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…

The Last Taxi Driver

The Last Taxi Driver

Lee Durkee

The Last Taxi Driver is a darkly comic novel about a day in the life of an exhausted, middle-aged hackie about to lose his job to Uber, his girlfriend to lethargy, and his ability to stand upright to chronic back spasms….

NICK

NICK

Michael Farris Smith

Critically acclaimed novelist Michael Farris Smith pulls Nick Carraway out of the shadows and into the spotlight in this exhilarating imagination of his life before The Great Gatsby…

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….

City of Margins

City of Margins

William Boyle

In City of Margins, the lives of several lost souls intersect in Southern Brooklyn in the early 1990s. There’s Donnie Parascandolo, a disgraced ex-cop with blood on his hands; Ava Bifulco, a widow whose daily work grind is her whole life; Nick, Ava’s son, a grubby high school teacher who dreams of a shortcut to success; Mikey…

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…

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….

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…