Contemporary Fiction

Rothko Taylor has washed up with the tide, back in their hometown, Edgecliff. Fifteen years since they left it behind.The past is accelerating towards them: the skateboard kids on the high street that remind them of their teenage …

Five women. Twenty-two years of friendship. One annual holiday that promises escape, connection and chaos in equal measure.No matter how hectic their careers, relationships or family lives become, they keep their tradition alive: …

Adora Hazzard has it all figured out.A contented divorcee, she relishes her teenage daughter, her job as a moral tutor for an old-money family and the bliss of finally being solo.Alone but far from lonely, she's also quietly assem…

Q: If your house was burning down, what would you take with you? A: I'd take the fire. This is the story of two sisters, Mia and Inés. Two girls enveloped in love, trapped by the social conventions of Casablanca at the dawn of the…

A young Belfast theatre troupe brings its experimental production of Hamlet to New York. On a night-flight, travelling with a violin older than the United States, a professional musician slips through time. A man who loses all he …

Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her bathroom-less studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual, spiking stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy…

In a small, sleepy town, a mediocre witch, in a mediocre marriage, tries to pass on her gifts to her twin daughters, who, it becomes immediately apparent, have skills far beyond her own. Lucie comes from a long line of witches, po…

How do you mourn someone you never really knew? Three siblings – Anna, Gemma and Matthew – will have to work that out quickly. Monday is the day of their gentle, but distant, father’s funeral, and for the first time in a long whil…

Sophie and her five children, still raw from tragedy, relocate from Canada to her partner Derek's childhood home. There they attempt to forge a new life together - but their new family is shadowed by grief, myth, and a lingering s…

Joan, a public servant in her fifties, is in the habit of living alone. Orrather, she's in the habit of living with the many rituals and routines-some ordinary, some less so-that allow her to navigate her days. It'sa system that w…

What does it mean to lose yourself – and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention. On her morning co…

Born in Germany to Afghan parents, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice. Now in Berlin’s techno-filled warehouses, their walls still scarred by the ravages of the last century, she …

Anyone can write a bestseller. Here’s how. GO GAY. It’s been seven years since Mallory shot to fame as a literary sensation. But after years of struggling with writer’s block, she’s desperate to resurrect her career before it spir…

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilising novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant.She’s an accomplished actress in …

Misty thought of them as friends, the three local boys from wealthy homes. Until upstairs at a house party an act of violence takes place, with lines drawn and repercussions for them all. On her side, Misty has her devoted father …

Dick and Reggie are ‘leather boys’, working-class London teens with an affinity for leather jackets and motorcycles who become friends through their involvement in a gang.For Dick, the money he gets from the gang’s thefts helps to…

Alaa is haunted by his grandmother's memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of t…

A Visitation of Spirits, is the powerful story of Horace Cross, a popular and highachieving sixteen-year-old boy, who wrestles with the guilt of discovering who he is, a young man attracted to other men and yearning to escape the …

Artists are slaves to their vanity. But in the end, in time, they see things as they really are.'Thomas Haller has achieved the kind of fame that most artists only dream of: shows in London and New York, paintings sold for a fortu…

A story of loss and grief, sex and love, and refusing to relinquish dreamsHe said he would understand if it was too much for me, that I could leave him, that I was young, I should be living, I said to him, I am living. Johnny Gran…

A man bets all he has on a horserace to pay for an expensive operation for his dog. A young refugee wants to box her way straight off the boat to the top of the sport. Old friends talk all night after meeting up by chance.She imag…

Deep in the forest, a band of lumberjacks on an illegal logging operation plan a winter dance that some will volunteer to attend as women. In other times and places, the gender apocalypse is brought about by an unstable ex-girlfri…

A captivating, polyphonic novel of one family’s flight from and return to Iran. 1979. Behsad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah’s expulsion.He tells of sparking hope, of clande…

The White Book is a meditation on colour, beginning with a list of white things. But it is also a book about mourning, and of rebirth and the tenacity of the human spirit. It is a stunning investigation of the fragility, beauty an…

Seventeen–year–old Jean, a troubled Jewish boy caught in the countercultural swirl of 1970s London, arrives at Compton Manor, a rural alternative boarding school for boys with “problems.” Though he is an outcast among these outcas…

This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a teenage boy. He is wandering into the night listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him…

Perennially on the outside, Brian has led a solitary life; he works at Camden Council, lunches every day at Il Castelletto café and then returns to his small flat on Kentish Town Road. It is an existence carefully crafted t…

Who was Gertrude Stein?Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius — a writer who has baffled readers and critic…

Cherry and Tom had built a quiet, contented life together in Omaha, until Tom's semi-autobiographical webcomic went viral and turned their marriage into public property.Now the world knows Baby, the character based on Cherry, bett…

Debbie's brain isn't perfect. Debbie's thoughts aren't unique. Debbie's dreams are all too real.Debbie White lives on a dairy farm with her mother, Maeve, and her uncle, Billy. Billy sleeps out in a caravan in the garden with a bo…