Contemporary

Written with burning intensity in the last years of Roberto Bolano's life, "2666" has been greeted across the world as the great writer's masterpiece, surpassing everything in imagination, beauty and scope. It is a novel on an astonishing scale from a passionate visionary. 'The best book of 2008 ...A masterpiece, the electrifying literary event of the year' - "Time". 'Readers who have snacked on...

'Brilliant and terrifying' Observer I had to be the man who was doing well and more than well, the man whose drab shop concealed some bigger operation that made millions. I had to be the man who had planned it all, who had come to the destroyed town at the bend in the river because he had foreseen the rich future. 'Salim, the narrator, is a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident...

There is an ancient saying that when lovers fall out, a plane goes down. This is the story of one such plane. Why did a Hercules C130, the world's sturdiest plane, carrying Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq, go down on 17 August, 1988? Was it because of: mechanical failure, human error, the CIA's impatience, a blind woman's curse, generals not happy with their pension plans, the...

Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang (or Z as she calls herself) arrives in London to spend a year learning English. Struggling to find her way in the city, and through the puzzles of tense, verb and adverb; she falls for an older Englishman and begins to realise that the landscape of love is an even trickier terrain.

Lia Frank - an appraiser of fine Chinese porcelain - is sent from New York to Beijing to catalogue and appraise a rare collection of 20 pieces. At the private house she has been given to work in, however, she finds 800 pieces - many originating from the imperial porcelain collection. Are all these beautiful objects authentic? Or are some brilliant fakes? As Lia examines her treasure, she finds...

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall masters from Balzac to Dickens, this magnificant novel caputures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic...

The events of Pietro Russell's life are told in 26 chapters. From A-Z, each chapter is set in a different place and reveals a fragment of his story. As his memories flicker back and forth through time in his search for a resolution to the conflicts of his life, his story gradually unfolds...

"The fact is, the whole of Australia despises my father more than any other man, just as they adore my uncle more than any other man. I might as well set the story straight about both of them." Heroes or criminals? Crackpots or visionaries? Relatives or enemies? It's a simple family story.. From the New South Wales bush to bohemian Paris, from sports fields to strip clubs, from the jungles of...

Sometimes the wrong decisions can be made for the right reasons ...Peter and Elaine Dizinoff have been friends with Joe and Iris Stern since medical school. Living the perfect life in a wealthy New Jersey neighbourhood, their children have grown up together and their lives are irrevocably intertwined. Until the Sterns are faced with a nightmare they could never have imagined - one that shatters...

With America quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a 'half-Jewish' farmer's daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to university - escaping her provincial home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who seem at once mysterious and glamorous, Tassie is drawn into the life of...

2009 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of legendary New Zealander Barry Crump's first, and most-loved novel, A Good Keen Man. Born in Auckland in 1935, Crump worked for many years as a government deer-culler in areas of New Zealand native forest and A Good Keen Man was the result of his collected experiences. This novel became one of the most popular in New Zealand history. Taken...

*A gripping masterpiece, hailed as one of the 20th century's finest novels* A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS is V.S. Naipaul's unforgettable third novel. Born the "wrong way" and thrust into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen, Mohun Biswas has spent his 46 years of life striving for independence. But his determined efforts have met only with calamity. Shuttled from one...

In a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, a young black man named Jefferson is an unwilling party to a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed. The only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

One of the most vivid and realised characters of recent fiction, Willie Dunne is the innocent hero of Sebastian Barry's highly acclaimed novel. Leaving Dublin to fight for the Allied cause as a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, he finds himself caught between the war playing out on foreign fields and that festering at home, waiting to erupt with the Easter Rising. Profoundly moving, intimate...

A son worries he is becoming too perfect a copy of his father. The co-owner of a weight-loss camp for teens finds himself running the black market in chocolate bars. A man starts melting and nothing can stop it, not even poetry. This terrific collection of stories by an exciting new talent moves from the serious and realistic to the humorous and outlandish, each story copying an element from the...

In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class division, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were carefully planted and took root. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a smallholding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in 'flesh', he takes a small slave...

In his, highly acclaimed debut, A PALE VIEW OF HILLS, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. Retreating into the past, she finds herself reliving one particular hot summer in Nagasaki, when she and her friends struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. But then as she recalls her strange...

Chris is in his forties: bored, lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. He's a stranger to the 1970s youth culture of London, a stranger to himself on the night he invites a prostitute into his car. Roza is Yugoslavian, recently moved to London. She's in her twenties, but has already lived a life filled with danger, misadventure, romance, and tragedy. And though she's not a prostitute,...

Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen does not believe in accidents and believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying.

'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.' Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside a lifetime of...

From the author of the top five bestseller ROAD TO PARADISE comes a novel of love, betrayal and redemption against the odds How well can you ever really know someone? If anyone asked Larissa's husband, children or friends if she was happy, they would say yes. Sometimes too busy, sometimes irritable - but really, what in her wonderful life could be wrong? She has a happy marriage, a dream house,...

Vikram Seth's novel is at its core a love story, the tale of Lata - and her mother's attempts to find her a suitable husband, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. Set in post-Independence India and involving the lives of four large families and those who orbit them, it is also a vast panoramic exploration of a whole continent at a crucial hour as a sixth of the world's population...

London, the week before Christmas, 2007. Over seven days, we follow the lives of seven major characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on...

'To keep quiet about something so important ...well, it's almost a lie, wouldn't you say?' When Father Anselm meets Kate Seymour in the cemetery at Larkwood, he is dismayed to hear her allegation. Herbert Moore had been one of the founding fathers of the Priory, revered by all who met him, a man who'd shaped Anselm's own vocation. The idea that someone could look on his grave and speak of a lie...

Irene has a secret. It slips out inadvertently during book club when the wine has been flowing too freely. Her teenage years as a marching girl are not something she had wanted her friend Ferrida to know about. She's always wanted Ferrida's approval, for her friendship is as important and fraught as the one with Paula, when they marched together all those years ago. But friends don't necessarily...

This is a novel of family secrets and tensions, and distant past grievances, set like so much of Maurice Gee's fiction in the West Auckland town of Loomis. It is also vintage Maurice Gee, widely recognised as New Zealand's finest living fiction writer. Publication will be a significant event. New Zealand fiction doesn't get any better than this. Three brothers and sisters, all now in their...

In this addictive, smart, wry yet sad, many-layered, utterly credible novel, Bernard Beckett calls on all his skills as a dramatist and man of ideas. Acid Song is a novel that explores the relationship between ethics and science, yet it's one that makes no sacrifice of action, dramatic pace, nor character. It's election day in contemporary New Zealand. From a staffroom argument about a playground...

Frank moves from Canberra to a shack on the east coast after the turbulent breakdown of his relationship. He wants to put his violent past and bad memories of his father behind him. In a small coastal community, he tries to retrain himself as someone who can have regular conversations and relations with other people. He even starts to make friends, including 8-year-old Sal and her carrot. But...

Ellen has been living on her own in a picturesque if damp cottage in Cheshire since her husband abandoned her to go and live with another woman in Provence. Having married once for love, she is now determined that the second time around it will be for money. Close at hand is Duncan, her not unattractive, and enticingly single, divorce lawyer...But then two new people enter her life: Jo-Jo, a...

When Glasgow journalist Gerry Conway receives a phone call promising unsavoury information about Scottish Justice Minister Peter Lyons, his instinct is that this apparent scoop won't warrant space in "The Tribune". But as Conway's curiosity grows and his leads proliferate, his investigation takes him from Scotland to Belfast. Shocked by the sectarian violence of the past, and by the prejudice and...

"All the King's Men" is considered the finest novel ever written on American politics. Set in the 1930s, this book traces the rise and fall of Willie Stark, who resembles the real-life Huey "Kingfish" Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon becomes corrupted by success.

The subject of this novel is a habitual womaniser. He regards his high libido as physiologically normal; if he goes without a woman for three days, he suffers headaches. He embarks on affairs with Hollywood starlets, with mob molls and numerous female employees, despite debilitating ailments and a persistent fear of losing his beloved wife and children. And this particular philanderer must choose...

After three years in prison, Shadow has done his time. But as the time until his release ticks away, he can feel a storm brewing. Two days before he gets out, his wife Laura dies in a mysterious car crash, in adulterous circumstances. Dazed, Shadow travels home, only to encounter the bizarre Mr Wednesday claiming to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America. Together...

Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation - as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty and love - that arises from its loss. From local bars to trainyards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a...

A heart-wrenching, unputdownable tale of redemption and survival in small-town America in the tradition of Richard Ford, Pete Dexter and Cormac McCarthy. Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation - as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love - that arises from its loss. From local bars...

In the year 2000, in the closest election in American history, Alice Blackwell's husband becomes president of the United States. Their time in the White House proves to be heady, tumultuous, and controversial. But it is Alice's own story - that of a kind, bookish, only child born in the 1940s Midwest who comes to inhabit a life of dizzying wealth and power - that is itself remarkable. Alice...

On a chilly February day two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence, Clive as Britain's most successful modern composer, Vernon as editor of the quality broadsheet, The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers too,...

This is a highly charged novel that embodies the violent recent history of Latin America. It is September 1968 and the Mexican student movement is about to run head-on into the repressive right-wing government of Mexico: hundreds of young people will soon die. When the army invades the university, one woman hides in a fourth-floor ladies' room and for twelve days she is the only person left on...

What do you do when you lose everything? It was one of the biggest scandals of the 80s. Lloyds. It started with just a few requests for money from various Names. And then the demands got bigger. And bigger. Until thousands of people found their lives ruined, homes gone and relationships wrecked. All because of money. When you do have it, its value isn't that important. When you don't - it's...

Jennet Mallow is born in Yorkshire in the 1920s but her interest in art and creativity alienates her from her family, her father who is a priest, her conventional sister and her emotionally stunted mother. Jennet moves to London in search of a more exciting life and finds it in her new environment and in the handsome and enigmatic figure of the painter David Heaton. When Jennet falls pregnant,...

Fat Charlie Nancy is not actually fat. He was fat once but he is definitely not fat now. No, right now Fat Charlie Nancy is angry, confused and more than a little scared -- right now his life is spinning out of control, and it is all his dad's fault. If his rotter of an estranged father hadn't dropped dead at a karaoke night, Charlie would still be blissfully unaware that his dad was Anansi the...

Juliet is enraged at the victory of men over women in family life. Amanda is warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework. Solly is confronting her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger. Maisie despairs at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed. And Christine's troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents. Rachel...

Alison Wong's outstanding first novel is set in Wellington in the early twentieth century and spans the years 1905 to 1922. For most people in the wider community, the area known as Haining Street has an infamous reputation in the city, allegedly full of opium dens, weird food, gambling and strange Chinese cultural practices. Nice Europeans stay away. But for the tiny number of Wellington...

Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust is all too rarely reciprocated. Both are symptomatic members of our atomised society, where...

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia...

He's a doctor with a past...He's a hit man with a conscience...And he's got 24 hours to beat the reaper. Meet Peter Brown, a young Manhattan hospital intern with an unusual past that is just about to catch up with him. His morning begins with the quick disarming of a would-be mugger, followed by the steamy elevator encounter with a young female pharmaceutical rep, topped off by a visit with a new...

Combining spirituality with intense eroticism, wild and surreal humour with deadly serious intent, Beautiful Losers revolves around four characters - a husband, a wife, their ambiguous mentor, and a mythic seventeenth-century Irquois virgin. The lives of the couple and their friend, F., are bound together by love, sex and a lunatic spirit of experimentation, their relationship a tangle of...

Meet Scarlett O'Hara. In her life, everything goes according to plan. Until now ...Now, Scarlett is back in her childhood home with her plan in tatters and a baby on the way, while John Smith -- actuary, proper grown-up and Scarlett's boyfriend -- has left her to join an archaeological dig in a tiny village somewhere in Brazil. But that's not the worst bit. The worst bit is she can't be sure who...

Emmaline Grant has always loved romance, so it's really no surprise that she has found her calling as a wedding florist. And she gets to work with her best friends Mackensie, Parker and Laurel - she couldn't ask for a better job. Yet while men swarm around her, she still hasn't found Mr Right. But the last place Emma's looking is right under her nose. And that's just where Jack Cooke is. He's...

Tessa has just a few months to live. Fighting back against hospital visits, endless tests, drugs with excruciating side-effects, Tessa compiles a list. It's her Ten Things To Do Before I Die list. And Number One is sex. Released from the constraints of 'normal' life, Tessa tastes new experiences to make her feel alive while her failing body struggles to keep up. Tessa's feelings, her...