Modern Fiction

October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington.

On a miserable summer trip to Geneva with her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet Lord Byron and a small group of friends, writer Mary Wollstonecraft was asked to participate in a game where the guests would create a ghost story and share it with the group. Everyone told their stories, but Mary's creation surprised them all. She had conceived of the idea that would later become her best known work, a tale of horror and creation, the legendary early science fiction classic: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

Frédérique Blanchet est une femme fonceuse et assumée. Photographe à ses heures, la technicienne en laboratoire rêve secrètement du jour où elle pourra vivre de sa passion. Toutefois, la peur de faire de mauvais choix la maintient malgré elle dans une réalité qui ne lui convient plus. Anthony Lemieux est un joueur de tennis professionnel qui, à la suite d’une grave blessure, a dû mettre fin à sa carrière. Depuis, il n’est plus que l’ombre de lui-même, cherchant sa place dans un monde qui ne lui apporte plus aucun plaisir.

Galapagos takes the listener back one million years to AD 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, totally different human race. Kurt Vonnegut, America's master satirist, looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry - and all that is worth saving.

The Modern Soul is more about characters than action. The story begins with the stereotype of the pompous German music professor explaining to the young English narrator why he incessantly eats cherries: “There is nothing like cherries for producing free saliva after trombone playing, especially after Grieg’s ‘Ich Liebe Dich’” He’s cherry eating is connected with a consuming desire for women. The two older Germans, the Professor and the German actress’ mother, talk incessantly of food and soul. They agree that the English are “fish blooded,” cold and without soul.

Charlie Hall has never found a lock she couldn’t pick, a book she couldn’t steal, or a bad decision she wouldn’t make. She's spent half her life working for gloamists, magicians who manipulate shadows to peer into locked rooms, strangle people in their beds, or worse. Gloamists guard their secrets greedily, creating an underground economy of grimoires. And to rob their fellow magicians, they need Charlie Hall.

American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Kurt Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of grey with a verdict that will haunt us all. Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense.

Listening to The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan can be a bit challenging. Not so with this new version that translates the original archaic language into simple, conversational English, allowing listeners of all ages to easily navigate the most popular Christian allegory of all time. The story chronicles the epic adventure of a man named Christian who leaves his home in the City of Destruction and begins a life-long quest to the Celestial City.

When Callie rents a beach cottage in Whitstable, she doesn't expect for its owner to be glamorous influencer Vanessa Lowe. Vanessa has it all. A beautiful home, a loyal husband, three perfect children, and a growing number of adoring online fans. Callie has long admired her world from afar. But when Vanessa invites her in, the closer Callie looks, the more she suspects that there's more to Vanessa than meets the eye. So when Vanessa's son disappears, Callie must question everything she knows.

Eric Jerome Dickey strides boldly over the minefield that is modern marriage. The central couple's biggest challenge is timing: He works days; she works nights. Instead of growing together, they're rapidly drifting apart, coexisting on stolen phone calls from work, punctuated by occasional bedroom encounters that leave them both feeling even emptier and more alone. When she finds out about his affair - and starts her own - the delicate fabric of their marriage is torn irrevocably asunder. Or is it?

In this captivating dual narrative novel, a modern-day woman finds inspiration in hidden notes left by her home’s previous owner, a quintessential 1950s housewife. As she discovers remarkable parallels between this woman’s life and her own, it causes her to question the foundation of her own relationship with her husband - and what it means to be a wife fighting for her place in a patriarchal society.

At some point, every one of us embarks on a journey to find love. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships, all with the hope of finding someone with whom we share a deep connection. This seems standard now, but it’s wildly different from what people did even just decades ago. Single people today have more romantic options than at any point in human history. With technology, our abilities to connect with and sort through these options are staggering. So why are so many people frustrated?

Long ago and far away (and somewhere south of France) lies the kingdom of Esquaveta. There, Princess Tullia is in nearly as much peril as her struggling kingdom. Esquaveta desperately needs to forge an alliance, and to that end, Tullia's father has arranged a marriage between her and an odious prince. However, one month before the "wedding of the century," Tullia falls in love with a lowly apprentice scribe. The king turns to Anatole, his much-maligned magician. Seventeen years earlier, when Anatole first came to the castle, he was regarded as something of a prodigy.

Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and reenters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin.

Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse. Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.

Kurt Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut – wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.

Vier Frauen, vier Leben und die Sehnsucht nach Sichtbarkeit, Liebe und Selbstbestimmung. Der lang erwartete neue Roman von Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Spiegel-Bestsellerautorin, literarischer Superstar und feministische Ikone. Chiamaka ist Reiseschriftstellerin, navigiert zwischen ihrer nigerianischen Heimat und ihrem amerikanischen Zuhause und versucht, sich im Rückblick auf die Männer ihres Lebens zu erklären, wann genau ihr ihre Träume abhandengekommen sind.

Paul Auster's signature work, The New York Trilogy, consists of three interlocking novels: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room - haunting and mysterious tales that move at the breathless pace of a thriller.

Set at a small, affluent liberal-arts college in New England at the height of the Reagan '80s, The Rules of Attraction is a startlingly funny, kaleidoscopic novel about three students with no plans for the future - or even the present - who become entangled in a curious romantic triangle.

Lucas Covington has everything: Charleston's old money, a successful family business, and Amara—the strong, brilliant professor who turned his world upside down. One careless conversation destroys it all. When Amara overhears Lucas admitting he's still torn about his recently single ex and not sure if he loves her, she walks out, leaving behind the life they were building and the man too blind to see what he had. As Lucas tumbles back into a toxic relationship with his high school sweetheart, he realizes just how badly he screwed up.