Social novels

Follow the bank of the Koitogawa river until you reach the beach. From there a path of white seashells will lead you to the Chibineko Kitchen. Step inside, they'll be expecting you. Nagi Hayakawa is facing an impossible choice. Should she agree to marry her boyfriend, despite being ill...

#1 New York Times bestselling author Fredrik Backman returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger’s life twenty-five years later. Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of...

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to...

Phoebe Stone arrives at a grand beachside hotel in Rhode Island wearing her best dress and least comfortable shoes. Immediately she is mistaken for one of the wedding people - but she's actually the only guest at the Cornwall Inn who isn't here for the big event.When the bride discovers...

Sometimes you need to get lost to find your way. Marnie is stuck. Stuck working alone in her London flat, stuck battling the long afternoons and a life that often feels like it's passing her by. Michael is coming undone. Reeling from his wife's departure, increasingly reclusive, taking himself on...

From internationally bestselling author John Boyne, a contemplative story about one man trying to move forward from the trauma of his youth to become a better father to his son. Being in limbo, 30,000 feet in the air, offers time to reflect and take stock. For Aaron Umber, it’s an...

The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he flees to nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his...

Rafaela remembers everything that matters: her beautiful childhood in San Juan, her marriage to Peter, uprooting their children, Ruth and Benny, to the American Midwest, and losing all sense of her place in the world. So she tells no one when her memory begins to slip. Her daughter, in...

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate’Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy...

Sunday Forrester lives with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Dolly, in the house she grew up in. She does things more carefully than most people. On quiet days, she must eat only white foods. Her etiquette handbook guides her through confusing social situations, and to escape, she turns to her treasury of...

Be Careful What You Wish For, the fourth instalment in Jeffrey Archer's The Clifton Chronicles, opens with Harry Clifton and his wife Emma rushing to hospital to learn the fate of their son Sebastian, who has been involved in a fatal car accident. But who died, Sebastian or his best...

When the stakes are high, how low will you go? Ayesha Scott has a perfect life. Home is an art-filled Cornish castle with her stratospherically wealthy, titled husband and their beloved daughter. But behind every realised dream lurks an unexploded nightmare and in the course of one day Ayesha discovers...

It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus.With the wreckage of the West's spy war with the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only on a more peaceful life. And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumour in Whitehall -...

Sometimes we must look to the past to survive the future. A novel about what really matters in life from the bestselling author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin Q wants a simpler and safer life. His work as a quantum cryptographer for the government has led him to believe a...

Long Island is Colm Tóibín’s masterpiece: an exquisite, exhilarating novel that asks whether it is possible to truly return to the past and renew the great love that seemed gone forever. A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything...

The eagerly awaited new novel from Bobby Palmer, author of the critically acclaimed debut Isaac and the Egg. If you stood before sunrise in this wild old place, looking through the trees into the garden... You'd see a father and son, a fox standing between them. You wouldn't know...

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s heartwarming Tales from the Cafe, translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot, explores the age-old question: what would you do if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time? In a small back alley in Tokyo, there...

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents...

The Red Tent meets Old Hollywood glamour in this extraordinary new novel by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of Mexican Gothic. Golden Age Hollywood - a city overflowing with gossip, scandal, and intrigue. Every actress wants to play Salome, the star-making role in a big-budget movie about the legendary temptress. So...

Henry dreams of silence. A world without the clattering of carriages through cobbled streets, the distant cries of drunken brawls, the relentless ticking of the clock. Then he meets a fascinating, mysterious gentleman who sells just that. Precious silk that can drown out the clamour of the world – and...

A brilliant translation of one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, revealing a tale that is as full of energy and power as it was when it was first written. From the author of The Metamorphosis. Written in 1914, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef...

A darkly funny debut novel about work, debt and how we live now, from a thrilling new voice in fiction. Jonathan Abernathy is a loser. Unemployed and behind on his student loan repayments, the only thing Abernathy has in abundance is debt. When a secretive government loan forgiveness programme offers...

Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people - dutiful wife and mild-mannered office worker. One day, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye decides to become a vegetarian. But in South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, it is a shocking act of subversion.   Yeong-hye's passive...

Everyone's got that history, I guess. Everyone's got a story. When Emily meets enigmatic and dazzling actress Tamsin, her life changes. Drawn into Tamsin's world of Soho living, boozy dinners and cocktails at impossibly expensive bars, Emily's life shifts from black and white to technicolour and the two women become...

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two...

CHOSEN AS BOOK OF THE MONTH BY AFRORI BOOKSFEATURED ON BBC RADIO 4: OPEN BOOK'It's hard not to fall for the main character . . .you can see the car crash coming, but you can't look away' CLAIRE FULLER'A brilliantly crafted story about class and race, and the failure of...

In The Great Reset: And the War for the World, the most controversial man on earth Alex Jones gives you a full analysis of The Great Reset, the global elite's international conspiracy to enslave humanity and all life on the planet.From central bankers, corporate billionaires, and corrupted government officials, global...

It will make you laugh, cry deeply, and want to call your siblings’ Cosmopolitan 'Even better than Cleopatra and Frankenstein' Grazia The Blue sisters have always been exceptional – and exceptionally different. Avery, a strait-laced lawyer living in London, is the typical eldest daughter, though she’s hiding a secret that...

Tom Ripley wants money, success, and the good life - and he's willing to kill for it. Struggling to stay one step ahead of his creditors, and the law, Ripley leaps at the chance to start afresh on a free trip to Europe. But when his new-found happiness is threatened,...