Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, 16-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles to regain her sanity, the listener is inexorably drawn into her private suffering.

Late one summer evening, antiquarian bookseller Adam Snow is returning from a client visit when he takes a wrong turn. He stumbles across a derelict Edwardian house, and compelled by curiosity, approaches the door. Standing before the entrance, he feels the unmistakable sensation of a small cold hand creeping into his own, ‘as if a child had taken hold of it’. At first he is merely puzzled by the odd incident but then begins to suffer attacks of fear and panic, and is visited by nightmares.

Tory Brennan - great niece of Dr Temperance Brennan - and the Virals return for their most terrifying adventure yet. Life appears peaceful on Loggerhead Island – rescued from financial disaster, the research institute is flourishing once more. But the tranquillity is quickly shattered when Tory Brennan and her technophile gang discover a mysterious box buried in the ground.

When a man and a woman get married, things can get complicated. When they have children from previous marriages, "complicated" can become the understatement of the year.

Au grand jeu du destin, Mimo a tiré les mauvaises cartes. Né pauvre, il est confié en apprentissage à un sculpteur de pierre sans envergure. Mais il a du génie entre les mains. Toutes les fées ou presque se sont penchées sur Viola Orsini. Héritière d'une famille prestigieuse, elle a passé son enfance à l'ombre d'un palais génois. Mais elle a trop d'ambition pour se résigner à la place qu'on lui assigne.

Set in the extreme landscape of Alaska, The Quality of Silence follows the story of Yasmin and her deaf daughter, Ruby. Yasmin arrives in Alaska to be told her husband, Matt, is dead, the victim of a catastrophic accident. Yasmin, unable to accept this as truth, sets out into the frozen winter landscape, taking Ruby with her, in search of answers. But as a storm closes in, Yasmin realises that a very human danger may be keeping pace with them.

Edinburgh was going to be a fresh start for Olivia Holloway. Crippled by shyness around the opposite sex, Olivia nevertheless meets gorgeous postgraduate Nate Sawyer and decides it is time to push her fears aside. Before long, Olivia and Nate form a close friendship and she finds herself confessing her deepest secrets, and Nate, being her best friend, offers to teach her the art of flirting. As Olivia and Nate’s friendship turns intense it soon blossoms into a passionate love affair. For the first time Olivia opens her heart but what she doesn’t realise is that Nate has his own fears and just when she finds herself hopelessly falling for him, Nate’s past returns to haunt him.

Eine geheimnisvolle Bibliothek in einer ummauerten Stadt am Ende der Welt, die nur betreten kann, wer seinen eigenen Schatten zurücklässt: Hier lebt das wahre Ich des Mädchens, in das sich der namenlose Erzähler mit siebzehn Jahren unsterblich verliebt. Er macht sich auf die Suche, gelangt in die Stadt, doch das Mädchen erkennt ihn nicht mehr.

For more than three decades Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture...from a groundbreaking newspaper serial, to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of six novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales of the City is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

From his remote moorland home, David Hartley assembles a gang of weavers and land workers to embark upon a criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history. They are the Cragg Vale Coiners, and their business is clipping - the forging of coins, a treasonous offence punishable by death.

In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders.... August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka takes in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one and in love with the man she is to marry. In a split second, the world turns white.

As teenagers, Poppy Carlisle and Serena Gorringe were the only witnesses to a tragic event. Amid heated public debate, the two seemingly glamorous teens were dubbed 'The Ice Cream Girls' by the press and were dealt with by the courts.Years later, having led very different lives, Poppy is keen to set the record straight about what really happened, while Serena wants no one in her present to find out about her past.

The incredible new novel and brand new world from the international bestselling author of the Wool trilogy. The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes. Here in this land of howling wind and infernal sand, four siblings find themselves scattered and lost. Palmer has never been the same since his father walked out twelve years ago. His elder sister, Vic, is trying to run away from the past; his younger brothers, Connor and Rob, are risking their lives to embrace it.

Filth ( Failed in London, Try Hong Kong) is a successful lawyer when he marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the war. Reserved, immaculate, and courteous, Filth finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions.

But Elisabeth is different - a free spirit. She was brought up in the Japanese internment camps, which killed both her parents but left her with a lust for survival and an affinity with the Far East. No wonder she is attracted to Filth's hated rival at the bar - the brash, forceful Veneering.

Jim Foley loves his parents, his brother, his sister, Dickens and God, although not necessarily in that order. Later, he loves Kate, enough to make her his wife; later still, he loves his children, Jack and Hannah. This is Jim's story, from early days spent in County Clare to early adulthood in America, and back to Clare again.

Pru's husband has walked out, leaving her alone to contemplate her future. She's missing not so much him, but the life they once had - picnicking on the beach with small children, laughing together, nestling up like spoons in the cutlery drawer as they sleep. Now there's just a dip on one side of the bed and no one to fill it. In a daze, Pru goes off to a friend's funeral. Usual old hymns, words of praise and a eulogy but...it doesn't sound like the friend Pru knew. And it isn't. She's gone to the wrong service.

On Emilia Morris's thirteenth birthday, her mother Rachel moves into a tent at the bottom of their garden. From that day on, she never says another word. Inspired by her vow of silence, other women join her and together they build the Community. Eight years later, Rachel and thousands of her followers around the world burn themselves to death.

Essays in Love is a stunningly original love story. Taking in Aristotle, Wittgenstein, history, religion and Groucho Marx, Alain de Botton charts the progress of a love affair from the first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to the onset of anxiety and heartbreak.

Artist, Hassie Day and her sister, Margot, buy a rambling, run-down Jacobean house in Hope Wenlock on the Welsh Marches. While Margot continues her London life in high finance, Hassie is left alone to work the large, long-neglected garden. She is befriended by eccentric, sharp-tongued Miss Foot, who recommends Murat, an Albanian migrant, out of place in the village, to help Hassie in the garden. As Hassie works in the garden alongside Murat, she begins to ruminate on her past life, her hostile mother, her diffident father and the sibling rivalry that tainted her childhood.

Raimund Gregorious - Mundus, as his students affectionately call him - is a predictable character. A bookish Latin professor, well-respected but perhaps a little boring. One stormy morning, he encounters a beautiful, distraught Portuguese woman in a red leather coat... Later that day Raimund will realise: that moment changed everything. All of a sudden, nothing in his life feels right. His restlessness is further fuelled when he finds a book by a little-known Portuguese writer, Amadeo de Prado.