Contemporary Fiction

It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of…

High in the Accursed Mountains, in a village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, Bekija escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. Her decision sets off a brutal chain o…

A Madame Bovary for the heyday of gay New York, Love Junkie is a riotously funny, razor-sharp tale about wanting it all. ‘He was a charismatic porn star who sold his dirty underwear. I was an upper-middle-class housewife fro…

Gloria has a learning disability. She’s nineteen, and there’s nothing to do except wander the local parks, look for friendship and keep out of trouble – or go round Jack’s. Jack needs Gloria's company, but he’s unpredictable and a…

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. The internationally acclaimed masterpiece from one of Iran's most influential writers - a powerful and essential tale of female freedom. Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis Wom…

Two strangers meet in Manhattan and spend a perfect night together. In Tokyo, they have seven days to see if that one night might mean something more. Landon’s living alone in Tokyo as a British ‘expat’, Louie’s visiting while he …

IN TOKYO, the son works as an English tutor, drinking his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He's entangled with a married man, too. But while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his family in America, …

When two quiet men form a tentative connection neither knows where it might lead. M has inherited his family's ironmongery business and B is younger by eleven years and can see no future in the place where he has grown up, but whe…

Samson Kabarebe is on the verge of stardom. At just nineteen, he's poised to take the football world by storm.Joining a struggling Premier League team, he steps into the spotlight, taking over the position-and squad number-of a ri…

A mother and son, estranged for many years, reckon at last with the secret that has kept them apart in this highly anticipated novel by one of the most talented American writers of his generation. Peter, an asylum lawyer in New Yo…

In The News from Dublin, a beautiful collection of short stories from the bestselling author of Brooklyn and Long Island, Colm Toibin delves into the days and nights of those living far from home: lives of great longing, at a grea…

Lorraine would say afterwards that she was smitten straight off with Paddy Farrell. You could tell that he was occupying the room in a different way, he found the spaces that fitted him. She was the kind of girl the papers called …

A reunion. A journey.A longing for a place called home...When veteran Canadian wheat farmer, Harry Cane is obliged to sell up and sail home to an England transformed by two world wars, his arrival triggers unwelcome self-examinati…

Hana has nothing but she's hopeful. She's fifteen years old. She lives in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar.They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko appears.Kimiko is ol…

Lajos von Lazar is brought into this world with the dawn of the new century, and his birth is both a miracle and a curse, his true patrimony a secret he will never know. The Lazars have ruled their Hungarian lands for generations.…

Through chance, luck and choice, one man’s life takes him from a modest apartment in Hungary to the elite society of London – in this captivating new novel about the forces that make and break our lives. Fifteen-year-old István li…

Renting is a nightmare... Áine should be feeling happy with her life. She’s just moved in with Elliot.Their new flat is in an affluent neighbourhood, surrounded by bakeries, yoga studios and organic vegetable shops. They even have…

Yes. I can feel it in my whole body. A great thrill – as if an adventure has begun.As if I’m the boy in a book about a boy who finds out his dad is the king of a magical and distant land. Christmas, 1983. In the aftermath of yet a…

If you could meet any dead person of your choosing for one night, who would it be? When Hirase, a young woman from Tokyo arranges an appointment with The Go-Between, she doesn't expect a teenager to show up. Dressed preppy-style i…

In the town of Dominion, Mississippi, Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr. is more than a preacher. From his pulpit at the Seven Seals Baptist Church to the airwaves of his local radio station, he exerts influence over every aspect of soci…

Amane is ten years old when she discovers she's not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in 'clean', sexless marriages. But …

What if the year's most talked about TV show was all about your marriage?Kate, thirty years into her marriage, has a seemingly idyllic metropolitan, North London life.Phoebe, a young screenwriter, is the creator of the year's hit …

A radiant novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer – about family, desire, and what we inherit – from celebrated author Tash Aw. When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with …

Set across liminal landscapes, this collection of fourteen stories from award-winning author Niamh Mac Cabe feature characters navigating emotional or existential thresholds—grieving, seeking meaning, or reconciling with the past.…

On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated, but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men…

Every morning, Sybil Van Antwerp sits down to write letters to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to attend a class she desperately wants to take, to her favourite authors to…

Charli has finished art school and now has no idea what to do with her life. She’s broke, disillusioned and her flatmates hate her.One night at a bar in Soho, however, everything changes when she first encounters the charismatic m…

"The lad is a bit like a stray dog. I keep an eye on him and throw him a few scraps. There are plenty of people in this town who'd just as soon drop him off in the wilderness and hope there's no scent to follow home. The problem i…

Still eighty-two, still with fifty-seven bullets in her, still dying, and with a blood-trail resembling a post-structuralist anti-principle of a traditional abstracted countercomposition, she was softly cursing and willing herself…

Avery, a strait-laced lawyer living in London, is the typical eldest daughter, though she’s hiding a secret that could undo her perfect life forever. Bonnie was a boxer but, following a devastating defeat, she's been working as a …