Literary Fiction

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing....

In Nocturnes, a sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time....

 A new mystery is afoot in the third book in the Thursday Murder Club series from million-copy best-selling author Richard Osman. Coming Autumn 2022! Pre-order your copy now....

From the author of When God Was a Rabbit and Tin Man, Still Life is a big-hearted story of people brought together by love, war, art and the ghost of E.M. Forster....

A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple....

It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life....

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness....

Slough House is Jackson Lamb’s kingdom; a dumping ground for members of the intelligence service who’ve screwed up....

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. The taverna is the only place that Kostas and Defne can meet in secret....

Big Brother is watching you.... 1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three superstates....

The many voices of The Promise tell a story in four snapshots, each one centered on a family funeral, each one happening in a different decade. In the background, a different president is in power, and a different spirit hangs over the country.... 

It was meant to be a harmless stag-night prank. A few hours later Michael Harrison has disappeared, and his friends are dead....

The Magic Faraway Tree is the second magical story in the Faraway Tree series by the world's best-loved children's author, Enid Blyton.... 

In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question on what it means to love....   

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....

Clare and Henry have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was 36. They were married when Clare was 23 and Henry was 31....

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds....

If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe....

14-year-old Adunni has a dream: to be educated. But her father needs her bride-price, so sells his daughter to an older man, who demands she give him the fine boy-children his first two wives have failed to produce....

In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it....

A masterpiece from the Orange Prize-winning, New York Times number one best-selling author of Commonwealth and Bel Canto: a story of love, family, sacrifice and the power of place....

From the Orange Prize-winning, internationally best-selling author of The Song of Achilles comes the powerful story of the mythological witch Circe, inspired by Homer's Odyssey....

I look like a normal kid. Only there's a difference. Poseidon, God of the Sea is my dad. Which sounds cool, but actually means there is usually someone (or something), somewhere, trying to kill me. Now I live at Camp Half-Blood, with other kids like me...

Drifters in search of work, George and simple-minded friend Lennie have nothing in the world except each other - and a dream. A dream that one day they will have some land of their own....

A brother chosen. A brother left behind. And a family where you'd least expect to find one....

Every day, Iona Iverson travels to work by train. Every day, she sees the same people, making assumptions about them, and even giving them nicknames. But they never speak. Obviously. Then one morning, Smart-But-Sexist-Surbiton chokes on a grape right in front of Iona. Sanjay, a nurse, steps up to help and saves his life. This single event starts a chain reaction.

When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me. And so we meet our deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose husband, a charismatic professor at the same small liberal arts college, is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had a mutual understanding when it comes to their extramarital pursuits, but with these new allegations, life has become far less comfortable for them both.

When Gozie and Obianuju meet in August 1978, it is nothing short of fate. He is the perfect man: charismatic, handsome, Christian and—most importantly—Igbo. He reminds her of her beloved Uncle Ikenna, her mother’s brother who disappeared fighting in the Civil War that devastated Nigeria less than a decade before. It is why, when Gozie asks her to marry him within months of meeting, she says yes, despite her lingering and uncertain feelings for Akin—a man her mother would never accept, as his tribe fought on the other side of the war. 

Black Beauty is an 1877 novel by English author Anna Sewell. It was composed in the last years of her life, during which she remained in her house as an invalid. The novel became an immediate best seller, with Sewell dying just five months after its publication, but having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success. With 50 million copies sold, Black Beauty is one of the best-selling books of all time.

It's 1984, and after an unexpected pregnancy, assistant professor Sophia Shulder learns that her newborn baby has Down syndrome and life-threatening anomalies that require immediate risky surgeries. Under pressure to give consent, Sophia is not sure whether that is best for her baby, or for herself. The hospital, threatened by the Reagan administration's new "Baby Doe" laws, launches legal proceedings to force surgery. Is a severely disabled baby's death ever preferable to life? Who decides?

David Leavitt's second collection of stories further confirms a talent deep and wonderfully creative in its empathy. A Place I've Never Been explores family relationships, friendships, and romantic relationships, among characters whose sexuality is fluid or uncertain—a barrier or under threat. A real estate agent happily married to a woman finds himself in love with another man in "Houses". A man entering a bold new world of gay hookups feels sheltered from the most intimidating attentions by his more attractive, charismatic friend. 

Life has always been a banquet for Sappho, one to be savored to the fullest. Following a magnificent destiny, her strange and sensual odyssey has carried her to the far corners of the ancient world, from Delphi to Egypt, to the Land of the Amazons, and the realm of Hades. For Sappho, it was always about love—love that seduced her into a plot to depose a dictator, and love that made her trade an unwanted marriage bed of a despised and drunken husband for a seemingly endless series of lovers, both male and female. 

Set against the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, While England Sleeps tells the story of a love affair between Brian Botsford, an upper-class young English writer, and Edward Phelan, an idealistic employee of the London Underground and member of the Communist Party. Though far better educated than Edward, Brian is also far more callow, convinced that his homosexuality is something he will outgrow. Edward, on the other hand, possesses “an unproblematic capacity to accept” both Brian and the unorthodox nature of their love for each other.

Winter blankets Montreal, while a bookseller and her lover dream of Prague. As the narrator’s open marriage becomes the subject of a novel, reality blurs with fiction, and she tries to reconcile the need to create with the desire for love and sex. Written in stark, spare prose, Prague is an introspective and intimate account of the making of a novel from life.

Jenna Walker has suddenly found herself with no job, no boyfriend, nowhere to live—and she's been wondering for a while now if, apart from her beloved cat Bertie, she has anything to live for. She really doesn't want to turn up on her sister's doorstep, but that feels like her only option. Already stretched between her job and the demands of looking after their mother, Rosie is not happy about having yet another person to take care of. If only one thing in her life would work out the way she wants it to.

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the centre of Bonds, a successful 1938 novel that all of New York seems to have read. But there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Michael has travelled a long way from his boyhood under the endless skies of the Midwest. His retirement is peaceful, if solitary. But one day there is a visitation: a mysterious car on the seafront, and a package delivered. From its contents, Michael understands that he has been commissioned to undertake a final journey. As Michael makes his way deep into a distant desert—a strange and liminal landscape that lies between hell and redemption—he undertakes another journey, into long-suppressed memories.

It was strange because it wasn't so long ago that he was convinced the only way out of the depression that had crippled him since he was a child was death. But now, he is on a high-speed train, travelling from Rome to Modena, a failed novelist on the tail of a famous physicist whose memoir he is ghostwriting. The more of another man's life he writes, the more his debt to his publisher is paid off. But nothing would be possible had he not experienced the life-altering, life-saving treatment for the darkness which had been hovering since the chemical spill in West Virginia.

Christian Fennell's debut book, Torrents of Our Time, brings together a collection of 22 stories, most of which have appeared in international literary journals and anthologies. A gifted storyteller with a wide-ranging audience, Fennell challenges the weakness in the heart of all our “truths", while illuminating our dreams and our fears. These are stories that reside in the broken places of us, a stunning dance between our flaws and the beauty and joy of who we are, in this place now. Taken as a whole, this book is a lyrical and gripping narrative of love, loss, and pain.  

Leaving the Country of Sin is a tale of Rafferty, who was saved as a teenager from delinquency and slapped into a six-year hitch in the army to avoid jail. Early on, his anger and fierce resolve catch the attention of an officer in charge of a small cadre of soldiers who provide unique, subdued solutions to problems too sensitive for more obvious snipers or commandos. Later, Rafferty, having determined to retire on Galveston Island, which he had visited as a child with his uncle, hovers between seeing his past deeds as a patriotic service and just another form of murder.