Contemporary Fiction

A 2024 BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK FOR BBC R4 OPEN BOOK, THE OBSERVER, GQ, GRAZIA, HERO, I-D, NYLON.A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home…

From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty, power, and capitals influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it. Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduati…

A provocative, tender and darkly funny novel that explores the painful truths of modern-day connection, and all the complicated and unexpected forms that love can take in a lifetime. Imagine discovering an animatronic sex doll hid…

'The name's O'Carroll-Kelly. Ross O'Carroll-Kelly.' As the great James Bond said, 'History isn't kind to men who play God.' How right the dude ended up being.My secret double-life was finally catching up with me. Sorcha wanted a d…

New home, new name and newly thirty: Phoebe Forde has stepped into emigrant life in Copenhagen with her anxious dog, Dolly. Almost three years into her gender transition, she has learned to move through the world carefully, savour…

THIS IS ONE HELL OF A STORY. IT’S JUST NOT HERS TO TELL. When failed writer June Hayward witnesses her rival Athena Liu die in a freak accident, she sees her opportunity… and takes it.So what if it means stealing Athena’s final m…

Summer in London stops for no-one. Not the half-naked boozers, stoners, and cruisers, the hen parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried fags.It's June 2019, and everyone has converged on the city…

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. Tom and Ming meet on a night out at university and fall hard for each other.It’s not long before they are planning a future and building a life. Then Ming announces her intention to transit…

As teenagers, Helen, Annie and Laura were inseparable, bonding over family, boys and their dreams for the future. But when school ended, so did their friendship. Twenty-five years later, a snowstorm forces the three women to spend…

Helen Zhang is the bestselling author who can't write her own happy-ever-after. Grant Shepard is the screenwriter with the movie-star looks who can't afford his therapist.When the two of them are put together to adapt Helen's book…

Nahr has been confined to the Cube: nine square metres of glossy grey cinderblock, devoid of time, its patterns of light and dark nothing to do with day and night. Journalists visit her, but get nowhere; because Nahr is not going …

It’s 1994 in County Donegal, Ireland, and everyone is talking about Colette Crowley – the writer, the bohemian, the woman who left her husband and sons to pursue a relationship with a married man in Dublin. But now Colette is back…

June 1940. As Paris falls to the Germans, Gaston Cassar - honorable servant of France, devoted husband and father, currently posted as naval attache in Salonica - bids farewell to his beloved wife, aunt and children, placing his f…

The much-anticipated new collection from the BBC National Short Story Award-winning author of Multitudes and Intimacies.I still sometimes wonder if one could draw a window in the wall, or in the air, and step through it together. …

Two boys can't remember the last time they had a hug. Meet Finlay.He's studying for his nursing degree at Glasgow University, against all the odds. But coming straight from care means he has no support network. How can he write e…

Do you know what happened already? Did you know her? Did you see it on the internet? Did you listen to a podcast? Did the hosts make jokes? Did you see the pictures of the body? Did you look for them? It's been nearly a decade sin…

There's a horse', he whispered. 'An old horse that's standing in front of my house. He's blind and he won't eat and I don't know what to do.' 65-year-old Al Ward is several years into an isolated stint living on old mining land in…

Danny Hook is a directionless twenty-something year old fresh out of therapy. Dealing with his disappointed family and dead-end career, he's sure things couldn't get much worse, until a drink-driving accident leaves his best frien…

Carmel had been alone all her life. The baby knew this. They looked at each other, and all of time was there.The baby knew how vast her mother's loneliness had been. Nell is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets ou…

Widely regarded as one of the greatest Irish-language novels of the 20th century, An Béal Bocht is a classic satire in Irish by one of the century's great writers. This extremely funny book, with its rain-sodden peasants of Corca …

When Francis Conroy wakes up one morning in an unfamiliar bed, with a wife he's never met before, in a house he's never seen in a country he left as a child, he has no idea what sort of a confusd, extraordinary and ultimately upli…

A story of love and astronomy told over the course of twenty years through the lives of two improbable best friends. Thomas Hart and Grace Macauley are fellow worshippers at the Bethesda Baptist chapel in the small Essex town of A…

The Barnes family are in trouble.Until recently they ran the biggest business in town, now they’re teetering on the brink of bankruptcy – and that’s just the start of their problems. Dickie and Imelda’s marriage is hanging by a th…

The world has fallen. Without warning, a mysterious and omnipotent force has claimed the planet for their own.There are no negotiations, no demands, no reasons given for their actions. All they have is a message: humanity has thir…

The bestselling novel by cult writer Wang Xiaobo, a satire of the Cultural Revolution, in its first full English translation. Twenty-one year old Wang Er, stationed in a remote mountain commune, spends his days herding oxen, nappi…

A young woman reorients her relationship to the world in the wake of sudden deafness in this mesmerizing debut novel for readers of Rachel Cusk, Clarice Lispector, and Fleur Jaeggy. When the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist…

Dancing is the one thing that can solve Stephen's problems. At Church with his family, the shimmer of Black hands raised in praise. With his band, making music speaking not just to their hardships, but their joys.Grooving with his…

Set in Dublin's Liberties, Estelle Birdy’s explosively original debut Ravelling channels the energies and agonies of young men let loose in the city, their city, navigating the tumultuous trajectory of youth and young manhood, whe…

Olwen was plunged prematurely into adulthood when her parents died in tragic circumstances. She and her three younger sisters - each single, each with a PhD - are now in their thirties and leading disparate, distanced lives. Until…

Three irresistible short stories by the global phenomenon Ali Hazelwood, now available together in paperback for the first time, with an exclusive bonus chapter. Mara, Sadie, and Hannah are friends first, scientists always. Thoug…