Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary

Turncoat

Anthony J. Quinn

The sole survivor of a murderous ambush, a Belfast police detective is forced into a desperate search for a mysterious informer that takes him to a holy island on Lough Derg, a place shrouded in strange mists and hazy rain, where nothing is as it first appears to be….

The Innocents

Michael Crummey

In centuries past, a brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated outport cove on Newfoundland’s northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but…

Daisy

J P Henderson

MEET DAISY: A PICTURE OF GRACE AND DIGNITY. MEET HEROD: A… DISAPPOINTMENT Written in his own words, and guided by a man who collects glasses in a local pub, this is the story of Herod ‘Rod’ Pinkney’s search for Daisy Lamprich, a young woman he first sees on a decade-old episode of the Judge Judy Show and now…

The Emperor of Shoes

Spencer Wise

From an exciting new voice in literary fiction, a transfixing story about an expatriate in southern China and his burgeoning relationship with a seamstress intent on inspiring dramatic political change….

Desperation Road : Now a Major film release 2023

Michael Farris Smith

For eleven years the clock has been ticking for Russell Gaines while he sat in Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta. His time now up, and believing his debt has been paid, he returns home only to discover that revenge lives and breathes all around….

Larry and the Dog People

J P Henderson

Larry MacCabe is a retired academic, a widower, and until a chance meeting with the administrator of a care home, also friendless. At her suggestion, he adopts a Basset Hound and joins her one Saturday at the local park. He becomes a regular visitor, and for the first time in his life the member of a gang. While his new companions…

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler’s lyrical and poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. A contemporary classic by one of America’s most important living writers, this edition of A Good Scent from a…

The Last of the Bowmans

J P Henderson

After an absence of some seven years, Greg Bowman returns from America to find his father lying in a bamboo coffin, his estranged brother Billy stalking a woman with no feet and his seventy-nine-year-old Uncle Frank planning to rob a bank……

Last Bus to Coffeeville

J P Henderson

Nancy Skidmore has Alzheimer’s and her oldest friend Eugene Chaney III once more a purpose in life – to end hers. When the moment for Gene to take Nancy to her desired death in Coffeeville arrives, she is unexpectedly admitted to the secure unit of a nursing home and he has to call upon his two remaining friends to help break her out…

The Marijuana Chronicles

Jonathan Santlofer

Marijuana is the everyman drug. Teenagers surreptitiously toke on it, politicians refuse to inhale it, even your mum and dad have had a go. Marijuana is a mellow, let’s put on a Barry Manilow CD, open a bottle of vino, and order a pizza drug. It’s the easy drug. The no howling at the moon drug. No shooting up and losing your job….

Potshot

Robert B Parker

Boston PI Spenser returns – heading west to the rich man’s haven of Potshot, Arizona, a former mining town reborn as a paradise for Los Angeles millionaires looking for a place to escape the pressures of their high-flying lifestyles. Potshot overcame its rough reputation as a rendezvous for old-time mountain men who lived off the land,…

The Hard Drug Chronicles

Gary Phillips

From Cocaine, that most troubling and fascinating of substances; through Speed, an oft demonized and misunderstood drug and on to Heroin, long seen as the most ‘literary’ of narcotics – the contributors to this all-new original anthology reveal that those who partake are forever changed, but the price of paradise is often steep….