Contemporary Fiction

Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. As the girls’ pasts and futures collide, the specific j…

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo. Sylvia Plath's groundbreaking semi-autobiographical novel offers an intimate, honest and often wr…

Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, Burroughs' only realist love story and a montage of comic-grotesq…

EVERY FAMILY HAS SECRETS. SOME ARE JUST BETTER AT HIDING THEIRS... MEET THE TOBIN FAMILY ... Conor, the high-achieving CEO and media darling walking a fine line between self-promotion and self-destruction.  Frances, the 'perfect'…

Wild Decembers charts the quick and critical demise of relations between Joseph Brennan and Mick Bugler-"the warring sons of warring sons"- in the countryside of Western Ireland. With her inimitable gift for describing the occasio…

In A Pagan Place, Edna O'Brien returns to Ireland, the uniquely wonderful, terrible, and peculiar place she once called home. After leaving to join a religious community in Belgium, a young woman remembers her childhood on the wes…

In the Forest is a newly reissued edition of the terrifying novel from "one of the greatest writers in the English-speaking world" (The New York Times), Edna O'Brien.O'Brien takes her reader into the mind of Michen O'Kane, a murde…

Love and tragedy converge in a seaside town in The High Road, a newly reissued novel from Edna O'Brien, the author of Girl and "one of the most celebrated writers in the English language" (NPR's Weekend Edition)This richly peopled…

Taking his inspiration from biographical facts, novelist Colum McCann tells the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev through the cast of those who knew himThere is Anna Vasileva, Rudi's first ballet teache…

Dear Dickhead,I read the piece you posted on Insta. You're like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past. It's shitty and unpleasant.Congratulations: you've had your fifteen minutes of fame! You want proof? Here I am writ…

The darkly comic new novel from the bestselling author of The Portable Veblen. Penny Rush has problems. Her marriage is over, she’s quit her job, her parents have been missing in the Australian outback for five years and now she’s…

The hottest debut novel of 2023 from Schitt’s Creek and Smothered screenwriter and an Observer debut author of the year, Monica Heisey.  Maggie’s marriage has ended just 608 days after it started, but she’s fine – she’s doing real…

First comes lust. An hour after meeting a hot stranger at a bar, Max is with him on the rooftop of his Manhattan apartment, making out.Then comes hate. Just five minutes later, Max is bolting back down twelve flights of stairs, h…

Plotters are just pawns like us. A request comes in and they draw up the plans.There’s someone above them who tells them what to do. And above that person is another plotter telling them what to do. You think that if you go up the…

The latest novel from the Women's Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Power, The Future is a white-knuckle tour de force and dazzling exploration of the world we have made and where we are going. Lai Zhen is about to die. As …

From the New York Times bestselling author of EVERY DAY, this is a queer love story for the ages–told over the course of a couple’s first ten dates.When a blue-haired boy (Ryan) meets a pink-haired boy (Avery) at a dan…

Anjir and Zal have been lovers in Iran since they were young, but must keep this secret or risk execution. When Zal is attacked after being caught with another man, Anjir is heartbroken by the betrayal but chooses to forgive, as t…

No boys, no girls, not a single person I had ever met. What did that mean? Georgia has never been in love, never kissed anyone, never even had a crush – but as a fanfic-obsessed romantic she’s sure she’ll find her person one day. …

Meet the wedding party: THE BRIDE AND GROOM: Celine and Luke are meant to get married and live happily ever after. But Celine's more interested in playing the piano, and Luke's a serial cheater. THE BRIDESMAID: Phoebe, Celine's s…

When X - an iconoclastic artist, writer and polarizing shape-shifter - dies suddenly, her widow, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognised as a crucial creative force…

Their love was supposed to last forever. But when life delivered blow after devastating blow, Yasmen and Josiah Wade found that love had its limits.It couldn't save their marriage. Yasmen wasn't prepared for how her life fell apar…

Soledad Barnes has her life all planned out. She plans everything.She designs everything. She fixes everything. But none of her varied talents can save her when catastrophe strikes, and the life she built with the man who was supp…

A rugged mountain town seemed like the perfect escape from a life in shambles. But on day one, she ran full tilt into the world's hottest single dad, and now all her plans are ruined.As a chart-topping country singer with a recent…

As a chronic procrastinator, Henry Turner always knew his junior year in college wasn’t going to be easy. That was before he made ice hockey captain as well as landing himself in a difficult class with his least favourite professo…

London, chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous province of Oceania. It's 1984 and Julia Worthing works as a mechanic fixing the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Under the ideo…

Eva looked out the attic window of their charming guest house and watched the sun rise. She thought she might be sick. Splayed on the lawn below was Frank, apparently out cold.Her husband snored in the bed behind her. She loved Sh…

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time . .. …

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life ev…

1980s Yugoslavia, a young girl namedEmine is married off to a man she hardly knows. But soon her country is torn apartby war, and she is forced to flee with her family. Decades later Emine's son, Bekim, has grown up a social outca…

A fiercely poetic coming-of-age novel following a group of young women of colour in Queens, New York. Brown Girls dives deep into the lives of a group of young women of colour growing up in Queens, New York. Here, streets echo wit…