GREAT CONTEMPORARY NOVELS
Discover the best contemporary novels with our curated list of must-read books. Explore top-rated fiction from today's leading authors and find your next great read.
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Embers
by Sandor Marai
Originally published in 1942 and now rediscovered to international acclaim, this taut and exquisitely structured novel by the Hungarian master Sandor Marai conjures the melancholy glamour of a decaying empire and the disillusioned wisdom of its last heirs. In a secluded woodland castle an old General prepares to receive a rare visitor, a man who was once his closest friend but who he has not seen in forty-one years. Over the ensuing hours host and guest will fight a duel of words and silences, accusations and evasions. They will exhume the memory of their friendship and that of the Generalâs beautiful, long-dead wife. And they will return to the time the three of them last sat together following a hunt in the nearby forest--a hunt in which no game was taken but during which something was lost forever. Embers is a classic of modern European literature, a work whose poignant evocation of the past also seems like a prophetic glimpse into the moral abyss of the present
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Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE ⢠The beloved first novel featuring Olive Kitteridge, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of My Name is Lucy Barton and the Oprahâs Book Club pick Olive, Again âFiction lovers, remember this name: Olive Kitteridge. . . . Youâll never forget her.ââUSA Today âStrout animates the ordinary with astonishing force.ââThe New Yorker One of the New York Timesâs 100 Best Books of the 21st Century A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post Book World, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, People, Entertainment Weekly, The Christian Science Monitor, The Plain Dealer, The Atlantic, Rocky Mountain News, Library Journal At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesnât always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Oliveâs own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her lifeâsometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human conditionâits conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires. The inspiration for the Emmy Awardâwinning HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, and Bill Murray
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Possession
by A. S. Byatt
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER ⢠NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠A tale of two young scholars researching the secret love affair of two Victorian poets that's an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. âGorgeously written ⌠A tour de force.â âThe New York Times Book Review Winner of Englandâs Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets. As they unearth their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshireâfrom spiritualist sĂŠances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittanyâwhat emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.
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Fatelessness
by Imre KertĂŠsz
At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesnât particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, âYou are no Jew.â In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider. The genius of Imre Kerteszâs unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georgâs dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnessesâor pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.
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London Fields
by Martin Amis
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠A blackly comic late 20th-century murder mystery set against the looming end of the millennium, in which a woman tries to orchestrate her own extinctionâfrom "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation" (TIME). âLyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic." âThe New York Times First published in 1989, London Fields is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded Y2K approaches, Nicola Six, a âblack holeâ of sex and self-loathing, has chosen her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her own murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Youngâa writer suffering from a long bout of writerâs blockâstumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself. A highly unusual mystery with an unexpected twist at the end, London Fields is also a corrosively funny narrative of pyrotechnic complexity and scalding moral vision.
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The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
Moving into the attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy, politically connected Fedden family in 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest becomes caught up in the rising fortunes of this glamorous family and finds his own life forever altered by his association during the boom years of the 1980s. By the author of The Swimming-Pool Library. Reprint.
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Veronica
by Mary Gaitskill
A finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, here is an evocative novel about female friendship in the glittering 1980s. One of the New York Timesâs 100 Best Books of the 21st Century ⢠One of The Atlanticâs Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: One is a young model stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly from present and past, casting a fierce yet compassionate eye on two eras and their fixations, the result is a work of timeless depth and moral power.
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Spider
by Patrick McGrath
Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles, Spider is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror.
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The Great Man
by Kate Christensen
National Bestseller and Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Oscar Feldman, the renowned figurative painter, has passed away. As his obituary notes, Oscar is survived by his wife, Abigail, their son, Ethan, and his sister, the well-known abstract painter Maxine Feldman. What the obituary does not note, however, is that Oscar is also survived by his longtime mistress, Teddy St. Cloud, and their daughters. As two biographers interview the women in an attempt to set the record straight, the open secret of his affair reaches a boiling point and a devastating skeleton threatens to come to light. From the acclaimed author of The Epicure's Lament, a scintillating novel of secrets, love, and legacy in the New York art world. "Mischievous...funny, astute...As unexpectedly generous as it is entertaining.... Christensen is a witty observer of the art universe." âThe New York Times
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Slowness
by Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.
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Bad Behavior
by Mary Gaitskill
Powerful stories of dislocation, longing and desire which depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation that is groping for human connection. (Or, more simply put, the angst of people-who-wear-black.)
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Fight Club: A Novel
by Chuck Palahniuk
"Fight Club's estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basement of bars."--P. [3] of cover.
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Soldiers of Salamis
by Javier Cercas
Facing a firing squad at the end of the Spanish Civil War, Nationalist Rafael Snchez Mazas escapes his executioners into the nearby forest, where he is discovered by an unknown soldier who refuses to kill him, in a historical novel that sheds light on the events surrounding a real-life incident. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.
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The New York Trilogy
by Paul Auster
First published by Sun & Moon Press in three volumes in 1985 and 1986, The New York Trilogy has since been translated into many languages. It was ranked 87 in The ĂLondonè Observer's list of "The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time."
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