Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

On the eve of his 36th birthday, author Mike Gayle picked up a pen and contemplated his life. He is nowhere near being an adult - even though his tenth wedding anniversary is looming and his second child due shortly. Appalled by this lack of maturity, Mike draws up a to-do list containing every item he's been meaning to do but keeps putting off.

The rich are different. But fate is blind. A private jet plunges into the sea. The only survivors are down-on-his-luck artist Scott Burroughs and JJ Bateman, the four-year-old son of a super-rich TV executive. For saving the boy, Scott is suddenly a hero. And then, as the official investigation is rapidly overtaken by a media frenzy, it seems he may also be a villain. Why was he on the plane in the first place, and why did it crash?

Den sydkoreanske forfatter Han Kang fik tildelt den internationale Man Booker Pris 2016 for dette litterære mesterværk. Yeong-Hye og hendes mand er helt almindelige mennesker. Han arbejder på kontor, hun er en pligtopfyldende, men lidt uengageret husmor. Så tager Yeong-Hye en beslutning om at blive vegetar. "Jeg havde en drøm", lyder hendes eneste forklaring. Et umiddelbart uskyldigt valg, men ikke i Sydkorea, hvor omgivelserne synes det er chokerende og skamfuldt ikke at spise kød.

Richard is a modern day everyman; a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one. His life has slowed almost to a standstill until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world. One day he wakes up with a knotty cramp in his back, which rapidly develops into an all-consuming pain. At the same time a wide hole appears outside his living room window, threatening the foundations of his house.

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.

Frances is a 30-something sub-editor, an invisible production drone on the books pages of the Questioner. Her routine and colourless existence is disrupted one winter evening when she happens upon the aftermath of a car crash and hears the last words of the driver, Alys Kyte. When Alys's family makes contact in an attempt to find closure, Frances is given a tantalising glimpse of a very different world: one of privilege and possibility.

Tony Pagoda è un cantante melodico con tanto passato alle spalle...

From the prize-winning author of West, a collision between old and new, east and west, in a former British hill station in contemporary South India. Fleeing the dark undercurrents of contemporary life in Britain, Hilary Byrd takes refuge in Ooty, a hill station in South India. There he finds solace in life's simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver, Jamshed, and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where the Padre and his adoptive daughter, Priscilla, have taken Hilary under their wing.

The Group follows eight graduates from exclusive Vassar College as they find love and heartbreak, and choose careers and husbands against the backdrop of 1930s New York.

An ordinary family man, geologist, and Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he'll be reunited with his loved ones after death in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life. In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity.

Julian Treslove and Sam Finkler are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick. Now all three are recently widowed, in their own way, and spend sweetly painful evenings together reminiscing. Until an unexpected violent attack brings everything they thought they knew into question.

Antwerpen, Hauptbahnhof, Salle des pas perdus im Jahr 1967. Dem Erzähler fällt ein Mann auf, der eingehend die Architektur des Gebäudes betrachtet. Die beiden Herren kommen ins Gespräch und verabreden sich für den nächsten Tag. Aus dem zufälligen Zusammentreffen wird ein über 30 Jahre andauerndes Gespräch an verschiedensten Orten Europas. Zwischen London, Paris und Prag erzählt der Kunsthistoriker Austerlitz seine Geschichte.

In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio's father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, now a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train upends Sami's visit and changes his life forever. Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic. Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the nuances of emotion that are the substance of passion.

Five years ago, three-year-old Dillon disappeared. For his father Harry - who left him alone for ten crucial minutes - it was an unforgivable lapse. Yet Dillon's mother Robyn has never blamed her husband: Her own secret guilt is burden enough. Now they're trying to move on, returning home to Dublin to make a fresh start. But their lives are turned upside down the day Harry sees an eight-year-old boy in the crowd. A boy Harry is convinced is Dillon. But the boy vanishes before he can do anything about it.

On a balmy midsummer's evening in 1923, a young woman - foreign, dishevelled and heavily pregnant - is found unconscious just off the railway tracks in the tiny logging community of Woody Creek. The town midwife, Gertrude Foote, is roused from her bed when the woman is brought to her door. Try as she might, Gertrude is unable to save her, but the baby lives.

J’ai voulu y croire, j’ai voulu rêver que le royaume de la littérature m’accueillerait comme n’importe lequel des orphelins qui y trouvent refuge, mais même à travers l’art, on ne peut pas sortir vainqueur de l’abjection. La littérature ne m’a pas sauvée. Je ne suis pas sauvée. Neige Sinno lit elle-même son texte, insufflant une force supplémentaire à son bouleversant récit autobiographique.

When Lisa Jones and her boyfriend George take on the run-down Rocks Hotel, they aim to do for Mariscombe what Rick Stein did for Padstow and set up a chic maritime retreat. But renovating a hotel is about more than stripped wooden floors and Egyptian cotton sheets, particularly when the locals are shifty and unhelpful. Especially Bruno Thorne, the tall, dark and surly owner of the nearby Mariscombe Hotel, where life is one long holiday; for the staff, anyway.

When 19-year-old Davey finds himself drunk, beaten, and alone, he is rescued by the oddly assorted inhabitants of an abandoned and beautiful house in the West Country. Their only condition for letting him join them is that he asks them no questions. More than 30 years ago in that same house, burned-out rock star Jack Laker writes a ground-breaking comeback album, and abandons the girl who saved his life to embark on a doomed and passionate romance with a young actress. His attempt to escape his destructive lifestyle leads to deceit, debauchery, and even murder.

August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.

A mysterious toymaker who lives as a recluse in an old mansion, surrounded by the magical beings he has created...a sickly wife locked away in a hidden room...an enigma involving strange lights that shine out from the small island on which an old, disused lighthouse stands...a shadowy creature that hides deep in the woods...These are the elements of a mystery will bind 14-year-old Irene to Ismael during one magical summer spent in Blue Bay when her mother takes a job as a housekeeper for the enigmatic toymaker, Lazarus Jann.