Modern & contemporary fiction

Sixteen-year-old Smidge is on the run, after her tumultuous upbringing culminated in a shameful secret. Together with fellow runaway Violet, Smidge devises a performance act that will allow them both to rise above the past. As they attempt to sell their new performance, they travel through the un...

A fiery evangelist takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959, carrying all they need from home, but find it is calamitously transformed on African soil. The tale recounts the family's tragic undoing and reconstruction.

In mystical 15th century Spain at the height of the Inquisition's power, young Jews Toba and Naftaly must fight for survival by unravelling the mysterious connections they have to a magical world of the immortal Maziks whose fates are tied to their own.

In a small Aboriginal town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, Cause Man Steel is chasing a mad vision: to futureproof his people against the climate crisis and to secure their economic independence via a nation-wide feral donk...

Brynn's happy ending has gone up in flames. She's newly divorced and living with a roommate - Josh - to afford her mortgage. At least she's got Carson's Cove to binge - her beloved 90s teenage soap. So when a birthday cake shows up on her and Josh's doorstep, Brynn makes a wish for her own happil...

It's been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves and the cities have retreated to higher storeys. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their ...

Dinah has always lived in Scarborough. Trapped with her feckless husband and useless son, her one release comes at her town's Northern Soul nights, where she gets to put on her best and lose herself in the classics. Dinah has an especial hero: Bucky Bronco, who recorded a string of soul gems in t...

Jamie Tulloch is a successful exec at a top tech company, a long way from the tough upbringing that drove him to rise so far and so quickly. But he has a secret - since the age of 23, he's had a helping hand from the Legend Programme, a secret intelligence effort to prepare impenetrable backstori...

We join the young Austrian teenager Filib Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his older brother Gregor, whom he never knew. He is armed only with two of Gregor's books: a copy book from agricultural school, and a Slovenian-German dictionary, in which Gregor has ...

From the outside, Maggie Lemon has a perfect life. But she and her husband have been trying for a baby for five years and she's exhausted. She's seen countless fertility experts and followed dozens of diets and homeopathic recommendations, and even gave up her dream restaurant in London when doct...