Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Showing 1–16 of 713 results
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13 Ways of Looking At a Fat Girl
£9.9913 Ways of Looking At a Fat Girl
Growing up in the suburban hell of Misery Saga (a.k.a. Mississauga), Lizzie has never liked the way she looks – even though her best friend Mel says she’s the pretty one. She starts dating guys online, but she’s afraid to send pictures, even when her skinny friend China does her makeup: she knows no one would want her if they could really see her. So she starts to lose weight. With punishing drive, she counts almonds consumed, miles logged, pounds dropped. She fights her way into coveted dresses. She grows up and gets thin, navigating double-edged validation from her mother, her friends, her husband, her reflection in the mirror. But no matter how much she loses, will she ever see herself as anything other than a fat girl?
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20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
£8.9920 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
‘She’s no good, that girl. Much too individualistic’This is the story of Fenfang who, determined to carve out a life more independent than her provincial roots, gets a job as a film extra in Beijing. But living a modern life is not as easy as it looks in this tumultuous, messy city. Grappling with the narrow world of cinema, an outworn Communist regime, and the city’s far-from-progressive attitudes to women, charismatic Fenfang finds her true freedom in the one place she never expected.20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is a sparkling and wry coming-of-age story about the changing identity of women in contemporary China.Meet ten of literature’s most iconic heroines, jacketed in bold portraits by female photographers from around the world.
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8 lives of a century-old trickster
£16.998 lives of a century-old trickster
At the Golden Sunset retirement home, it is not unusual for residents to invent stories. So when elderly Ms Mook first begins to unspool her memories, the obituarist listening to her is sceptical. Stories of captivity, friendship, murder, adventure, assumed identities and spying. Stories that take place in WWII Indonesia; in Busan during the Korean war; in cold-war Pyongyang; in China. The stories are so colourful and various, at times so unbelievable, that they cannot surely all belong to the same woman. Can they?
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£12.99A
In the late 1960s, Andy Warhol set out to turn an ordinary book into a piece of pop art. He said that he wanted to create a ‘bad’ novel because doing something the wrong way always opens doors. The result was this account of the influential group of artists, superstars, addicts and freaks who made up the world of Warhol’s Factory.
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A Beginner’s Guide to Murder
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A Certain Slant of Light
£9.99A Certain Slant of Light
After the death of his child, a man – disconnected, lost, unable to sleep – explores the absence at the heart of life. Gathering accounts of trauma and loss from the lives of people and places, past and present: of Isadora Duncan, Ana Mendietta, W.G. Sebald and Pier Paolo Pasolini; of a car crash, a fall from a skyscraper, the photographs of a murderer, a journey to The Gate of the Kiss; he travels through a landscape of half-remembered events and lost works of art, attempting to fathom lives pieced together from borrowed and fragmentary stories of history, memory and existence; trying to recover his own life. Part fiction, part essay, part meditation on absence and grief, ‘A Certain Slant of Light’ is a profound and moving attempt to trace the connections between art, history, and life.
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A Day of Fallen Night
£18.99A Day of Fallen Night
Tunuva Melim is a sister of the Priory. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms – but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation is starting to question the Priory’s purpose. To the north, in the Queendom of Inys, Sabran the Ambitious has married the new King of Hróth, narrowly saving both realms from ruin. Their daughter, Glorian, trails in their shadow – exactly where she wants to be. The dragons of the East have slept for centuries. Dumai has spent her life in a Seiikinese mountain temple, trying to wake the gods from their long slumber. Now someone from her mother’s past is coming to upend her fate. When the Dreadmount erupts, bringing with it an age of terror and violence, these women must find the strength to protect humankind from a devastating threat.
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A Girl in Winter
£9.99A Girl in Winter
This compelling story of Katherine Lind and Robin Fennel, of winter and summer, of war and peace, of exile and holidays, is memorable for its compassionate precision and for the curious and unmistakable distinction of its writing.
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A glass of blessings
£9.99A glass of blessings
Wilmet Forsyth is well dressed, good looking and fairly young – but very bored. Her husband Rodney, a handsome army major, is slightly balder and fatter than he once was. Her interest wanders to the Anglo-Catholic church, where she neglects her comfortable household for the company of three unmarried priests – and Piers Longridge.
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A good year
£7.99A good year
Rural Cyprus, 1925. Despo is recently married, heavily pregnant and deeply afraid. The twelve days of Christmas are beginning – the time when, according to local folklore, creatures known as kalikantzari come up from Hell to wreak havoc. Meanwhile, her husband Loukas has troubles of his own. Struggling with dreams and desires he doesn’t understand, he finds himself irresistibly drawn to an Englishman, a newcomer to the island. In a village wreathed in superstition, Despo and Loukas must protect themselves and their unborn child from ominous forces at play.
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A Little Life
£10.99A Little Life
A novel of extraordinary intelligence and heart, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark and haunting examination of the tyranny of experience and memory.
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A marriage of fortune
£8.99A marriage of fortune
England, 1469. As the War of the Roses rages on, Margaret Paston knows that there is only one way to survive the loss of the Paston’s family seat, Caister Castle: a fortunate marriage for one of her unruly daughters. A favourable match will change the future of her family overnight but a scandal will ruin the Paston name forever.
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A midwinter’s tail
£14.99A midwinter’s tail
It’s nearly Christmas and committed Londoner, Mina Kestle, is close to signing a deal that will make her career and give her everything she’s ever wanted. And then she receives a mysterious letter in the post along with an ancient key, sent by her long-estranged godfather. Davy Penhallow is an artist who lives on the tiny Cornish island of Morgelyn with only his pet cat, Murr, for company. Mina hasn’t seen or heard from him in decades, but now it seems he wants her to look after his cottage – and his cat – while he recovers from a stroke in hospital. Mina doesn’t know why Davy has written after all these years, but she intends to do what’s right. However, the more time Mina spends in the cottage, looking after Murr and remembering the magic of Cornish folklore, the harder it becomes for her to tear herself away.
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A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the
£15.00A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the
The grandson of Prince Genji lives outside of space and time and wanders the grounds of an old monastery in Kyoto. The monastery, too, is timeless, with barely a trace of any human presence. The wanderer is searching for a garden that has long captivated him. This novel describes a search for the unobtainable and the riches to be discovered along the way. Despite difficulties in finding the garden, the reader is closely introduced to the construction processes of the monastery as well as the geological and biological processes of the surrounding area, making this an unforgettable meditation on nature, life, history, and being.
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A Narrow Door
£8.99A Narrow Door
It’s an incendiary moment for St Oswald’s school. For the first time in its history a headmistress is in power, the gates opening to female students. Rebecca Buckfast has spilled blood to reach this position. Barely forty, she is just starting to reap the ambitions she has sown. But as the ground shifts beneath the old guards’ feet, a body is discovered, along with a Prefect’s badge from another school. But Rebecca is here to make her mark. She’ll bury the past, just like she has done before. Even if that means murder.
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A Narrow Door
£20.00A Narrow Door
It’s an incendiary moment for St Oswald’s school. For the first time in its history a headmistress is in power, the gates opening to female students. Rebecca Buckfast has spilled blood to reach this position. Barely forty, she is just starting to reap the ambitions she has sown. But as the ground shifts beneath the old guards’ feet, a body is discovered, along with a Prefect’s badge from another school. But Rebecca is here to make her mark. She’ll bury the past, just like she has done before. Even if that means murder.
£20.00
