Great fiction by contemporary authors
Discover great fiction by contemporary authors with our curated list of must-read books. Explore top-rated novels and literary works from today's finest writers in modern fiction.
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The Confessions of Max Tivoli
by Andrew Sean Greer
Born as an old man, Max Tivoli lives his life aging backwards, falling in love and living an odd, sometimes terrifying life in San Francisco at the turn of the nineteenth century.
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The Uncle from Rome
by Joseph Caldwell
Having fallen short of opera stardom in the U.S. and having recently lost his ex-lover to AIDS, Michael Ruane ventures to Naples in an attempt to renew himself personally and professionally. "A dazzling tour de force, deftly melding the exaggerated passions of grand opera with the techniques of contemporary fiction".--Los Angeles Times.
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Biggest Elvis
by P.F. Kluge
Part mystery, part love story, part mordant commentary on America's waning presence in the world, this hugely entertaining novel tells the story of a trio of Elvis impersonators working out of the Graceland club in Olongapo, Phillipines. In their act, Baby Elvis, Dude Elvis and Biggest Elvis incarnate the King's evolving life. Their popularity grows. In a tawdry town, this successful act becomes almost an obsession. But there are those that think Biggest Elvis has to go. Re-envisioning the life of America's greatest hero, this is an edgy and evocative novel.
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Gone Tomorrow
by P.F. Kluge
**One of NPR's best books of 2008** **One of The Cleveland Plain Dealer's top 10 Fiction titles of 2008** When George Canaris, a writing professor on the verge of forced retirement at a small college in Ohio, is killed by a hit-and-run driver, he is the first faculty member in half a century whose death merits an obituary in The New York Times. "A writer, a critic, a professor, a campus legend and a national figure, the very embodiment of the liberal arts," says the paper. And a mystery. "Compared to Faulkner and Dos Passos at the start of his career," the Timesobserved, "in the end he resembled Harper Lee." With a book listed among the one hundred greatest novels of all time, decades now separating him from the hefty advance taken on his next book, The Beast, and not a page to show of it, Canaris is an enigma. Inevitably, speculation grows that the book was a myth, a lie, a joke. Upon his death, Mark May, a young English professor who barely knew him finds himself named as Canaris's literary executor and begins a search through lives and letters that is at once gripping, hilarious, and affirming. A true page-turner, Gone Tomorrowis equal parts Richard Russo and Michael Chabon, and yet entirely unlike anything you've ever read.
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Four Dreamers and Emily
by Stevie Davies
Academics and Wuthering Heights fans are descending on the Bronte family homestead for an Emily Bronte conference. Among their ranks are a single, over-sixty, self-professed expert on the Brontes; an overworked wife, mother, and university lecturer; a widower sustained by nocturnal visits from Emily's ghost; and a young waitress suddenly drawn into the curios orbit of academia. Each looks forward to a weekend in the company of kindred spirits, but none is prepared for the unexpected conflicts and unpredictable alliances that result. Four Dreamers and Emily is the United States debut of an acclaimed British novelist -- a sharply observed, hilarious, and bittersweet send-up of academic pretentiousness and literary obsession.
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Eva Moves the Furniture
by Margot Livesey
From a highly acclaimed author comes the enchanting story of a motherless young woman torn between real life and the otherworldly companions only she can see.
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The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title, that may also include a folder with miscellaneous notes, discussion questions, biographical information, and reading lists to assist book group discussion leaders.
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Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license...records my first name simply as Cal." So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic. Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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The Reader
by Bernhard Schlink
The novel traces the relationship between a German lawyer, Michael, and an older woman Hanna, beginning with their affair when he is fifteen in post-war Germany. It then goes on to desribe his later discovery as a law student attending war crimes trials, that she had been a guard at a camp attatched to Auschwitz - for which she is imprisoned.
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The Music Room
by Dennis McFarland
Martin Lambert must come to terms with his brother's suicide, and embarks on a poignant journey through his family's haunted past that leads him from a childhood tainted by parental abuse to a present clouded by alcoholic despair and desperate love.
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic—both poignant and funny—about a boy with autism who sets out to solve the murder of a neighbor's dog and discovers unexpected truths about himself and the world. “Disorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect.... Suspenseful and harrowing.” —The New York Times Book Review Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow. This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.
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Stallion Gate
by Martin Cruz Smith
This is a novel about the most important ten seconds in history. Stallion Gate, a magnificent successor to Gorky Park, is a powerful sensual idyll, a blend of love and betrayal, of humor and cultures in collision, of jazz and war. In a New Mexico blizzard, four men cross a barbed-wire fence at Stallion Gate to select the test site for the first automatic weapon. They are Oppenheimer, the physicist; Groves, the general; Fuchs, the spy. The fourth man is Sergeant Joe Peña, a hero, informer, fighter, musician, Indian. Oppenheimer and Groves have hidden Los Alamos on a mesa surrounded by vast Indian reservations. It is the most secret installation of the war, the future encompassed by the past. To it come soldiers, roughnecks and scientists, including Anna Weiss, a mathematician and refugee from the Holocaust with whom Joe falls in love.
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Rose
by Martin Cruz Smith
The year is 1872. The place is Wigan, England, a coal town where rich mine owners live lavishly alongside miners no better than slaves. Into this dark, complicated world comes Jonathan Blair, who has accepted a commission to find a missing man. When he begins his search every road leads back to one woman, a haughty, vixenish pit girl named Rose. With her fiery hair and skirts pinned up over trousers, she cares nothing for a society that calls her unnatural, scandalous, erotic. As Rose and Blair circle one another, first warily, then with the heat of mutual desire, Blair loses his balance. And the lull induced by Rose's sensual touch leaves him unprepared for the bizarre, soul-scorching truth. . . .
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Thirteen Moons
by Charles Frazier
This magnificent novel by one of America’s finest writers is the epic of one man’s remarkable journey, set in nineteenth-century America against the background of a vanishing people and a rich way of life. At the age of twelve, under the Wind moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home. In a card game with a white Indian named Featherstone, Will wins—for a brief moment—a mysterious girl named Claire, and his passion and desire for her spans this novel. As Will’s destiny intertwines with the fate of the Cherokee Indians—including a Cherokee Chief named Bear—he learns how to fight and survive in the face of both nature and men, and eventually, under the Corn Tassel Moon, Will begins the fight against Washington City to preserve the Cherokee’s homeland and culture. And he will come to know the truth behind his belief that “only desire trumps time.” Brilliantly imagined, written with great power and beauty by a master of American fiction, Thirteen Moons is a stunning novel about a man’s passion for a woman, and how loss, longing and love can shape a man’s destiny over the many moons of a life.
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The Passion
by Jeanette Winterson
Winner of the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, this novel explores the many faces of passion. Set in Napoleon's Europe, it is an evocative exploration of love, war and chance.
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Moon Tiger
by Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively's Booker Prize winning classic, Moon Tiger is a haunting story of loss and desire. Claudia Hampton - beautiful, famous, independent, dying. But she remains defiant to the last, telling her nurses that she will write a 'history of the world . . . and in the process, my own'. And it is her story from a childhood just after the First World War through the Second and beyond. But Claudia's life is entwined with others and she must allow those who knew her, loved her, the chance to speak, to put across their point of view. There is Gordon, brother and adversary; Jasper, her untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool conventional daughter; and then there is Tom, her one great love, found and lost in wartime Egypt. 'Leaves its traces in the air long after you've put it away' Anne Tyler 'A complex tapestry of great subtlety. Lively writes so well, savouring the words as she goes' Daily Telegraph 'Very clever: evocative, thought-provoking and hangs on the mind long after it is finished' Literary Review Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra's Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.
