Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

'Will you marry me?' I think of you, then. I think of you every day. But usually in the quietest part of the morning, or the darkest part of the night. Not when my boyfriend of two years has just proposed. I look up at Richard with his hopeful eyes. 'Lily?' he prompts. It's been ten years, but...

Captivating and suspenseful, Best Kept Secret is the third novel in international bestseller Jeffrey Archer’s outstanding Clifton Chronicles. It sees our hero Harry Clifton and Giles Barrington, brother of Harry’s beloved wife Emma, become entwined in the fate of the Barrington family...

Ready with his black bag, Dr Finlay sets out to remedy all manner of ailments suffered by his patients in the Scottish Highland town of Levenford. In this complete BBC Radio collection, we meet the surprising Dr Finlay as he is welcomed to the practise with a black eye. Over the course of these series the early years of Dr Finlay are explored, as he gets to grips with the locals in the Scottish Highland town of Levenford.

Adapted For The Film Slumdog Millionaire. Eighteen-year-old Ram Mohammad Thomas has been arrested after answering twelve questions correctly on a TV quiz show to win one billion rupees. The producers have accused him of cheating his way to victory. Twelve extraordinary events in street-kid Ram's life - how he was adopted as a foundling orphan by a priest; came to have three names; fooled a professional hit man; even fell in love - give him the crucial answers.

The extraordinary new novel from the Orange Prize winning author of ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’. What do you pack for the rest of your life? Shepherd Knacker is bored with his humdrum existence. He's sold his successful handy-man business for a million dollars and is now ready to embark on...

As a young girl, Beryl Markham was brought to Kenya from Britain by parents dreaming of a new life. For her mother the dream quickly turned sour, and she returned home; Beryl was brought up by her father, who switched between indulgence and heavy-handed authority, allowing her first to run wild on their farm, then incarcerating her in the classroom. The scourge of governesses and a serial absconder from boarding school, by the age of 16 Beryl had been catapulted into a disastrous marriage.

Loretta has run the little sewing shop in Butterbury for years, while bringing up her three headstrong daughters. Her own grandmother taught her how to quilt, and Loretta always found time to sit with Daisy, Ginny and Fern, pulling together scraps of material - and their hopes and dreams - into a beautiful whole. But this Christmas the family is coming apart at the seams.

Compton Magna and Nether Bagot sit high on the Fosse Hills to either side of the Gloucestershire/Warwickshire border, just half a mile apart. They form the backdrop to this rich story of secrets and rivalries, as glamorous Ronnie Ledwell returns to take up the reins of her father's horse...

Rachel has always loved being at the centre of her large family. She has fiercely devoted herself to her three sons all their lives, and continues to do so even now they are all grown up. They are, of course, devoted to her – she and Anthony, their father, hold the family together at their big, beautiful, ramshackle house near the wide, bird-haunted coast of Suffolk. But when Luke, her youngest, gets married, Rachel finds that control is slipping away.

The year is 1967. Thirteen-year-old Maisie is at her decaying family home, once a medieval abbey. Lucas, an artist and friend, is painting a portrait of Maisie and her sisters. Maisie embarks on a portrait of her own: telling the story of herself, her sisters and their lovers, and of her friend, Daniel Nunn. Twenty-three years later, Lucas's now-famous portrait features in a retrospective of his work. Daniel, obsessed by the sisters and determined to understand what happened that summer at the abbey, pursues answers.

As war rages across Europe, one young woman faces an impossible choice. Will she save her country...or the man she loves? It is the late 1930s. In London, socialite Rosamund Hanbury is determined to give up the parties and social sets of which she is a prominent member to join the war effort, along with scores of other young women. 

‘To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti and not even this one we live in – who wants...

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup: bringing an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDs epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying, and after his friend Nico's funeral, he finds his partner is infected and that he might even have the virus himself. The only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. 

One summer of nearly a hundred years ago saw one of the high sunlit meadows of English history. A new king was crowned; audiences swarmed to Covent Garden to see the Ballet Russes' and Nijinskys' gravity-defying leaps. The aristocracy was at play, bounding from house party to the next; the socialite Lady Michelham travelled with her nineteen yards of pearls. Rupert Brooke (a 23-year-old poet in love with love, Keats, marrons glaces and truth) swam in the river at Grantchester.

A counter-terror operation, codenamed Wildlife, is being mounted in Britain's most precious colony, Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms-buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, and a private defence contractor who is also his close friend. So...

Maurice has just killed a dragon with a breadknife. And had his destiny foretold...and had his true love spirited away. That's precisely the sort of stuff that'd bring out the latent heroism in anyone. Unfortunately, Maurice is pretty sure he hasn't got any latent heroism. Meanwhile, a man wakes up in a jar in a different kind of pickle (figuratively speaking).

Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, 16-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles to regain her sanity, the listener is inexorably drawn into her private suffering.

'A wonderful storyteller' Ciara Geraghty 'Meaney is utterly credible, utterly authentic, utterly irresistible' Irish Independent 'Roisin Meaney is a skilful storyteller' Sheila O'Flanagan The new novel from No.1 bestselling author Roisin Meaney. Another summer is in full swing on the island of...

»Eines der aufwühlendsten Bücher, das ich seit langem gelesen habe.« Denis Scheck »Ein wenig Leben« handelt von der lebenslangen Freundschaft zwischen vier Männern in New York, die sich am College kennengelernt haben. Jude St. Francis, brillant und enigmatisch, ist die charismatische...

Beauty journalist, and 40-something year old woman, Erica Pells, is tired of feeling invisible and disappearing behind her nematode wrinkles. She’s over the ‘pro-ageing’ articles she is exclusively asked to write (apart from the punny headlines that no one appreciates.) Frankly, she's over most things; getting older, heavy contouring, boring old Wiltshire and her exasperating Mum (who clearly prefers her prodigal brother, Simon).