Showing titles in Genre Fiction

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God’s elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles.

Lodging-house keeper Clem Talleyfer prefers a quiet life. He's happy with his hobbies, his work - and especially with his lodger Rowley Green, who becomes a friend over their long fireside evenings together. If only neat, precise, irresistible Mr. Green were interested in more than friendship. Rowley just wants to be left alone - at least until he meets Clem, with his odd, charming ways and his glorious eyes. Two quiet men, lodging in the same house, coming to an understanding...it could be perfect.

When Vicky Cogburn’s Mafia boyfriend enters the witness protection program, she enlists a law firm to set her up with a fake wife and fake life far away from the city. Ambitious, no-nonsense attorney Rachel Huntington would do anything to secure a partnership in her New York City law firm—even if it means hiding out and playing house with a seductive Mafia mistress.

Maya Hoshimoto was once the best art thief in the galaxy. For ten years, she returned stolen artifacts to alien civilizations – until a disastrous job forced her into hiding. Now she just wants to enjoy a quiet life as a graduate student of anthropology, but she's haunted by persistent and disturbing visions of the future. Then an old friend comes to her with a job she can't refuse: find a powerful object that could save an alien species from extinction. Except no one has seen it in living memory, and they aren't the only ones hunting for it.

All This Could be Different introduces us to Sneha. A recent college graduate freshly arrived in Milwaukee, she occupies her days with rote, stressful work as a young consultant for a battery production corporation. She is, as her boss reminds her, a 'contractor, no benefits'. Her nights are spent ordering furniture off the internet, trying out the newfangled invention of dating apps and avoiding confrontation with the terrifying property manager who lives below her. But the rewards are bountiful.

In the house on Violin Road he found the bodies of his brother, his mother, and the man who killed them both-his father. From the house on Violin Road, in Missing Mile, North Carolina, Trevor McGee ran for his sanity and his soul, after his famous cartoonist father had exploded inexplicably into murder and suicide. Now Trevor is back. In the company of a New Orleans computer hacker on the run from the law, Trevor has returned to face the ghosts that still live on Violin Road, to find the demons that drove his father to murder his family-and worse, to spare one of his sons. But as Trevor begins to draw his own cartoon strip, he loses himself in a haze of lines and art and thoughts of the past, the haunting begins. Trevor and his lover plunge into a cyber-maze of cartoons, ghosts, and terror that will lead either to understanding-true understanding-or to a blood-raining repetition of the past.

After a messy divorce, attractive young mother Sonia is struggling to provide for herself and keep custody of her son. With her back to the wall, she resorts to smuggling cocaine into Iceland and finds herself caught up in a ruthless criminal world. As she desperately looks for a way out of trouble, she must pit her wits against her nemesis, Bragi, a customs officer whose years of experience frustrate her new and evermore daring strategies.

Grace Warner spends her days teaching four sections of Beowulf for Cretins to bored students at one of New England's “hidden ivy” colleges. Not long after she is dumped by her longtime girlfriend, Grace meets the engaging and mysterious Abbie on a cross-country flight. Sparks fly on and off the plane as the two strangers give in to one night of reckless passion with no strings attached and no contact information exchanged.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, Southern black community and running away at age 16, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same Southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white and her white husband knows nothing of her past.

The day of the garden party should’ve been a celebration of love for Raphael and his fiancée, as they toast their engagement with their families. But for someone, it’s an opportunity to unveil the lies that have bound the family together over the years. With their nearest and dearest gathered at the family manor, as the first glass is raised, the secrets that bind them begin to crack. And what should have been the happiest day of their lives, might just end as a day they’d rather forget…

Inspired by Nigeria's folktales and war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly. Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is 11 when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child, and the star-crossed pair fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls.

In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the 10th human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Kalki’s 10thyear, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity.

Merryn grew up on the wilds of Bodmin moor, raised by her mother and her aunt in an old farmhouse. Here, the locals never leave the village, fear for the future of their farms and cling desperately to the folkloric tales that are woven into their history. Except Merryn, who has escaped to Manchester for university, briefly untethering herself from her past. When Merryn returns home for the memorial service of her ex-girlfriend Claud, she finds her childhood home stranger and more secretive than ever. She’s sure that her mother is hiding something.

Moving between Ireland, Scotland and London, Something About Her is a story about the fragility and transformative power of first love. With vivid insight and tenderness, it exposes the fear, hope, and longing that can consume us, particularly when there’s so much you still don’t know about love, about life, and about yourself.

1972. Ten years on from the events of The Miseducation of Evie Epworth and Evie is settled in London working for the BBC. She has everything she's ever dreamed of (a career, a leatherette briefcase, an Ossie Clark poncho) but, following an unfortunate incident involving Princess Anne and a Hornsea Pottery mug, she finds herself having to rethink her life and piece together work, love, grief and multiple pairs of cork-soled platform sandals.

Katie Brandt was like no woman Shay had ever met. She was brilliant, funny, gorgeous, exciting, sexy as hell, and she made Shay’s blood boil. She made Shay feel things she’d never felt before. Katie’s estranged husband described her as, “Not your run-of-the-mill genius, but universe-bending genius. Her mind works in mysterious ways. Ways we can’t fathom or comprehend. Ways that are sometimes violent and dangerous - sometimes self-destructive. She borders on insanity.”

Angelina Sicco was born and raised in Cadenze, an ugly little mountain town that's dead most of the year. Determined to be content with her lot in life, she walks her mongrel dog, attends her brother's heavy metal concerts, holds court in the local dive bar, and does everything she can to bait hot, queer women to her sleepy, conservative hometown. On the night of a family party, Angelina runs into the sternly handsome Jagvi, who's back in town for a spell. And who just so happens to be her brother's ex-girlfriend.

Mary is the great-niece of Victor Frankenstein. She knows her uncle disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the Arctic but she doesn't know why or how. She and her husband are trying to make a name for themselves as paleontologists but, in 1850s' London, scientific success requires wealth and connections - neither of which they possess. But then Mary discovers some old family papers that allude to the truth behind her great-uncle's past, of his attempts to create a living being and the creature that ultimately killed him. Perhaps this idea will prove to be their salvation.

Marguerite Demers is 24 when she leaves Paris for the sleepy southern village of Saint-Sulpice, to take up a job as a live-in nurse. Her charge is Jerome Lanvier, once one of the most powerful men in the village, and now dying alone in his large and secluded house, surrounded by rambling gardens. Manipulative and tyrannical, Jerome has scared away all his previous nurses.

James is 34 and fed up. His six-year relationship with Adam has imploded, he hates his job making up celebrity gossip and his best friend, Bella, has just announced she's moving to Russia. Adrift and single in loved-up London, James needs to break out of his lonely, drunken comfort zone. Encouraged by Bella, he throws himself headlong into online dating, blogging each encounter anonymously as the mysterious Romeo.