Modern & contemporary fiction

Behind anonymous screens, an army of cool and beautiful girls manage the dating service Ghost Lover, a forwarding system for text messages that promises to spare you the anguish of trying to stay composed while communicating with your crush. At a star-studded political fundraiser in a Los Angeles...

People have been telling fairy tales to their children for hundreds of years. And for almost as long, people have been rewriting those fairy tales - to help their children imagine a world where they are the heroes. Karrie and Jon were reading their child these stories when they hit upon a dilemma...

Horror novelist Nick Steen is abducted and imprisoned at Nulltec, a shadowy technological research facility with excellent conference parking, concealed deep on the Stalkford Downs. There he is observed, tested and 'interfered with' (physically) by a team of scientific experts led by Dr Barbara N...

In this blazing cauldron of a book, the boldest writers of our day take up words and their pens, celebrating 50 years of Virago.

In this blazing cauldron of a book, the boldest writers of our day take up words and their pens, celebrating 50 years of Virago.

A collection of humane, beautiful and disarming short stories from the award-winning author Aliya Whiteley. In 16 stories, Whiteley deftly unpeels the strangeness of everyday life through beguiling gardens, rebellious bodies and journeys across familiar worlds, with her trademark wit and compassi...

'Friday Black' tackles urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explores the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In the first, unforgettable story of this collection, 'The Finkelstein Five', Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unstinting reckoning of the brutal prejudice of ...

From wronged wives to nosy neighbours, from distant dads to new-found family, from secrets to lies, fresh starts to false endings - and everything in between - this is a collection of brilliant short stories from the best writers around.

'Free Therapy' takes us into the inner lives of men and women who are versed in the language of therapy, possessed with the self-knowledge needed to change their lives, but finding themselves unwilling to doing it. As her characters try and fail to connect - via sex, friendship, screens and work ...

From swimming on Hampstead Heath to illicit trysts in hayfields, or counting stock in corner shops and stifling parenting classes to pedicures in Florence, this collection of short stories includes some previously unpublished in book form, and covers the gamut of human nature - our foibles, our l...