Modern Fiction

In the aptly named borough of Foulsham, Grandfather Umbitt Iremonger has found a way of making everyday objects assume human shape, and turning real people into objects. Lucy Pennant has been discarded as a clay button, abandoned in the Heaps. Meanwhile, Clod has been turned into a gold coin and ...

Casey Han's years at Princeton have given her a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, a popular white boyfriend and a degree in economics. But no job, and a number of bad habits. As Casey, the daughter of working-class Korean immigrants, navigates an uneven course of small triumphs and spec...

Suddenly unemployed and single, Anna escapes to her parents' beautiful house in France for a much needed recharge – and to work out what she wants to do next with her life now her carefully mapped out plan has gone out the window. Anna gives herself 6 months to recuperate, all the while helping r...

Ada was born with one foot on the other side. Having prayed her into existence, her parents Saul and Saachi struggle to deal with the volatile and contradictory spirits peopling their troubled girl. When Ada comes of age and heads to college, the entities within her grow in power and agency. An a...

In the three years since her husband died in a car accident, Lili has just about managed to resume her day-to-day life as a single mother and successful illustrator. She can now get her two girls to school, show up to work and watch TV like a pro. But there's still the small problem of the aching...

An apocalyptic cult member, a jazz buff in Tokyo, a woman on a holy mountain, a burnt-out lawyer, a Mongolian gangster, a redundant spy, a despondent 'zookeeper', a nuclear scientist, a ghostwriter, a ghost, and a New York DJ are all tenuously connected. All of them have tales to tell, and all mu...

Amanda King and Tess Cuffe are strangers who share the same Georgian house, but their lives couldn't be more different. Amanda seems to have it all, absolute perfection. She projects all the accoutrements of a lady who lunches. Sadly, the reality is a soulless home, an unfaithful husband and a ve...

In Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis shows us a shadowy looking-glass world, the juncture where fame and fashion, terror and mayhem meet and then begin to resemble the familiar surface of our lives.The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friend...

After two decades spent in the US, L-J is on a flight back to his native Suffolk to visit family and his childhood coastal home. His flight is straightforward, as per design, until it hits a glitch - an unexpected and dramatic cabin decompression - which suggests that all that L-J expects from th...

Rural Trinidad: a brick house on stilts surrounded by bush; a family, quietly surviving, just trying to live a decent life. Clyde, the father, works long, exhausting shifts at the petroleum plant in southern Trinidad; Joy, his wife, looks after the home. Their two sons, thirteen years old, wake e...