Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

Ricky Delgado works as a chicken hanger at the poultry plant in Rugoso, Texas, a small border town just 30 miles south of Laredo. His quiet, illegal lifestyle is disrupted when he learns that his brother Tomás has been shot and injured shortly after crossing the border. Together, Ricky and Tomás and seek justice, or remain silent and endure the injustices common to all "wetbacks" within the states. Meanwhile, Ricky is fighting a battle within his own body, a disease he acquired in the poultry plant.

‘Riveting, profoundly moving’ Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven ‘Beautiful and devastating’ Red ‘Thought-provoking and profound’ Cosmopolitan Imagine a world where sleep could trap you, for days, for weeks, for months… She sleeps through sunrise. She sleeps through...

On a beautifully restored barge on the Seine, Jean Perdu runs a bookshop - or, rather, a 'literary apothecary', for this bookseller possesses a rare gift for sensing which books will soothe the troubled souls of his customers. The only person he is unable to cure, it seems, is himself. He has nursed a broken heart ever since the night, twenty-one years ago, when the love of his life fled Paris, leaving behind a handwritten letter that he has never dared read.

The rich are different. But fate is blind. A private jet plunges into the sea. The only survivors are down-on-his-luck artist Scott Burroughs and JJ Bateman, the four-year-old son of a super-rich TV executive. For saving the boy, Scott is suddenly a hero. And then, as the official investigation is rapidly overtaken by a media frenzy, it seems he may also be a villain. Why was he on the plane in the first place, and why did it crash?

At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break. Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape. The tape triggers a chorus of voices - those of the men, women, teenagers, and parents involved in the scandal - that details the ways in which lives can be derailed or destroyed in one foolish moment.

Surreal and splendidly unconventional, The Hearing Trumpet is an apocalyptic fairy-tale quest about an occult old ladies' home and the spry nonagenarian who ends up there. After coming into possession of a hearing trumpet, 92-year-old Marian Leatherby discovers her son's plans to send her to a nursing home. But this is no ordinary place.... Here there are strange rituals, orgiastic nuns, levitating abbesses, animalistic humans, humanistic animals, a search for the Holy Grail, and a plan to escape to Lapland and knit a tent....

Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, a middle-aged man embarks on a dubious road trip through Switzerland with his eighty-year-old mother, recently discharged from a mental institution. Traversing the country in a hired cab, they attempt to give away the wealth she has amassed from investing in the arms industry, but a fortune of such immensity is surprisingly hard to squander. Haunted in different ways by the figure of her father, an ardent supporter of Nazism, mother and son can no longer avoid delving into the darkest truths about their past.

One summer of nearly a hundred years ago saw one of the high sunlit meadows of English history. A new king was crowned; audiences swarmed to Covent Garden to see the Ballet Russes' and Nijinskys' gravity-defying leaps. The aristocracy was at play, bounding from house party to the next; the socialite Lady Michelham travelled with her nineteen yards of pearls. Rupert Brooke (a 23-year-old poet in love with love, Keats, marrons glaces and truth) swam in the river at Grantchester.

Bloomsbury presents Pig Iron by Benjamin Myers, read by Ralph Ineson. WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE An unflinching portrait of contemporary Traveller culture by the award-winning author of The Gallows Pole John-John wants to escape his past. But the legacy of brutality left by his boxer father...

Dreamer. Bombshell. Icon. Featuring a wealth of unpublished material, Andrew Wilson’s biography of Marilyn Monroe presents the actress in a startling new light. Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, she had an uncertain and unforgiving upbringing. She grew up in Los Angeles and would dream about...

‘To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti and not even this one we live in – who wants...

Embroiled in a continuing struggle with his nemesis Sunflash the Mace, evil ferret warlord Swartt Sixclaw abandons his son. Taken in by the kindly folk of Redwall Abbey, the youngster is named Veil and raised in the hope he will become good. But Veil commits an unforgivable crime and is banished forever. So when Swartt goes on a rampage, Veil must make a choice. He can either fight for the father who orphaned him, or for those who raised him well—but ultimately turned him away.

When two best friends decide to share their wedding day, what could possibly go wrong? Jade is over the moon to be tying the knot alongside her best friend, Sarah, at the stunning Bluebell Cliff Hotel in Dorset—a venue where no detail is too small and no expense is spared in the pursuit of perfection. But as the big day draws closer, so do the complications. A long-lost relative, a troublesome brother, and some wildly unexpected animal antics all threaten to derail the brides' dream celebration. With emotions running high and chaos around every corner, their perfect day begins to unravel.

On a peat and heather island off the west coast of Scotland, Effie and her mother Nora take refuge in the large mouldering house of their ancestors and tell each other stories.Nora, at first, recounts nothing that Effie really wants to hear, like who her father was - variously Jimmy, Jack, or...

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...

Brought to you by Penguin. Annie's put fifteen years into safe, slightly obsessive Duncan, and now she's like her money back, please. It's time to move on. But she lives in Gooleness, the north's answer to a question nobody asked. Is she really going to find real, proper...

Hierdie aangrypende roman oor ’n ongeletterde Nama-vrou van die Richtersveld speel af in die 1950’s. Katryn Jonis word van moord aangekla, maar sy kom agter die pro deo advokaat glo nie in haar onskuld nie en besluit dan om haar eie verdediging in die hof te behartig. Die vindingryke en berekende wyse waarop die reguit en passievolle Katryn die waarheid uit die staat se getuies in die hof trek, boei die leser deurgaans. Daar is baie vrae: Wie het dan die moord gepleeg, en hoekom?

On the night Fliss loses everything - her beloved hotel ravaged by fire and fiancé exposed as a cheat - she receives devastating news: her estranged mother has died. Summoned to a dilapidated guesthouse in France for the reading of the will, Fliss is stunned to discover she has been left all her mother's possessions. As Fliss begins restoring the guesthouse, she unearths long-buried secrets about her mother, their past and the true cost of her long absence.

‘A gutsy, heartfelt novel’ Sunday Times ‘[Shriver’s] best novel yet’ Independent on Sunday ‘A surprising sledgehammer of a novel’ The Times ‘Shriver is brilliant on the novel shock that is hunger… glorious, fearless, almost fanatically hard-working prose’ Guardian ‘Lionel...

Mysterious, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking, these are tales of expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. They compose a secret history, both intimate and panoramic, of modern times, and offer a kaleidoscopic impression of the world within a world that is Paris.