Modern Fiction (post 1945)

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...

When six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, her insistence on what she has seen, and her mother's belief in her, lead to a man's dramatic...

Lawrence Durrell was one of the best-selling, most celebrated English novelists of the late 20th century. The Alexandria Quartet is unquestionably his most admired work, at heart a sensuous and...

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...

In this novel - a story of irreconcilable loves and infidelities - Milan Kundera addresses himself to the nature of twentieth-century 'Being' In a world in which lives are shaped...