Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

Astrid is the only child of a single mother, Ingrid, a brilliant, obsessed poet who wields her luminous beauty to intimidate and manipulate men. Astrid worships her mother and cherishes their private world full of ritual and mystery, but their idyll is shattered when Astrid's mother falls apart over a lover. Deranged by rejection, Ingrid murders the man, and is sentenced to life in prison.

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.

When the teenage girl who's been hanging around near the house knocks on the door and tells her she's her granddaughter, Cassie is shocked rigid. There's only one way this can be true: if Evie is the daughter of the baby Cassie gave away for adoption when she was herself a troubled teenager. Is this a trick? Or is Evie's tale true? When she finds out why the girl has come to find her, it brings a tangle of other problems that she can't ignore. This was the last thing she expected to be dealing with as she moves into her new home in a leisure village in Wiltshire.

We all need to know where we come from, where we belong. But for David and Nathalie, this need to know is even more urgent, since they are adopted. Brought up by the same parents but born to two different mothers, they have grown up as brother and sister, and share a fierce loyalty.Their decision, in their late thirties, to embark upon the journey to find their birth mothers is no straightforward matter.

Frank and Leon are two men from different times, discovering that sometimes all you learn from your parents' mistakes is how to make different ones of your own. Frank is trying to escape his troubled past by running away to his family's beach shack. As he struggles to make friends with his neighbours and their precocious young daughter, Sal, he discovers the community has fresh wounds of its own. A girl is missing, and when Sal too disappears, suspicion falls on Frank. Decades earlier, Leon tries to hold together his family's cake shop as their suburban life crumbles in the aftermath of the Korean War.

Molly Somerville knows she has a reputation for trouble. She did give away her $15-million inheritance, but, hey, nobody's perfect. Yes, Molly's happy about almost everything...except her long-term crush on the daredevil quarterback for the Chicago Stars. That awful, gorgeous Kevin Tucker, a man who can't even remember her name! One night, Molly's penchant for running into trouble runs her right into Kevin himself, turning her world upside down.

It all hinges on one kiss. Whether Irina McGovern does or does not lean in to a specific pair of lips in London will determine whether she stays with her disciplined, intellectual partner Lawrence or runs off with Ramsey, a hard-living snooker player. Using a parallel universe structure, we follow Irina's life as it unfolds under the influence of two drastically different men.

A murder has taken place in a tony Mumbai neighbourhood. A prime suspect, Prashanth, keeps his silence in the interrogation room as Inspector Khan plays the tapes of his therapy sessions. The explosive tapes, surreptitiously recorded by therapist Shaily Gupta, slowly reveal shocking information about Prashanth, about his relationship with his girlfriend Sonya, about the therapist and about the gruesome murder in question.

Government minister Patrick Macready has been found dead in his flat. The coroner rules it an accident, a sex game gone wrong. Jon Swift is from the old stock of journos - cynical, cantankerous and overweight - and something about his friend's death doesn't seem right. Then, days after Macready's flat is apparently burgled, Swift discovers that his friend had been researching a string of Russian government figures who had met similarly 'accidental' fates.

Bestselling author Torey Hayden's novel is a fascinating study of a fractured family, a troubled child, and a psychiatrist's attempts to rescue them. Conor, aged nine, arrives in the play therapy room of child psychiatrist James Innes with the diagnosis "autistic". His mother Laura, an aloof, enigmatic novelist, can't handle him. His rancher father, embroiled in divorcing Laura, does not feel there is anything wrong with Conor. His six-year-old sister Morgana insists he really does see ghosts.

In the summer of 1972, Famagusta, in Cyprus, is the most desirable resort in the Mediterranean, a city bathed in the glow of good fortune. An ambitious couple open the island's most spectacular hotel, where Greek and Turkish Cypriots work in harmony. Two neighbouring families, the Georgious and the Özkans, are among many who moved to Famagusta to escape the years of unrest and ethnic violence elsewhere on the island. But beneath the city's façade of glamour and success, tension is building.

The irrepressible Russell "Buffy" Buffery has upped sticks from London and moved to Knockton, Powys, to a B&B inherited from an old flame. With his future spread before him, and a string of failed marriages behind him, Buffy decides it's time for a new challenge. Meanwhile: Harold's wife has run off with a younger woman leaving him alone with his as-yet-unwritten novel narrated by Mary Pickford's cat; Amy's weedy boyfriend has turned out to be not so needy after all; and Andy's partner's corset-and-suspender-clad attempts at seduction are having anything but the desired effect.

On a peat and heather island off the west coast of Scotland, Effie and her mother Nora take refuge in the large decaying house of their ancestors and tell each other stories. Nora, at first, recounts nothing that Effie really wants to hear, like who her father was - variously Jimmy, Jack, or Ernie.

On a beautifully restored barge on the Seine, Jean Perdu runs a bookshop - or, rather, a 'literary apothecary', for this bookseller possesses a rare gift for sensing which books will soothe the troubled souls of his customers. The only person he is unable to cure, it seems, is himself. He has nursed a broken heart ever since the night, twenty-one years ago, when the love of his life fled Paris, leaving behind a handwritten letter that he has never dared read.

School, the happiest days of your life? Not for Amanda Baker, 16 and sick of it as she moves miserably between lessons. Her only solace is her fifth form gang - the four Mandies - and a low-calorie diet of king-sized cigarettes, until she teams up with Julia Smith, games captain and consummate game player. So begins a passionate friendship that will threaten her future, menace her sanity, and risk the betrayal of everything and everyone she holds dear.

When you're as big and rough as Jack Reacher - and you have a badly-set, freshly-busted nose, patched with silver duct tape - it isn't easy to hitch a ride. But Reacher has some unfinished business in Virginia, so he doesn't quit. And at last, he's picked up by three strangers - two men and a woman. But within minutes it becomes clear they're all lying about everything - and then they run into a police roadblock on the highway.

The rhythms of this novel are the rhythms of the land. A Place on Earth resonates with variations played on themes of change; looping transitions from war into peace, winter into spring, browning flood destruction into greening fields, absence into presence, lost into found.

Gegen Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts machen sich zwei junge Deutsche an die Vermessung der Welt. Der eine, Alexander von Humboldt, kämpft sich durch Urwald und Steppe, befährt den Orinoko, kostet Gifte, zählt Kopfläuse, kriecht in Erdlöcher, besteigt Vulkane und begegnet Seeungeheuern und Menschenfressern. Der andere, der Mathematiker und Astronom Carl Friedrich Gauß, der sein Leben nicht ohne Frauen verbringen kann und doch in der Hochzeitsnacht aus dem Bett springt, um eine Formel zu notieren.

When Pandora picks up her older brother, Edison, at her local Iowa airport, she literally doesn’t recognize him. The once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened? Soon Edison’s slovenly habits, appalling diet, and know-it-all monologues are driving Pandora and her fitness-freak husband Fletcher insane. After the brother-in-law has more than overstayed his welcome, Fletcher delivers his wife an ultimatum: It’s him or me. Rich with Shriver’s distinctive wit and ferocious energy, Big Brother is about fat: why we overeat and whether extreme diets ever really work.

The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules is an incredibly quirky, humorous, and warm-hearted story about growing old disgracefully - and breaking all the rules along the way! 79-year-old Martha Andersson dreams of escaping her care home and robbing a bank. She has no intention of spending the rest of her days in an armchair and is determined to fund her way to a much more exciting lifestyle. Along with her four oldest friends - otherwise known as the League of Pensioners - Martha decides to rebel against all of the rules imposed upon them.