Modern & contemporary fiction

Benji is an imaginative eight-year-old boy, living with his parents in a mining village in Nottinghamshire amidst the spoil heaps and chip shops that characterise the last industrially bruised outposts of the Midlands, just before Northern England begins. His family are the eccentric neighbours o...

Winston Smith rewrites history. It's his job. Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, he helps the Party, and the omnipresent Big Brother, control the people of Oceania. Winston knows what a good citizen of Oceania must do: show his devotion for Big Brother and th...

At the Golden Sunset retirement home, it is not unusual for residents to invent stories. So when elderly Ms Mook first begins to unspool her memories, the obituarist listening to her is sceptical. Stories of captivity, friendship, murder, adventure, assumed identities and spying. Stories that tak...

1963. Saigon. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney working for US Navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. The two women form a wary alliance as they struggle to balance the pressure to be respectable wives for their ...

1924. When Anastasia's beloved mother dies, she has no choice but to go to rural Skimpole and move in with 'the Aunt' - too fearsome for a first name, an outcast from the village who lives in a dilapidated mansion with two servants and an unruly pack of dogs. The many mysteries of Skimpole are ir...

At long last, Adam Sealey has an Oscar within reach. Working with his controversial former mentor, Jonathan, he's given the performance of a lifetime, and he almost believes it might be worth the cost. Because Adam subscribes to 'the method'. It's the secret that the world's greatest actors swear...

There is no adama without dam. In 1946, a young Ruth begins building a new life in Palestine, haunted by the death of her family in Europe and driven by youthful ideals in a land hostile to her presence. Her sister, Shoshana, survives in the Displaced Persons camps of Germany and joins her in Pal...

Prague, 1588. The Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, wants to expand the boundaries of human knowledge and his court is a haven for scientists, astrologers and alchemists. His abiding passion is the elusive hunt for the philosopher's stone and thus immortality. The Catholic Church fears he has pushed...

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an enti...

Mimi is a young single mother looking to break free from her mother's judgements and her church's oppressive, hypocritical gossip to establish who she is on her own. But a dangerous new romance could lead her into trouble. Meanwhile, fifteen-year-old Abi dreams of emulating the life she sees thro...