted by grief, guilt, and the agony of imagining how his life could have been.

When the bohemian, sophisticated Innes Kent turns up by chance on her doorstep, Lexie Sinclair realises she cannot wait any longer for her life to begin, and leaves for London. There, at the heart of the 1950s Soho art scene, she carves out a new life for herself, with Innes at her side. In the present day, Elina and Ted are reeling from the difficult birth of their first child.

A new recording of Ray Bradbury’s timeless classic Fahrenheit 451 narrated by Penn Badgley! Nearly seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its...

A century after it first appeared, Crime and Punishment remains one of the most gripping psychological thrillers. A poverty-stricken young man, seeing his family making sacrifices for him, is faced with an opportunity to solve his financial problems with one simple but horrifying act: the murder of a pawnbroker. She is, he feels, just a parasite on society. But does the end justify the means? Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov makes his decision and then has to live with it.

It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment? Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.

Big Brother is watching you.... 1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three superstates. In Oceania, the Party’s power is absolute. Every action, word, gesture and thought is monitored under the watchful eye of Big Brother and the Thought Police. In the Ministry of Truth, the Party’s department for propaganda, Winston Smith’s job is to edit the past. Over time, the impulse to escape the machine and live independently takes hold of him and he embarks on a secret and forbidden love affair.

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'; so the recording begins and ends with some of Dickens's best-known words, and between those lines is every Briton's view of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. Set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, the audiobook tells the story of a French doctor who is imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille in Paris. Upon his release, he moves to London with his daughter, Lucie, whom he had never met.

Narcissus and Goldmund is the story of a passionate yet uneasy friendship between two men of opposite character. Narcissus, an ascetic instructor at a cloister school, has devoted himself solely to scholarly and spiritual pursuits. One of his students is the sensual, restless Goldmund, who is immediately drawn to his teacher's fierce intellect and sense of discipline.

Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery. In a small cafe in Tokyo, 16-year-old Nao Yasutani is navigating the challenges thrown up by modern life.

One year on from the death of her husband, Emma feels no closer to moving forward with her life. Seeking distraction, she quits her job and begins working at the local garden centre. Here, Emma begins to open up and finds herself attending boss Les’ talk on the Titanic. Intrigued, Emma sets out to research who would have arranged the flowers on-board.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, written and read by Arundhati Roy. FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018 LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL...

Enid is many things: lesbian, serial dater, deaf in one ear, space obsessive, true crime fanatic. When she's not listening to grizzly murder podcasts, she's managing her crippling phobia of bald people and trying hard not to think about her mortifying teenage years—which is hard, when she's lost the password to her old YouTube account and the (many) vlogs that her teen self once uploaded. She's worried about herself, her depressive mother, and what the deal is with gender reveal parties.

Twelve-year-old Bird lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist. He knows not to ask many questions, stand out too much, stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve 'American culture' in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird's mother.

You met quarterback Kevin Tucker in This Heart of Mine. Now get ready to meet his shark of an agent, Heath Champion, and Annabelle Granger, the girl least likely to succeed. Annabelle's endured dead-end jobs, a broken engagement . . . even her hair's a mess! But that's going to change now that...

Lucy is running from what she’s done, attacking that boy in her sleep. Pursued by nightmares, she makes for her big sister's house. But when she arrives, Jess is nowhere to be found. The clifftop town is strange and full of rumours. A dozen men disappeared, without a trace. Women’s voices murmuring on the waves. A foundling discovered in a sea-swept cave. As Lucy searches for Jess, her dreams draw ever closer. She can see a great ship in 1800, and two sisters bound together in its hull. She sees a world where men always seem to get their way. And something in her body wants to fight back.

THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING SENSATION WINNER OF WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 WINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS DEBUT NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2025 SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA CRIME FICTION IN TRANSLATION DAGGER AWARD 2025 A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB PICK ‘A full-fat...

Despite the title, Dickens's portrayal of early industrial society is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Times weaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love and to have no empathy, their lives completely devoid of beauty, culture, or imagination. Only after a series of crises does their father realise that the manner in which he raised his children has ruined their lives.

Brought to you by Penguin. A #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE & THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION An exquisite story of mothers and daughters from the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge Lucy is recovering from an operation in a New York hospital when...

Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and now a major film. When paramedic Bruce Pike is called out to deal with another teenage adventure gone wrong, he knows better than his colleague, better than the kid's parents, what happened and how. Thirty years before, that dead boy could have been him. A relentlessly gripping and deeply moving novel about the damage you do to yourself when you're young and think you're immortal.