Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Swimming For Beginners

Swimming For Beginners

Nicola Gill

Funny, heart-breaking and life-affirming, Swimming for Beginners will show you how a child can open your heart even if you aren’t a mother.

Our American Friend

Our American Friend

Anna Pitoniak

‘Emily in Paris meets Scandal’ (New York Times) in this propulsive Cold War-era political thriller as one intrepid journalist writes the official biography of the mysterious First Lady – uncovering secrets that could destroy them both….

Salvage This World

Salvage This World

Michael Farris Smith

A young woman returns home with her child, to her ghost-haunted father, while a religious extremist hunts the storm-ridden territory to find the girl who may hold the key to the region’s apocalyptic future. At once elegiac and profound, Salvage This World asks how we keep going – what do we hold onto – in a land where God has…

The Magic Kingdom

The Magic Kingdom

Russell Banks

A dazzling tapestry of love and faith, memory and imagination, The Magic Kingdom questions what it means to look back and accept onea??s place in history. With an expert eye and stunning vision, Russell Banks delivers a wholly captivating portrait of a man navigating Americana and the passage of time….

This Train

This Train

James Grady

This Train races us through America’s heartland, carrying secrets. There is treasure in the cargo car, along with an invisible puppeteer. There is a coder named Nora, Mugzy, the yippy dog, and Ross, the too-curious poet. On board, it’s a countdown to murder……

Where’s Ma’am?

Where’s Ma’am?

Muick, The Queen's Corgi

Inspired by the 1910 bestseller Where’s Master?

Muick is the Queen’s loyal corgi. Loving, attentive, but with an occasional tendency to nip ankles. But Muick can’t find his Queen.

Muick gives his own account of events and travels through his grief from Scotland to the funeral as he seeks to make sense of his loss and find a future beyond.

Shifty’s Boys

Shifty’s Boys

Chris Offutt

Army-cop-turned-small-town-investigator Mick Hardin returns to the Kentucky hills in this second vividly atmospheric thriller from acclaimed literary crime novelist Chris Offutt…

The Killing Hills

The Killing Hills

Chris Offutt

* LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA GOLD DAGGER * A literary master across genres, award-winning author Chris Offutt’s latest novel, The Killing Hills, is a compelling, propulsive thriller in which a suspicious death exposes the loyalties and rivalries of a deep-rooted and fiercely private community in the Kentucky backwoods….

Foregone

Foregone

Russell Banks

At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare…

Blackwood

Blackwood

Michael Farris Smith

The small town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, but now seems stuck in a black-and-white photograph from days gone by. Unknowing, the town and its people are about to come alive again, awakening to nightmares, as ghostly whispers have begun to fill the night from the kudzu-covered valley that sits on the edge of town….

Turncoat

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

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…