Modern Fiction (post 1945)

Eighteen is a good time for suffering Welcome to the country town of Stillbourne. Restless teenage resident Oliver wants to enjoy himself before going to university, beginning with his pursuit...

When eighteen-year-old Michael visits the Hanbury's remote family home he is captivated by their bohemian lifestyle. Years later, when he marries the strong-willed, beautiful Rebecca, he is secretly hoping to...

Ralph Loman works in an unsatisfying job, for a free London newspaper, when Francine Snaith, a temporary secretary for a corporate finance firm, unexpectedly crosses his path at a party....

Thomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann are experiencing the classic symptoms of marriage in its middle years: comfortable house, happy-enough daughter and an eerie sense that life might be happening elsewhere....

Arlington Park is an ordinary English suburb. Over the course of a single day, the novel moves from one household to another, revealing its characters: Juliet, enraged at the victory...

Stella Benson sets off for Hilltop, a tiny Sussex village housing a family that is somewhat larger than life. Her hopes for the Maddens may be high, but her station...

Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about mothers, transsexuality, bereavement, kitchens, love and tragedy in contemporary Japan. It is a startlingly original first work by Japan's brightest young literary star and is...

Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote religious Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and raped, often repeatedly, by what many thought were ghosts or...

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2019 Not far from London, there is a village. This village belongs to the people who live in it and to those who lived...

After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, aged barely seventeen, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, fight in the Indian Wars and the Civil War. Having...

My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost... The hero of Hanif Kureishi's debut novel is dreamy teenager Karim, desperate to escape suburban South...

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER TWICE WINNER OF THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A masterpiece' - Sunday Times 'Stunning' - LIZ NUGENT...

OVER HALF A MILLION COPIES OF APPLE TREE YARD SOLD 'Psychologically acute. Terrific.' Daily Mail 'A page-turning read. Kept me reading well past bedtime!' VAL McDERMID 'Pacey and propulsive.' Guardian...

Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the...

Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. But then as he traverses a landscape by...

England, 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country's most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of...

Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly. The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from the tightly regulated mental...

Wise Blood , Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle...

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J.R.R....

Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and Lucille, orphans growing up in the small desolate town of Fingerbone in the vast northwest of America. Abandoned by a succession of relatives,...

Meet Mr Bones, canine sidekick of Willy G. Christmas, a troubled poet-saint from Brooklyn. Together they sally forth to Baltimore in search of Willy's beloved mentor Bea Wanson - who...

I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water . So begins Mr Vertigo, the story of Walt, an irrepressible orphan from the Mid-West. Under the tutelage...

Annie Dunne and her cousin Sarah live ands work on a small farm in a remote and beautiful part of Wicklow in late 1950s Ireland. When Annie's nephew and his...

Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and nerves prick, And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of, Being slow. -...

In Ignorance, set in contemporary Prague, one of the most distinguished writers of our time takes up the complex and emotionally charged theme of exile and creates from it a...

A budding poet and his adoring mother are the central characters of this intriguing early novel by Milan Kundera. He takes us through the young man's fantasies and love affairs...

A celebrated actress who has died in mysterious and shocking circumstances leaves behind an unconventional extended family that includes an older sister, a woman in her 20s through whose eyes...

Slowness was Milan Kundera's first novel written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows him through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated in time by...

'This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme,...

The Joke , Milan Kundera's first novel, gained him a huge following in his own country and launched his worldwide literary reputation. In his foreword Kundera explains why this completely...

NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand...

NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand...

NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand...

NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand...

NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand...

'With Teeth is a wonderfully sticky novel about motherhood, partnership, sex and love. Kristen Arnett lets her characters have the run of the place, and it's delicious fun to watch...

'Exquisitely written and structurally bold ... a deeply impressive novel' Eva Dolan, author of This Is How It EndsArthur and Gwen married young. Twenty years on, Gwen's got it all:...

One, two, three . . . Lisa Dale shuts her eyes and counts to one hundred during a game of hide-and-seek. When she opens them, her four-year-old daughter Ella is...

Once it was a family home. Now they are all at sea...When Anna and David receive a phone call late one evening, their lives are upturned. Within minutes, they are...

'Visceral and unpredictable, Silverback is doing what novels do best . . . Told with real intelligence, skill and compassion, this is a seriously impressive novel' COLIN WALSH'Silverback is both...

Compulsive, gripping and dark, NEVER BE BROKEN is the stunning new novel in the Marnie Rome series, for fans of Peter James, Mark Billingham, and Val McDermid'Deeply contemporary, painfully real,...

"Both a pleasure and a testament to life in Ukraine, before" Sunday Times"Ukraine's greatest living novelist" New European"A Ukrainian Murakami" GuardianA love letter to the beautiful city of Lviv, by...

An irresistible love story . . . delivered with sparkle and wit (in a too-tight red dress!)Meet Lexie Byrne. The big 4-0 is looming, but she's perfectly content without a...

A delicious, sharp novel about a woman who jets off to France after her perfect marriage collapses, putting the broken pieces of herself back together while rediscovering her own joie...

'Original, tender, thoughtful and true. Can't wait for people to read!' Reese Witherspoon'Part tender coming of age story, part electrifying tale of political awakening, part heartfelt love letter to Deaf...

First published in 1979, this is bestselling author Deborah Moggach's second novel.__________________'Moggach is at the height of her powers' Sunday Times'She really is the Nora Ephron of North London' Clare...

THE ELEVENTH BOOK IN THE BELOVED NO. 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIESThe one with the difficult aunt . . .The no. 1 lady detectives of Botswana travel to a safari...

A little boy was found dead in a children's playground. . .Daniel Hunter has spent years defending lost causes as a solicitor in London. But his life changes when he...