Modern & contemporary fiction

For decades, George R.R. Martin - bestselling author of 'A Song of Ice and Fire' and creator of 'A Game Of Thrones' - has collaborated with an ensemble of science fiction and fantasy icons to create the amazing 'Wild Cards' universe.

In Paradise Block, mould grows as thick as fur along the walls, alarms ring out at unexpected hours and none of the neighbours are quite what they seem. A little girl boils endless eggs in her family's burnt-out flat, an isolated old woman entices a new friend with gifts of cutlery and cufflinks,...

In this deliciously strange debut collection, Leon Craig draws on folklore and gothic horror in refreshingly inventive ways to explore queer identity, love, power and the complicated nature of being human. Some say that hell is other people and some say hell is loneliness. In the thirteen darkly ...

Truman Capote makes whiskey-soaked fruitcake in Alabama; Laurie Lee slides across a frozen pond in Gloucestershire; and Shirley Jackson is outwitted by a wily Santa Claus at the bank. Ghosts haunt the Christmases of Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Bowen, while Dostoyevsky, Daphne du Maurier and Italo ...

For anyone interested in European literature these stories are an undiscovered snapshot of some of the most interesting and important writing of the 20th and 21st century. From the same culture that consistently draws worldwide attention for its groundbreaking and avante-garde movements in the vi...

In these seven stories of the people from Bloomington, our peculiar narrators find themselves in the most peculiar of circumstances and encounter the most peculiar of people. Set in Bloomington, Indiana, where the author lived as a graduate student in the 1970s, this is far from the idyllic portr...

Mingling fact and fiction, science and personal record, history and anecdote, Levi uses his training as an industrial chemist and the terrible years he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz to illuminate the human condition in a unique autobiography.

A marriage is arranged between a little servant girl and a middle-aged cook with an opium habit; an idealistic political worker faces disillusionment; a man returns from years studying in England to a wife he scarcely knows; a conventional bride has her first encounter with her husband's 'emancip...

In 2015, Alexander McCall Smith wrote a book entitled 'Chance Developments: Unexpected Love Stories', in which he imagined the stories behind five chanced-upon black-and-white photographs. Who were these people, why were they smiling, and what made them sad? He so enjoyed the experience that when...

An expedition to Mars goes terribly wrong. A seaside pier collapses. A 30-stone man is confined to his living room. One woman is abandoned on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. Another is saved from drowning. Two boys discover a gun in a shoebox, and a group of explorers find a cave of uni...