Modern & contemporary fiction

In 1925, college student Zora Neale Hurston - the sole black student at Barnard College, New York - was living in the city, 'desperately striving for a toe-hold on the world.' During this period, she began writing short works that captured the zeitgeist of African American life and transformed he...

Introducing 'Holiday Shorts', a compilation of bite-sized stories with a wider scope than a typical story collection! Quick to read, packed with wit and wry observations, but often set against a background which leaves plenty to think about, these stories cover it all from love and loss, history ...

That's the beauty of stories; you never know where they will take you. The toymaker who wants to create the perfect wife; the princess whose heart is won by words, not actions; the tiny dog whose confidence far outweighs his size; and the sinister Lacewing King who rules over the Silken Folk. The...

Dambudzo Marechera burst onto the English literary scene with a bang in 1978 with this vivid roar of a book exploring township life in pre-independence Zimbabwe. Irreverent and uncompromising, Dambudzo Marechera rejected what he saw as the narrow stereotypes of African literature, and was a fearl...

From buffering Skype chats and the truth about beards, to fried chicken shops and the things smartphones make you less likely to do when alone in a public place, Fisher paints a complex, funny and moving portrait of contemporary British life.

In her stunning debut, Souvankham Thammavongsa captures the day-to-day lives of immigrants and refugees in a nameless city, illuminating hopes, disappointments, love affairs, and above all, the pursuit of a place to belong.

This title collects 14 stories by Anna Kavan including 'The Blackout', 'A Certain Experience' and 'Now I Know Where My Place Is'.

In Dianne Williams' stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life. In perfec...

Combining elements of both Chinese materiality - the love of physical things - and Western abstract thinking, Can Xue invites her readers into an immersive landscape that blends empirical fact and illusion, mixes the physical and spiritual, and probes the space between consciousness and oblivion....

With this sharp and witty debut collection, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, pre-occupied by nostalgia for past relationships - with friends, roommates, siblings - while trying to move forward into an uncertain future.