Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

The Last Weynfeldt

The Last Weynfeldt

Martin Suter

A well-to-do bachelor, who sees no more promise in love. A beautiful young woman with a mysterious past. A picture and its price. An auction, which causes an uproar in the art community – and a few who come up short in their desire for the big money.Adrian Weynfeldt, mid-fifties, bachelor, upper-middle class, art expert, lives in an…

Larry and the Dog People

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…

King Death/ I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo

King Death/ I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo

Nik Cohn

I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo – Despite persistent rumours of his death fifteen years ago, Johnny Angelo’s legend continues. Johnny Angelo is a rock singer, and this is his story from the beginning. As a child he is a dreamer and a solitary, a thief, a killer of birds and cats. As a man he is a god…

I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo

I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo

Nik Cohn

I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo is Nik Cohn’s hymn to rock as myth, in all its crazed, absurd and glorious excess. Partly based on the legendary rocker, P J Proby, Johnny Angelo is the pop star to end all pop stars – narcissistic, mock-heroic and massively destructive. The novel follows his progress from warped…

King Death

King Death

Nik Cohn

Eddie is a strange man with an extraordinary talent that makes him the ‘performer’ he is. Eddie administers Death. His subjects, he explains, are not afraid, but are thrilled and transported. To Eddie, Death is completion, and he finds fulfilment, satisfaction, and pride in each job he carries out. When Seaton Carew, America’s most…

Perfume River

Perfume River

Robert Olen Butler

Robert Quinlan and his wife Darla teach at Florida State University. Their marriage, forged in the fervor of anti-Vietnam-war protests, now bears the fractures of time, with the couple trapped in an existence of morning coffee and solitary jogging and separate offices. For Robert and Darla, the cracks remain below the surface, whereas…

Severance / Intercourse

Severance / Intercourse

Robert Olen Butler

The human head remains in a state of consciousness for one and a half minutes after decapitation. In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at a rate of 160 words per minute. Inspired by this, Robert Olen Butler wrote Severance, sixty-two vignettes each exactly 240 words in length, that capture the flow of thoughts that go…

Coyote

Coyote

Colin Winnette

A daughter disappears in the middle of the night. What happens in the aftermath of this tragedy-after the search is abandoned, after the TV crews move on to cover the latest horrific incident-is the story of Coyote. There is a marriage and a detective. There is a storm, a talk show host, and a roasted boar. People are murdered…

Willnot

Willnot

James Sallis

In the woods outside the town of Willnot, the remains of several people have been discovered, unnerving the community and unsettling Dr. Lamar Hale, the town’s all-purpose general practitioner, surgeon and town conscience. At the same time, Bobby Lowndes – his military records missing, and followed by the FBI – mysteriously reappears in…

Dodgers

Dodgers

Bill Beverly

When East, a low-level lookout for a Los Angeles drug organisation, loses his watch house in a police raid, his boss recruits him for a very different job: a road trip – straight down the middle of white, rural America – to assassinate a judge in Wisconsin. Having no choice, East and a crew of untested boys – including his trigger-happy…

Haints Stay

Haints Stay

Colin Winnette

Brooke and Sugar are contract killers without a contract. Bird is the boy who mysteriously woke beside them while between towns. For miles, there is only desert and wilderness, and along the fringes, people.The story follows Bird, and the middling bountyhunters after they’ve been chased from town, each in pursuit of their own sense of…

Dragonfish

Dragonfish

Vu Tran

Vu Tran has written a thrilling and cinematic work of sophisticated suspense and haunting lyricism set in motion by characters who can neither trust each other nor trust themselves. This remarkable debut is a noir page-turner resonant with the lasting reverberations of lives lost and lives remade a generation ago….