Modern Fiction I Need to Read to Be Up to Date
Discover the must-read modern fiction books to stay current with today's literary trends. Explore top contemporary novels and essential reads for every book lover.
Book
Jim Giraffe
by Daren King
Scott Spectrum is being haunted by a ghost giraffe named Jim. Scott thinks he's a man how has everything -- a high-speed internet connection, alien-shaped slippers, and a beautiful wife called Continence. But Scott hasn't touched her in years and she's been left furiously polishing the sideboard, dreaming of black stallions. According to Jim, Scott's days are numbered, and to save himself from certain death from sexual repression he must quickly perform every act in the lovermaker's lexicon. Jim Giraffe knows a lot about sex, luckily. He also loves pizza and beer and has breath that smells of tree-tops. The prudish Scott is at first shocked by this profane, perverted ghost giraffe, but he accepts his help. Little does Scott realize that Jim has his own agenda and that his suburban idyll is about to be well and truly buggered up. Following on from the cult classic Boxy an Star, Daren King has written another extraordinary novel: highly original and linguistically ingenious, na�ve and knowing, utterly charming, filthy, and very, very funny.
Book
The Adventuress
by Audrey Niffenegger
The author of the "New York Times" bestseller "The Time Traveler's Wife" returns with the much-anticipated follow-up to "The Three Incestuous Sisters." This novel follows the dreamlike journey of an alchemist's daughter who turns herself into a moth and flees to the garden of a charming butterfly collector named Napoleon Bonaparte.
Book
The Icarus Girl
by Helen Oyeyemi
Jessamy "Jess" Harrison, a racially-mixed child, is growing up feeling that she is caught between two different worlds, until she is sent to visit relatives in Nigeria, where she comes face to face with a mysterious new friend.
Book
On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
Struggling with a stale marriage and the misguided passions of his three adult children, long-suffering art professor Howard Belsey finds his family life thrown into turmoil by his son's engagement to the socially prominent daughter of a right-wing icon. By the author of White Teeth. 200,000 first printing.
Book
Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and one of the world’s greatest storytellers comes “an insistently metaphysical mind-bender” (The New Yorker) about a teenager on the run and a deceptively simple old man. Now with a new introduction by the author. Here we meet fifteen-year-old runaway Kafka Tamura and the elderly Nakata, who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder, in what is a truly remarkable journey. “As powerful as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.... Reading Murakami ... is a striking experience in consciousness expansion.”—Chicago Tribune
Book
The Thin Place
by Kathryn Davis
In a thin place, according to legend, the membrane separating this world from the spirit world is almost nonexistent. The small New England town of Varennes is such a place, and Kathryn Davis transports us there - revealing a surprising pageant of life as, in the course of one summer, Varennes' tranquillity is shattered by the arrival of a threatening outsider, worldly and otherworldly forces come into play, and a young local girl finds her miraculous gift for resurrecting the dead tested by the conflict between logic and wish.
Book
The Accidental
by Ali Smith
Talking her way into the Norfolk cottage that the Smart family is renting for the summer, Amber, an enigmatic con artist, insinuates herself into the lives of Eve, her husband Michael, and their children.
Book
The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
A young man born of Indian parents in America struggles with issues of identity from his teens to his thirties.