Contemporary Fiction

The final instalment in the Ross O'Carroll-Kelly series* * * It looked like it was Game Over for the Rossmeister General. I was staring down the barrel of the big four-oh! And what did I have to show for it? I was an out-of-work …

Eva looked out the attic window of their charming guest house and watched the sun rise. She thought she might be sick. Splayed on the lawn below was Frank, apparently out cold.Her husband snored in the bed behind her. She loved Sh…

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time . .. …

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human narrates a se…

1980s Yugoslavia, a young girl namedEmine is married off to a man she hardly knows. But soon her country is torn apartby war, and she is forced to flee with her family. Decades later Emine's son, Bekim, has grown up a social outca…

A fiercely poetic coming-of-age novel following a group of young women of colour in Queens, New York. Brown Girls dives deep into the lives of a group of young women of colour growing up in Queens, New York. Here, streets echo wit…

When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined…

A beguiling, sinister collection of 12 dark academia short stories from masters of the genre, including Olivie Blake, M.L. Rio, Susie Yang and more! In these stories, dear student, retribution visits a lothario lecturer; the sinis…

Plucky fourteen-year-old Adunni is in Lagos, excited to finally enrol in school. Having escaped her rural village in a desperate bid to seek a better future, she's found refuge with Tia, a kind and brilliant woman on her own troub…

You wait ages for The One . . .Then 203 come along at once.One night Lauren finds a strange man in her flat who claims to be her husband. All the evidence - from photos to electricity bills - suggests he's right.Lauren's attic, sh…

As the world changes around them, a family weathers the storms of growing up, growing older, falling in and out of love, losing the things that are most precious – and learning to go on. In a cosy brownstone in Brooklyn, the venee…

'It's been a long time since I've been on a date,' he says, pocketing his own phone. 'Please ignore anything I say for at least the first ten minutes.' Ivan's laugh is loud, delighted. 'I know, mate, I'm bloody terrified.' Two mid…

In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of desp…

When Zoe moves in with Penny, their relationship looks perfect; after all, everyone wants a wife. But this is the story of how love can become a disaster . . .Zoe Stamper, junior researcher in Ancient Greek Tragedy, meets fellow a…

A DANGEROUS OBSESSIONMartina wants to be the best gymnast in the world. But so does everyone around her. A TOURNAMENT WITH A DIFFERENCEDuring one week of intense competition, Martina and her teammates are tested to the limit, and …

From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escap…

A tale of modern Japan and old-fashioned romance. Tsukiko is in her late 30s and living alone when one night she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, 'Sensei', in a bar. He is at least thirty years her senior, …

Margaret Anne ('Moddie') Yance has just returned to her hometown, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with…

From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter i…

From Wales to Croatia to the depths of the ocean, these five achingly tender stories of (dis)connection are bursting with emotional vulnerability. A child attends his first football match, buoyed by secret magic; a young seahorse …

Discover the big, beaming power ballad of a novel about a love so true it refuses to be forgotten .. .Back in high school, everybody thought Shiloh and Cary would end up together .. . everybody but Shiloh and Cary.They were just f…

The most profound book yet from the visionary author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, a darkly funny novel about grief that becomes a desert survival story.A woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that …

Ren Yu is a swimmer. Her daily life starts and ends with the pool.Her teammates are her only friends. Her coach, her guiding light. If she swims well enough, she will be scouted, get a scholarship, go to a good school.Her parents …

Justine is 21 years old and has lived with her grandparents and cousin Jules since the death of her parents. She works as a carer at a retirement home and spends her days listening to her residents’ stories. After bonding with Hél…

Juan Gay lies dying in a room in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert. There, a young man cares for him - someone whom Juan met only once, but who has haunted the edges of his life ever since. As the end appr…

A man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years living in exile in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn't recognize the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone at the airport knows him-a man who ca…

Micheál Burns lives alone in his family's bungalow at the end of Kerry Head in Ireland. It is a picturesque place, but the cliffs have a darker side to them: for generations they have been a suicide black spot. Micheál's mother sa…

I’ve never eaten a person but today I might . . .A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign, overlooking the city that humans call ‘ellay’. Lonely and fascinated by h…

An inspirational tale of the love, comfort and growth you can find in the pages of a good book. What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo's most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. But she is no ordinary librarian.Sensing exactly …

Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick.A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets. So why is everything brok…