Modern & contemporary fiction

Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea. Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, sits primly in a second class carriage on the train from Sussex to London and imagines a new life in the big city. George, a private...

'Ancient Light' is the story of a life rendered brilliantly vivid - the obsession and selfishness of young love and the terrifying shock of grief.

One magical winter's night in Venice, Didi fell in love. But it ended - and he left without even saying goodbye. Now, 13 years on, Shay Mason is back. Of course the old spark is still there, but that's as far as it goes. Didi won't let the past unsettle her present: as manager of one of the most ...

One magical winter's night in Venice, Didi fell in love. But it ended - and he left without even saying goodbye. Now, 13 years on, Shay Mason is back. Of course the old spark is still there, but that's as far as it goes. Didi won't let the past unsettle her present: as manager of one of the most ...

When Tia accidentally overhears a whispered conversation between her mother - terminally ill and lying in a hospital bed in Port Harcourt, Nigeria - and her aunt, the repercussions will send her on a desperate quest to uncover a secret her mother has been hiding for nearly two decades. Back home ...

On the surface, Alice is where she should be in life: she's just given birth to a baby girl, Dawn; her husband Steve - a white academic whose area of study is conveniently her own Mohawk culture - is nothing but supportive; and they've moved into a new home in a wealthy neighbourhood in Toronto, ...

When members of Vigata's elite are targeted in a series of perfectly executed burglaries, Inspector Montalbano reluctantly takes the case. It soon becomes clear however that more links these privileged few than simply their lost possessions. It isn't long too before Montalbano finds himself taken...

Paris, Christmas 2021. After a heart attack, Mathias Taillefer wakes up in hospital with a stranger at his bedside. The mysterious girl reveals herself to be Louise Collange, a volunteer who has come to play the cello for patients. When she finds out Mathias is a cop, she asks him to take charge ...

Like A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession, these two mesmerising novellas are set in the nineteenth century. In 'Morpho Eugenia', an explorer realises that the behaviour of the people around him is alarmingly similar to that of the insects he studies. In 'The Conjugal Angel', curio...

Two sisters growing up in the Scotland Road area of Liverpool join the Voluntary Aid Detachment during World War 1 and find themselves in a hellish, death-filled world that contrasts acutely with the warmth and love of working-class Liverpool.