Modern & contemporary fiction

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon a...

London, 1920. Arlette works in Liberty by day, and by night is caughty up in a glamorous whirl of parties, clubs, cocktails and jazz. But when tragedy strikes she flees the city, never to return. Over half a century later, in the grungy mid-'90s, her graddaughter Betty arrives in London. She can'...

Alice and Alfie are strangers. But they sleep next to each other every night. Alfie Mack has been in hospital for months recovering from an accident. A new face on the ward is about as exciting as life gets for him right now, so when someone moves into the bed next to him he's eager to make frien...

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. In this novel, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make u...

This spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideo...

'Best British Short Stories' invites you to judge a book by its cover - or more accurately, by its title. This series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere.

From the gentle romance of 'Kissing Emily Baker', to the trials and tribulations of a young English family setting out for a new life in 1920s Australia in 'The Group Settler's Wife', this collection contains 15 stories of love, second chances and new beginnings that will enthral Anna Jacobs' man...

Theo Byrne is a promising young astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son Robin is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals, and ...

Angela Carter has taken old fairy stories, subtly altering and changing them to create strange glittering tales that will haunt the reader.

In this dazzling collection, Nam Le takes us across the globe as he enters the hearts and minds of characters from all over the world. Whether it's the story of fourteen-year-old Juan, a hit man in Colombia; an ageing painter in New York mourning the death of his much-younger lover; or a young re...