Literary Fiction

After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up....

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere....

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake....

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival....

From China's most beloved sci-fi author, a first-contact story that weaves politics, science, and cosmic mystery.

Combining magic, wisdom, and wonder into an inspiring tale of discovery, this is a modern classic narrated by the inimitable Jeremy Irons.

Lyn, Cat, and Gemma Kettle, beautiful 33-year-old triplets, seem to attract attention everywhere they go. Together, laughter, drama, and mayhem follow them, but apart, each is dealing with her own share of ups and downs....

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him—so when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman year of college, it’s as if the world has lit up around him....

Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life—living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising their beautiful son, Asher—was upended when her husband revealed a darker side....

A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition....

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is a captivating story of women helping other women. It is also a triumphant reimagining of the life of a woman who was remarkable in the Ming dynasty and would be considered remarkable today....

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier comes a sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—a daring, moving tale of memory and fate....

"One of the greatest crime novelists writing today" (Vox) weaves a masterful, atmospheric tale of suspense, asking how to tell right from wrong in a world where neither is simple, and what we stake on that decision....

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name....

A tale of sorrow, a tale of survival, a tale of one man's search for meaning in his universe, and how that search, and the indomitable will that drove it, gave birth to a legend....

It seems like any other day. You wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and head out. But today, when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. This box holds your fate inside: the answer to the exact number of years you will live....

A great American classic with many invaluable teaching moments. It continues to touch hearts and minds.

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats....

Daisy is a girl coming of age in LA in the late '60s, sneaking into clubs, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock 'n' roll she loves most. By the time she's 20, her voice is getting noticed....

A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history....

A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time....

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she decides she must go....

In this “rich, complex family saga” (USA Today) full of long-buried family secrets, Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, blithely ignorant of all that awaits them. By 2016, they have four radically different daughters, each in a state of unrest....

When her estranged mother dies, Stella is left with an unusual inheritance: a one-way plane ticket and a note reading “Go to Paris.” Stella is hardly cut out for adventure; a traumatic childhood has kept her confined to the strict routines of her comfort zone....

Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and publishing, now as the Oscar-nominated film, American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright and Tracee Ellis Ross....

A tale of intense, flickering intelligence, Tell is structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has mysteriously disappeared. The joint winner of The Novel Prize, Tell is a work of strange and intoxicating immediacy that explores money, art and industry, the intimacy and distance between social classes, and the complex fluidity of memory.

Lily Valance wants to forget the war. She's determined to enjoy the world of the 1920s, with its music, singing, laughter and pleasure. When she meets Captain Stephen Winters, a decorated hero back from the Front, she's drawn to his wealth and status. The hidden tensions of the respectable facade of the Winters household come to a head. Stephen's nightmares merge ever closer with reality and the truth of what took place in the mud and darkness brings him and all who loves him to a terrible reckoning ...

Amanda Romriell is finally starting to feel like herself again after a major heartbreak when she gets the news of her parents’ death. Once again, she is reeling and wondering what else can go wrong. After she and her sisters move into their family’s lake house, she is ready to start fresh, but she knows to guard her heart and never let anyone else in. She watches as her eldest sister marries and the next one starts dating…but she expects to grow old alone. Her career as an interior designer keeps her going and hoping and wishing and dreaming. Until finally her life starts to level out...

"The Saggar" is a riveting narrative that plunges listeners into the gritty, vibrant life of Teddy Saggar, a man wrestling with the shadows of his past in Stoke-on-Trent. Through a series of vivid, compelling episodes, we journey with Teddy as he navigates a world teeming with old friends, uneasy reunions, and the stark realities of a life spent on the fringes.

Six-year-old Sharon Rowling has a lot to contend with. Her gorgeous mum, Maria, literally stops traffic with her beauty, much to the annoyance of dodgy dad, Ricky, who is under-height as well as underemployed. And then there are her three excruciating siblings who remain stubbornly oblivious to her unrelenting fear of being outed as a "gypo." Sharon opens her comical tale during the sweltering British summer of 1976 when even an incredibly handsome World Boxing Champ finds himself on the wrong end of her clueless dad's fists.

Whilst faith can be practiced anywhere religious faith is usually at a church or temple. The stories in this volume are centered both in houses of worship and with those with a strong association to its calling. Of course, short story authors have a determined belief in their undoubted talents to make us look at this subject from different angles. In this volume they take us on literary journeys that are revealing and challenging yet always entertaining.

Stephen Crane was born 1st November, 1871 in Newark, New Jersey and was the eighth surviving child out of fourteen. Incredibly he began writing at the age of four and was published several times by the age of sixteen. His poems, predominantly short and abstract, display another facet of his talent which questions, advises and presents his audience with much to contemplate. Some are difficult to engage with but with the effort comes the reward.

Whatever the reasons given or proffered the reality and known facts are that if you want a really good ghost story to bring that edge of chill, that foreboding of dread, that feeling that in an empty house we are not quite alone and that sometimes the sharp, sheer shock of what just happened is upon us then look no further than ‘The Victorian Ghost Story’ for your listening pleasure.

The German peoples spent centuries as tribes and regions without being a whole. Otto von Bismarck was instrumental in unifying these central European states into one country albeit based on the militaristic doctrine of Prussia. In the 20th Century its history was blighted by its capacity to resort to war to fulfill its ambitions, or right its perceived historical wrongs. In this volume the short stories by its greatest authors readily attest that their talents are equal to the greatest in World literature.

In this volume we examine the German language. Or rather the authors who wrote in German but are here translated into English. German is most often called the language of philosophers due to its precision and clarity. However, if you’ve studied German, you will know that sentence construction can be difficult to grasp. However, within these stories the language of these great talents express themselves in dazzling prose and searching narratives. And the characters? Clearly the works of genius.

In this volume our authors, including Ambrose Bierce, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Winifred Holtby, Bernard Capes and many others bring forth creations and contraptions that are both amazing and abstract as well as diabolical and delightful.

Wilkie Collins was born on 8th January 1824 in Marylebone, London. He pursued his education at Mr Cole’s private boarding school in Highbury, Islington. Here, he began his literary career under unusual circumstances: the school bully would give him no peace until he had been told a bedtime story. This ‘little brute’ helped create one of England’s greatest writers.

At 62, Sonny's world has been shaken. The love of her life, Mitch, is no more, leaving behind dreams yet to be fulfilled. They had imagined adventures together, tracing the footsteps of the literary giant Ernest Hemingway—from the vibrant streets of Paris, the thrilling rush of running with the bulls in Spain, to the wild expanse of the African safari. But now, with Mitch gone, Sonny embarks on an adventure of her own, an exploration of the Big Two-Hearted River by canoe. Dive into this stirring novella as Sonny faces rapids, untamed wildlife, and the challenges of survival. But amid the ...

The twice Booker-shortlisted author returns with his third novel, THE ROAD TO THE COUNTRY, about a young man, Tunde, whose brother is involved in an accident and stranded just as the Biafran war begins. Tunde spends the novel travelling through a war zone to be reunited with his brother - to bring him home and to ask for forgiveness for the part he played in the accident, a part his brother has no knowledge of.

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. What happens when his idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting.