Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

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.

Marcello è un trentenne senza un vero lavoro, resiste ai tentativi della fidanzata di rinsaldare il legame e cerca di prolungare ad libitum la sua condizione di post-adolescente. Per spirito di contraddizione, partecipa a un concorso di dottorato in Lettere, e imprevedibilmente vince la borsa. Entra così nel mondo accademico e il suo professore, un barone di nome Sacrosanti, gli affida come tesi un lavoro sul viareggino Tito Sella, un terrorista morto in carcere.

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 Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations.

Barrytown, Dublin, has something to sing about. The Commitments are spreading the gospel of the soul. Ably managed by Jimmy Rabitte, brilliantly coached by Joel 'The Lips' Fagan, their twin assault on Motown and Barrytown takes them by leaps and bounds from Paris Hall to immortality on vinyl...

The Ravenscar Dynasty, introducing the house of DeRavenel, launches Barbara Taylor Bradford’s epic new series. Ravenscar: A house, a legacy and a dynasty. On a bitterly cold day in 1904, the Deravenel family's future changes for ever. When Cecily Deravenel tells her 18-year-old son Edward of the death of his father, brother, and cousins in a fire, a part of him dies as well. Edward is comforted by his cousin Neville Watkins, who is suspicious of the deaths.

Carrie has it all: a stellar career, a gorgeous heart-surgeon boyfriend and an apartment in the city. But when something happens that forces her to question her ability to do her job, the only way she can see through the mess is to get far away from everything. Carrie is thrust into a very different life in Magnolia Creek. She’s knee-deep in renovations at her house at the top of the hill; she’s sharing time and space with her ex, Owen; and newcomer Noah gets under her skin from day one.

After a morning that starts with a terrible migraine, an accidentally strong concoction of painkillers, and a bump on the head, Clover Hendry is not quite herself. And as she walks out of work at 9.47am, for once Clover isn’t worrying about the consequences. For once, she’s going to live for herself. . . if only for a day. Full of a joyful recklessness, Clover Hendry is taking the day off. But will her new-found freedom uncover long-buried secrets?

Ruth Patchett never thought of herself as particularly devilish. Rather the opposite in fact - simply a tall, not terribly attractive woman living a quiet life as a wife and mother in a respectable suburb. But when she discovers that her husband is having a passionate affair with the lovely romantic novelist Mary Fisher, she is so seized by envy that she becomes truly diabolic. Within weeks she has burnt down the family home, collected the insurance, made love to the local drunk and embarked on a course of destruction and revenge.

When Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect caretaker for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite and devoted woman who sings to their children, cleans the family's chic apartment in Paris' upscale tenth arrondissement, stays late without complaint and is able to host enviable birthday parties.

Toby Jones and Holliday Grainger star in a new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Dodie Smith's enduringly popular coming-of-age novel In the 1930s, seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain lives in a crumbling ruin of a castle in the Suffolk countryside. Her father, an author wrestling with...

Stan Barstow's A Kind of Loving finds Vic Brown in a bleak Yorkshire industrial town, striving for maturity in his relationship with girlfriend Ingrid and her small-town ways. The story examines in great detail his feelings as the relationship develops.

Richard Huw perfectly captures the mood and the character in his reading.

A woman inherits a beloved bookstore and sets forth on a journey of self-discovery in this poignant debut about family, forgiveness and a love of reading. Miranda Brooks grew up in the stacks of her eccentric uncle Billy’s bookstore, solving the inventive scavenger hunts he created just for...

A brilliantly observed story of crises and reconciliations within families and stepfamilies and the conflict between Millennials and their Baby Boomer parents. Funny, dark, yet limned with hope, Tim Lott returns to a family saga – and social commentary – that began with the award-winning...

The Beating of his Wings by Paul Hoffman is the final instalment in his epic Cale and the Sanctuary of Redeemers series. Thomas Cale has been running from the truth. Since discovering that his brutal military training has been for one purpose - to destroy God's greatest mistake, mankind itself -...

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...

The name of your first-born. The face of your lover. Your age. Your address... What would happen if your memory of these began to fade? When Claire starts to write her Memory Book, she already knows that this scrapbook of mementoes will soon be all her daughters and husband have of her. But how can she hold onto the past when her future is slipping through her fingers...?

79-year-old Martha Anderson, with the aid of her Zimmer frame, is robbing a bank. She’s not past it yet and intends to fund her way to a much more exciting life-style. Except all the cashier can see is a little old lady. So Martha is bundled into a cab and sent back to her atrocious care home...

At the age of twelve, under the Wind Moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home. In a...

A marriage on the rocks. A family in disarray. A weekend in the sun at a luxury, all-inclusive hotel. What could possibly go wrong? Jo and Dave haven't had a holiday in years. They've had other things on their plate: failed IVF, the death of Dave's mother, doing up the bathroom. So when Dave’s...

Shadow Moon has been on the road a while now, but he can't walk any farther tonight, not with the rain lashing down. Gratefully he heads home with a nice English couple, who offer a box room, hot whisky and local tales. But when the man collapses en route, Shadow realises that something about this place has been left untold. Something ancient, something within the very walls of the village. Something shadowing them all.