Fiction & Literature - contemporary

The Victorian language of flowers was used to express emotions: honeysuckle for devotion, azaleas for passion, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it has been more useful in conveying feelings like grief, mistrust and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster care system, her only connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings. Now eighteen, Victoria has nowhere to go, and sleeps in a public park, where she plants a small garden of her own. When her talent is discovered by a local florist, she disco... read more

Autumn Laing seduces Pat Donlon with her pearly thighs and her lust for life and art. In doing so she not only compromises the trusting love she has with her husband, Arthur, she also steals the future from Pat's young and beautiful wife, Edith, and their unborn child. Fifty-three years later, cantankerous, engaging, unrestrainable 85-year-old Autumn is shocked to find within herself a powerful need for redemption. As she begins to tell her story, she writes, 'They are all dead and I am old and skeleton-gaunt. This is where it bega... read more

Small-time private investigator Ray Lovell veers between paralysis and delirium in a hospital bed. But before the accident that landed him there, he had promised to find Rose Janko. Rose was married to the charismatic son of a travelling gypsy family, Ivo Janko. When Ray starts to investigate her disappearance, he's surprised that her family are so hostile towards him. The Jankos have not had an easy past. They are a clan touched by tragedy - either they are cursed, or they are hiding a terrible secret. Could it be that Rose's disc... read more

A magical short novel from the author of All My Friends are Superheroes. A robber charges into a bank with a loaded gun, but instead of taking any money he steals an item of sentimental value from each person. Once he has made his escape, strange things start to happen to the victims. A tattoo comes to life, a husband turns into a snowman, a baby starts to shit money. And Stacey Hinterland discovers that she's shrinking, a little every day, and there is seemingly nothing that she or her husband can do to reverse the process. Can... read more

"I imagined lamplight, shadows, soft voices, clothes put away, the low sound of late news on the radio. And I thought as I crossed the bridge at Baggot Street to face the last stretch of my own journey home that no matter what I had done, I had not done that." In the nine captivating stories that make up The Empty Family, Colm Toibin delineates with a tender and unique sensibility lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals, often willingly, cast adrift from their history. From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks s... read more

A devastatingly powerful and memorable novel for readers of The Memory Keeper's Daughter.
On a stormy night in small-town America, a couple, desperate and soaked to the skin, knock on a stranger's door. When Martha, a retired schoolteacher living a safe and conventional life, answers their knock, her world changes forever. For they are fugitives. Lynnie, a young woman with an intellectual disability, and Homan, a deaf man with only sign language to guide him, have escaped together from The School for the Incurable and... read more

A family is transformed by the internet when a father, searching for his run-away son, enters the son's online world of computer gaming and becomes addicted himself. As the nuclear family everywhere turns into the digital family, Jim Delpe finds himself cast in the role of his son's cyber-space saviour while the son, in the real world, decides whether he will repay the favour.

When Jack Canfield is told he has a terminal illness and that he has weeks to live, his first concern is for his beloved wife, Lizzie, and children, baby Jack, Cory and rebellious teenager Mikki. On Christmas Eve, when Lizzie comes home, Jack is devastated to see his neighbour, Bill Miller, kiss Lizzie on their driveway. Jack confronts her, she tries to explain he's got it all wrong, and distraught, she leaves the house into an ice storm - and a fatal collision with a truck. Overwhelmed with grief, and with his illness worse... read more

'As they used to say in Ireland, the devil only comes into good things.' Narrated by Lilly Bere, the story opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. It then goes back to the moment she was forced to flee Dublin, at the end of the First World War, and follows her life through into the new world of America, a world filled with both hope and danger. At once epic and intimate, Lilly's narrative unfurls as she tries to make sense of the sorrows and troubles of her life and of the people whose lives she has touched. Spanning ne... read more

Once more, we catch up with the delightful goings-on in the fictitious 44 Scotland Street from Alexander McCall Smith. With customary charm and deftness, Alexander McCall Smith gives us another instalment in this popular series, currently running in The Scotsman. Anything could happen to Bertie and the gang, especially with an invitation to one of Scotland's premier jazz festivals...

Fourteen years after independence, the enduring childhood friendship of three women has carried them through times of violence and loss in Kenya, their chosen homeland. Hannah Olsen and her husband Lars own Langani Farm and Safari Lodge where they struggle to protect their wildlife and land from poachers and corrupt officials. But the developing relationship between their daughter and a young African boy with a terrifying legacy tests the strength of their family. Sarah Singh, wildlife researcher and renowned photographer, is marri... read more

A wonderful, warm novel from a major new American voice. In THE ART OF FIELDING, we see sport played in its purest form: by young men who know that their four years on the baseball diamond at Westish College, "a little school in the crook of the thumb of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin," are all they have left. Only their preternaturally gifted fielder, Henry Skrimshander, seems to have the chance to keep his dream - and theirs, vicariously - alive, until a routine throw goes astray. Five lives brought together at Westish - t... read more

"The sound of horses' hooves turns hollow on the farms west of Wirri. If a man can still ride, if he hasn't totally lost the use of his legs, if he hasn't died to the part of his heart that understands such things, then he should go for a gallop. At the very least he should stand at the road by the river imagining that he's pushing a horse up the steep hill that leads to the house on the farm once known as One Tree." Set in hardscrabble farming country and around the country show high-jumping circuit that prevailed in rural New Sou... read more

As the countdown to Mma Makutsi's wedding begins, all is not as it should be at the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency. While investigating unpleasant occurrences on a southern cattle-post, Mma Ramotswe, always on the side of the weak against the strong, has reason to reflect on Rule No.3 of The Principles of Private Detection: never lie to the client. Apprentice mechanic Charlie seems to be avoiding certain important responsibilities. And as Mma Makutsi's big day approaches, her nemesis Violet Sephotho is casting her net wider: by stan... read more

Fires light the sky over Kibera -- East Africa's largest slum. It is the prelude to the bloody violence that erupts during Kenya's presidential elections.

Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears? For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god - A g... read more

It's the year 2044, and the real world has become an ugly place. We're out of oil. We've wrecked the climate. Famine, poverty, and disease are widespread. Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes this depressing reality by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia where you can be anything you want to be, where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. And like most of humanity, Wade is obsessed by the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this alternate r... read more