Contemporary Fiction

Breathtakingly suspenseful and beautifully written, The Historian is the story of a young woman plunged into a labyrinth where the secrets of her family's past connect to an inconceivable evil: the dark fifteenth-century reign of …

Clementine Clark isn't looking for love. She's a talented singer, but she's set her dreams of stardom - and romance - aside to care for her ailing mother. And then her best friend calls her with a life-changing opportunity: join I…

Macy is settling into an ambitious if emotionally tepid routine: work hard as a new paediatrics resident, plan her wedding to an older, financially secure man, keep her head down and heart tucked away. But when she runs into Ellio…

For fans of Sebastian Faulks, Donal Ryan and Anne Tyler comes this beautiful novel following two troubled men, separated by nearly a century, bound by the ghosts of their past When George Allenby is put in charge of building a lak…

In 1985 Dublin, nineteen-year-old Anna Hughes is in thrall to Peter Gallagher, an older, worldly man. Anna is introverted and naïve, and Peter's experience, wide circle of friends and thirst for adventure captivate her. Her o…

The short story flourishes in Ireland. All Irish conditions seem to favour it. With its roots in the fertile soil of the Gaelic folk tradition, it appeared to grow and thrive on the discontinuities of Irish history – the war of in…

Like a long winter’s dream, this haunting and visionary new novel from 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang takes us on a journey from contemporary South Korea into its painful historyBeginning one morning in December, We Do Not Part …

One of our best writers, Lauren Groff returns with a fierce new story collection, her first since the award-winning and bestselling Florida.Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region - from …

Mary Lavin is the great unsung voice of Irish fiction. Here are her very best, most electric stories: illuminating, moving, arrows in flight.Mary Lavin’s stories feature ordinary people in the tight confines of ordinary life. From…

This dark yet hilariously satirical state-of-an-era novel sees Will Self's middle-class, middle-English characters apparently trapped in a timeless go-round of polite chitchat in dinner parties that refract like a hall of mirrors,…

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Room and The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue takes readers on a thrilling ride through a simmering turn-of-the-century Paris on the edge of a dazzling future.A woman determined to make …

Through long winter mornings in Bulgaria, a man sits by the bedside of his elderly father. His father, who created and left­ behind a garden, blooming from a barren village yard: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees. His f…

One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father, Serk, take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town. Hours later, Louisa wakes on the beach, soaked to the skin.Her father is missing: p…

Anthony Fennell, a journalist, is in pursuit of a story buried at the bottom of the sea: the network of tiny fibre-optic tubes that carry the world’s information across the ocean floor - and what happens when they break. So he has…

What happens when you find love, but life keeps getting in the way? When she first meets Adam, Coralie is new to London and feeling adrift. But Adam is clever, witty, and – he insists – half an inch taller than the average British…

Eleven strange buildings. One terrible secret. A lonely hut in the woods. A hidden chamber. A mysterious shrine. A home in flames. A nightmarish prison... Each of the buildings in this book tells a chilling story. Each one is part…

What happens in the dark never stays in the dark. As one of Seattle's most dangerous, feared men, Zeth Mayfair always carried out the jobs he was sent on without a second thought. Drugs? Guns? Dirty money? All fair game.But even h…

Eriko really wouldn't mind being savaged, if it was her best friend doing the savaging … Eriko's life appears perfect – devoted parents, pristine apartment and a high-flying job in the seafood division of one of Japan's largest tr…

When your life flashes before your eyes, where would you stop?No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there.The chance to re-live the moments that meant most.To see what kind of person you really were.For W…

In 1982, Roisin and Red meet as teenagers in their hometown in Ireland. Red's reputation for trouble might precede him, but Roisin finds in him an intelligent and funny - if unlikely - friend. When a brush with the law pushes Red …

Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He spends his days teaching history to high schoolers, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties…

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomas and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged…

The stunning new novel from the Booker Prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo. Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to t…

Gloria Bonaventura, a divorced mother of three living with her 26-year-old son Nico in a sprawling house in Brooklyn, decides to participate in a new city programme - Big Apple, Big Heart - that would pay her to take in a migrant …

Razor-sharp, glittering tales exploring marriage, fame and female friendship, from the Sunday Times bestselling author. In this compulsive collection of twelve witty stories, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fic…

Peggy Jenkins and her teenage son, Samson, live on a remote stretch of canal in the Midlands.She is a writer and he is a schoolboy. Together, they battle against the hardness and manipulation of the man they live with.Until, one d…

Viola Bowen has the chance of a lifetime: to design a video game based on her all-time favorite book series. The only problem? Her co-lead is Jesse f-ing Andrews, aka her archnemesis. Jesse has made it abundantly clear over the ye…

Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prair…

This contemporary twist on Brief Encounter is a tender meditation on what might have been. 'Maybe we love people because they won't let us know them.' A summer's evening in Manhattan. Nothing - not cold drinks, not showers not a s…

An epic miniature of one man's life journey through the American West at the turn of the twentieth century. Robert Grainier is a day labourer in the American West, felling the trees that feed the railways. It is the start of the t…