Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

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….

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…

Daisy

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…

Sarah Jane

Sarah Jane

James Sallis

Sarah Jane Pullman is a good cop with a complicated past. From her small-town chicken-farming roots through her runaway adolescence, court-ordered Army stint, ill-advised marriage and years slinging scrambled eggs over greasy spoon griddles, Sarah Jane unfolds her life story, a parable about memory, atonement, and finding shape in…

Whiskey When We’re Dry

Whiskey When We’re Dry

John Larison

In the spring of 1885, seventeen-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family’s homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbours, she cuts her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains. Her goal? To find her gun-slinging fugitive brother Noah and…

Judge Walden: Call the Next Case

Judge Walden: Call the Next Case

Peter Murphy

Charlie Walden, the irrepressible Resident Judge (RJ) of Bermondsey Crown Court is back with a new selection of cases. As ever, there is little rest for the RJ as he does his best to deal with: the church-going carer who steals from the old lady under her care; the cleaver-wielding chefs with different ideas about how to make a Caesar…

The Lonely Witness

The Lonely Witness

William Boyle

Amy was once a party girl, but now she lives a lonely life. Helping the house-bound to receive communion in the Gravesend neighbourhood of Brooklyn, she knows the community well. When a local woman goes missing, Amy senses something isn’t right. Tailing the woman’s suspicious son, she winds her way through Brooklyn’s streets. But before…