Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

Martin Sturrock desperately needs a psychiatrist. The problem? He is one.Emily is a traumatised burns victim, Arta a Kosovan refugee recovering from a rape. David Temple is a long-term depressive, while the Rt Hon Ralph Hall MP lives in terror of his drink problem being exposed. Very different Londoners, but they share one thing: every week they spend an hour at the Prince Regent hospital, revealing the secrets of their psyche to Professor Martin Sturrock.

The incredible new novel and brand new world from the international bestselling author of the Wool trilogy. The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes. Here in this land of howling wind and infernal sand, four siblings find themselves scattered and lost. Palmer...

Jim Foley loves his parents, his brother, his sister, Dickens and God; later, he loves Kate -- enough to make her his wife and to shape his life around her -- and later still, he loves his children, Jack and Hannah. Only Say the Word tells Jim's story, and the story of the people and places in...

Bloomsbury presents Beastings by Benjamin Myers, read by Ralph Ineson. Winner of the Portico Prize for Literature and the Northern Writers’ Award ‘A brilliant, brutal novel’ ROBERT MACFARLANE A girl and a baby. A priest and a poacher. A savage pursuit through the landscape of a changing...

Anna Cole grew up poor, but her mother's love made her feel rich every day. Then her mother died, and Anna was sent to a care home. As a teenager, Anna vowed that one day she would have children of her own and create the happy, noisy family life she always craved. Then, one day, Anna meets Theo Montgomery in a lift. Theo has kind eyes but a sad past. His family were rich, but his childhood was full of neglect. Theo can't imagine bringing a child into this cruel world, but he does want a soul mate. Someone to love him unconditionally; someone with whom he can share his family's wealth.

Kate Telman is a senior executive officer in The Business, a powerful and massively discreet transglobal organisation whose origins predate the Christian Church. Financially transparent, internally democratic it wants to buy its own state in order to acquire a seat at the United Nations. Kate's job is to keep abreast of current technological developments and her global reach encompasses Silicon Valley to the remote Himalayas.

Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s: a world of communal living, drugs, music and love - Garner captures the fluid relationships of a community of friends. Helen Garner’s gritty, lyrical first novel divided the critics on its publication in 1977. Today, Monkey Grip is regarded as a masterpiece - the novel that shines a light on a time and a place and a way of living never before presented in Australian literature: communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs and sex.

ONE OF THE EVENING STANDARD'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 Barney Campbell's Rain is a searingly powerful début that reads like a British Matterhorn ******** Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Rain by Barney Campbell, read by Mark Meadows. 'Corporal Thomas (my acting...

Born into the lowest class of her society, Flora 717 is a sanitation bee, only fit to clean her orchard hive. Living to accept, obey and serve, she is prepared to sacrifice everything for her beloved holy mother, the Queen. But Flora is not like other bees. Despite her ugliness she has talents that are not typical of her kin. While mutant bees are usually instantly destroyed, Flora is removed from sanitation duty and is allowed to feed the newborns, before becoming a forager, collecting pollen on the wing. She also finds her way into the Queen's inner sanctum, where she discovers secrets both sublime and ominous.

It's 1995, Joah Harrigan is the brash, enigmatic frontman of the biggest band in the world, and Ysolde is the iconic face of a generation. She's who people write their songs about-the kind of girl who could ruin a man. He doesn't fall, and she doesn't chase. But from the moment they meet, it's headfirst, reckless, and inevitable. Too much, too fast, too consuming.

The First Phone Call from Heaven tells the story of a small town on Lake Michigan that gets worldwide attention when its citizens start receiving phone calls from the afterlife. Is it the greatest miracle ever or a massive hoax? Sully Harding, a grief-stricken single father, is determined to...

Don't miss the extraordinary new novel from Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings - published on 21st April 2020, and available to buy now. Jessie Sullivan has been married half her life, and has become accustomed to her role. But when she returns to the isolated island where she grew up to...

Bath, 1821. Rachel Crofton escapes her unhappy employment as a governess by marrying a self-made businessman. But her new life soon takes an unexpected turn. Reclusive Jonathan Alleyn is a man tormented by the disappearance of his childhood sweetheart, Alice. Starling, foundling child and now...

In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders.... August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka takes in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one and in love with the man she is to marry. In a split second, the world turns white.

Bloomsbury presents The Offing by Benjamin Myers, read by Ralph Ineson. FROM THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE GALLOWS POLE COMES A POWERFUL NEW NOVEL A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR _______________________ ‘What a radical thing, these days, to have written a book so full of warmth and...

Esme Posorsky is an enigma. For as long as people can remember, she has been part of community life in the quaint Cornish fishing village of Tremarnock, but does anyone really know her? She is usually to be found working in her pottery studio or at home with her beloved cat, Rasputin. But when an old school friend turns up with a secret from the past, nothing will ever be the same again. 

It is the early 1960s in a country village in Ireland. Caithleen Brady and her attractive friend, Baba, are on the verge of womanhood and dreaming of spreading their wings in a wider world - of discovering love and luxury and liquor and above all, fun. With bawdy innocence, shrewd for all their inexperience, the girls romp their way through convent school to the bright lights of Dublin – where Caithleen finds that suave, idealised lovers rarely survive the real world.

The New York Times bestseller As a young girl, Beryl Markham was brought to Kenya from Britain by parents dreaming of a new life. For her mother, the dream quickly turned sour, and she returned home; Beryl was brought up by her father, who switched between indulgence and heavy-handed authority...

Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, 16-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles to regain her sanity, the listener is inexorably drawn into her private suffering.

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. A Guardian Fiction Book of the year. Sometimes discovery brings destruction. "When We Cease to Understand the World" shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness.