Some Excellent Fiction to Explore
Discover some excellent fiction to explore with our curated list of must-read books. Dive into captivating stories and timeless classics for every reader.
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Wolf Point
by Edward Falco
Tom “T” Walker, a 57-year-old businessman, knows better than to pick up a beautiful young woman hitchhiking with her dangerous-looking boyfriend, but he stops for them anyway. He’s been living alone, his life ruinously off course, in such utter isolation from everyone he has ever loved that he welcomes the company and the excitement. But as T finds himself pulled into the chaos of their world in a way he will barely survive, he comes to see his personal history and experiences in an altered and troubling light. Edward Falco brings stunning emotional depth and tense action to unforgettable characters as they journey through the mundane world to places where illusions fail and they must face their hidden selves.
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Banishing Verona
by Margot Livesey
Zeke is twenty-nine and working as a carpenter and painter in London. Verona is thirty-seven, headstrong, and seven months pregnant. When the two meet in a house that Zeke is renovating, they fall in love, only to be separated less than 24 hours later when Verona mysteriously disappears. After much searching, Zeke discovers that Verona has travelled to Boston to help Henry, her brother, disentangle himself from some shady financial matters. As impulsively as he fell for Verona, Zeke decides to follow her to Boston. It is here that both lovers take on further and more desperate searches of their own, and Livesey's sophisticated novel, Banishing Verona, evolves into the most surprising and suspenseful of modern love stories.
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Pocketful of Names
by Joe Coomer
Inhabiting an island off the coast of Maine left to her by her great-uncle, Hannah finds her life as a dedicated and solitary artist rudely interrupted one summer when a dog arrives with the tide. The dog is soon followed by a teenager running away from an abusive father, a half-sister in trouble, a mainland family in need and a trapped whale. Now in the midst of a communnity that depends on her for support and love, Hannah faces new emotional challenges as a series of family secrets are discovered, each one more alarming than the last.
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Cotton
by Christopher P. Wilson
Lee Cotton was born of interracial parentage and will have a hard time figuring out which world he can live in comfortably-black or white. His travels and adventures lead him all over the world and he gets to see people and events through his diverse personality and experiences.
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The Electric Michelangelo
by Sarah Hall
Cy Parks is the Electric Michelangelo, an artist of extraordinary gifts whose medium happens to be the pliant, shifting canvas of the human body. Fleeing his mother's legacy -- a consumptives' hotel in a fading English seaside resort -- Cy reinvents himself in the incandescent honky-tonk of Coney Island in its heyday between the two world wars. Amid the carnival decadence of freak shows and roller coasters, enchanters and enigmas, scam artists and marks, Cy will find his muse: an enigmatic circus beauty who surrenders her body to his work, but whose soul tantalizingly eludes him. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
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Tangerine Dream
by Ken Douglas
Best friends Haley and Taylor must deal with a terrible loss when Taylor's twin sister, Dylan, is killed in a car crash. Meanwhile, Taylor and Dylan's father, a senator running for president and supposedly somewhere on the campaign trail, can't be reached because he is in the arms of a prostitute. While the girls and the twins' mother try to recover and avoid the press in New Zealand, Nick Nesbitt, a television news reporter, senses a story and will stop at nothing to get it.
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The Saint of Lost Things
by Christopher Castellani
In a 1953 Italian neighborhood in Delaware, Maddalena Grasso, her husband Antonio, and Guilio Fabbri live in the shadows of St. Anthony's Church, where their prayers are heard and fate and circumstances intervene to answer them in unforeseeable ways.
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Slow Man
by J. M. Coetzee
Dependent on others after losing his leg in an accident, sixty-year-old Paul Rayment finds himself falling in love with a down-to-earth Croatian nurse and encouraged by a mysterious writer to take an activist role in his own life.
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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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The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The New York Times bestseller “The Shadow of the Wind is ultimately a love letter to literature, intended for readers as passionate about storytelling as its young hero.” —Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice) “One gorgeous read.” —Stephen King Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Soon Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.
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If You Want Me to Stay
by Michael Parker
When Joel Dunn, Jr.'s mother leaves and his father fades into insanity, he and his little brother, Tank, set off on a journey to reunite with their mother, but as they become caught between the idealism of childhood and the realities of adulthood, they find that one sure thing may be right by their sides all along.
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The Harmony Silk Factory
by Tash Aw
Aw's highly original first novel juxtaposes three accounts of the life of an enigmatic man at a pivotal and haunting moment in Malaysian history.
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The Practice of Deceit
by Elizabeth Benedict
Benedict navigates the turbulent waters of love, law, psychology, and ethics with wit and penetrating insight in her gripping thriller about marriage and divorce gone awry.
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Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes
Tells the alliance of George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur a shabby genteel Edinburgh, their adventures, triumphs, and set-backs.
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All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
Character study of a Southern demagogue whose career follows in some respects as that of Huey Long.
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In the Fold
by Rachel Cusk
Returning to the site of a garden party where he made some lasting friendships, Michael hopes to escape his troubled marriage and brings along his taciturn young son, but discovers the place to be fraught with long-standing deceptions.
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Beyond Black
by Hilary Mantel
Trouble spirals out of control for a psychic and her personal assistant when they take up with a spirit guide and his drowned therapist after moving to a suburban wasteland.
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The Five People You Meet in Heaven
by Mitch Albom
Eddie dies on his eighty-third birthday in a tragic accident - He awakens in the afterlife where he learns that heaven is where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it.
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A Salty Piece of Land
by Jimmy Buffett
In 'A Salty Piece of Land', Jimmy Buffett weaves a mesmerising tale that combines humour and emotional reflection. After all, one man's cathedral is another man's fishing hole. And in Jimmy Buffett's world, paradise is just a state of mind.
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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.
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A Certain Slant of Light
by Laura Whitcomb
In the class of the high school English teacher she has been haunting, Helen feels them: for the first time in 130 years, human eyes are looking at her. They belong to a boy, a boy who has not seemed remarkable until now. And Helen--terrified, but intrigued--is drawn to him. The fact that he is in a body and she is not presents this unlikely couple with their first challenge. But as the lovers struggle to find a way to be together, they begin to discover the secrets of their former lives and of the young people they come to possess.