Modern Fiction

In a world where magic follows strict natural laws, someone just tore up the rulebook. As a master druid, Colin is the first line of defense against magical disruption. But this time, he's hunting a shadow—an ancient practitioner who's found a way to twist reality itself... I've decided to resurrect a god. Not by necromancy, mind you—I'm not the Dark Druid, after all. But someone's determined to stop me, and they're willing to break the very laws of magic to do it.

On a secluded bluff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house, lavender with gingerbread trim, a home that contains a century’s worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane. There are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards, even though no one has set foot there in decades. The house becomes a hideaway for Jane, a place to escape her volatile mother.

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 Ultimate Modern Classics Collection: Volume 2 is the second instalment of our Modern Classics Collections, delving into a world of 20th-century literary brilliance. This anthology features a wide array of thought-provoking, genre-defining works from the 1900s, showcasing the range of modern storytelling—from existential musings to dark humour and intricate social commentary. These are the stories that have shaped modern literature, offering timeless insights into human nature and society.

Aurelia Schwartz has spent twenty-three years maintaining the equilibrium between her carefully curated human life and the magical one that she endures in secret. Except, her gift of green magic has begun to fade, and if that wasn't enough to upset the balance of her life, a fateful run-in with another power-hungry witch with a penchant for stolen magic has threatened to bring it all to ruin.

An Oprah's Book Club Selection regarded as one of Faulkner's greatest and most accessible novels, Light in August is a timeless and riveting story of determination, tragedy, and hope. In Faulkner's iconic Yoknapatawpha County, race, sex, and religion collide around three memorable characters searching desperately for human connection and their own identities.

When 17-year-old Valerie Russell runs away to New York City, she's trying to escape a life that has utterly betrayed her. Sporting a new identity, she takes up with a gang of squatters who live in the city's labyrinthine subway system.

Whispers of Pemberley is a trilogy where each book stands on its own as a romance novel, yet the stories are interconnected through direct or subtle nods to Jane Austen’s literature and characters. The inaugural volume, Elizabeth and Darcy 1800, is a variation of Pride and Prejudice—a creative twist setting the foundation for the series. In this adaptation, Elizabeth Bennet embarks on a journey as a writer, echoing the life and struggles of Jane Austen herself. The subsequent volumes, while maintaining the iconic names of the main characters, Elizabeth and Darcy, explore the lives of ...

Read by the critically acclaimed actress Maggie Gyllenhaal. When Esther Greenwood wins an internship at a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women's aspirations seriously.

At a safe distance from the intrigues of courtly life at Louis XIV’s Versailles, an intellectual crowd of mostly women have been gathering in a Parisian home to share what hostess Marie D’Aulnoy herself has christened contes de fées: fairy tales. Recently ousted from court and still raw from the death of his beloved wife, Charles Perrault finds companionship and creative camaraderie at the salon, where he eagerly joins the storytellers. Their hostess is impressive, fiercely intelligent, but somehow unreadable. She is harboring secrets of her own.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Rosamunde Pilcher, Winter Solstice (the basis for the TV movie) is the story of five unforgettable characters, lonely and haunted strangers who find love and loyalty as a reborn family of friends during the Christmas holidays.

Yao Shen, Grand Patriarch of the Modern Sect, succeeds in his bold attempt to unify the Azlak Plains. The construction of the Mortal Capital, All Haven is well underway. Under the rule of Soul Emperor Yao Shen, the Azlak Plains seems to be on the verge of stepping into a new era, a time when old grievances and festering wounds are set aside and given time to heal in favour of unprecedented progress and growth. All is going well until the mighty demonic path sect, The Ancient Codex takes note of Yao Shen's actions.

From his first novel – Less Than Zero – published when he was still a college student – to his most recent – the fierce American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis has been a powerful and original presence in contemporary literature, whether giving voice to a previously inchoate generation or provoking a controversy that raged throughout the culture. Now he takes a quantum leap forward: an awesome reckoning of the American Century at endgame. In Glamorama, a young man in what is recognizably fashion and celebrity-obsessed Manhattan is gradually, imperceptibly drawn into a shadowy looking-glass of that society, there and in London and Paris, and then finds himself trapped on the other side, in a much darker place where fame and terrorism and family and politics are inextricably linked and sometimes indistinguishable. At once implicated and horror-stricken, his ways of escape blocked at every turn, he ultimately discovers – back on the other, familiar side – that there was no mirror, no escape, no world but this one in which hotels implode and planes fall from the sky.

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.

He says he saved her. So why won’t he let her go? Fiercely independent Catherine Alexander-Blair, Cat to her friends, doesn’t scare easily. But after the Celtic fiddler is attacked leaving a performance, she wakes terrified and tied to a gurney in a dungeon. With scant memory, sanity threatens to shatter when her handsome, silver-haired captor claims not only to have rescued her but to be an eight-hundred-year-old vampire. He insists he’s protecting her, but when her undead guardian demands her obedience, Cat defies him at her own peril. When her magical abilities start blossoming, ...

Talia is a mysterious woman with a complicated past. She is a fighter who keeps her thoughts and feelings well guarded. While fulfilling her destiny, she meets Hark - a man she is inexplicably drawn to. Little does she know that her life will play out before his eyes during the very moment he intends to destroy her. Hark develops a deeper understanding of Talia's past as her secrets are revealed to him. Will Hark choose his feelings over the fate of the world, or is it much too late?

Canadian Jordan Haines is on vacation in the Caribbean. After the summer he's had, a couple months of fun in the sun is just what the doctor ordered. What he didn't count on was meeting a beautiful woman on a private beach - or falling hard. Crown Princess Astrid of San Majoria seems to lead a charmed life. Just like everyone, there's tragedy in her past, but she lives in a palace, has aides to do everything - and paparazzi hounding her private moments. Her sanctuary on her family's beach is broken one day when a tired windsurfer takes refuge in her cove - and works his way into her heart.

Kate Appleton needs a job. Her husband has left her, she's been fired from her position as a magazine editor, and the only place she wants to go is to her parents' summer house, The Nutshell, in Keene's Harbor, Michigan. Kate's plan is to turn The Nutshell into a Bed and Breakfast. Problem is, she needs cash, and the only job she can land is less than savory.

Do you believe that fear only haunts the distant bhoot bangla, crumbling fort or empty village streets? Surely, it can’t touch you now. You’ve distanced yourself from the darkness by living in the glare of city lights, hiding inside secure houses, comforted by a regular job. But what if fear has accompanied you into the modern world? What if it lives inside you, eating away at your heart and mind? After all, fear is just a ticking time bomb that explodes when you least expect it, leaving your reality...twisted.

Meet Jane. Newly arrived to Birmingham, Alabama, Jane is a broke dog-walker in Thornfield Estates—a gated community full of McMansions, shiny SUVs, and bored housewives. The kind of place where no one will notice if Jane lifts the discarded tchotchkes and jewelry off the side tables of her well-heeled clients. Where no one will think to ask if Jane is her real name. But her luck changes when she meets Eddie Rochester. Recently widowed, Eddie is Thornfield Estates’ most mysterious resident.