Books about contemporary fiction

A tale of disaster at sea. The only survivor from the wreck of a cargo ship on the Pacific, 16-year-old Pi spends 221 days on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal Tiger called Richard Parker.

The remarkable debut novel from Khaled Hosseini, now out in paperback in a stunning new package

This extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty.

A story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Point, Michigan.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone ...

Deals with a range of topics: friendship, love, war, three cultures, three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and, the tricky way the past has of coming back.

A novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting - but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places.

Secret Life of Bees is a novel.

* Atwood's Booker prize-winning novel reissued with a striking new jacket along with other titles from Margaret Atwood's backlist

Harvard Professor Robert Langton, visiting Paris, is called in when the curator of the Louvre is murdered. Alongside the body is a series of baffling ciphers. Langton and a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, are amazed to find a trail that leads to the works of Da Vinci - and beyond.

Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen does not believe in accidents and believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying.

Imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. This is the story of love, friendship and memory, with a sense of the fragility of life.

Annie Proulx's highly acclaimed, international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

A tale that tells the story of a geisha girl, uncovering a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a geisha house. She tells her story many years later from New York.

A story that begins with three young people in the garden of a country house on the hottest day of 1935, and ends with three profoundly changed lives. A depiction of love and war, class, childhood and England, that explores shame and forgiveness, atonement and the possibility of absolution.

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.