Bookfinder

The stories in this collection explore the multifaceted lives of women.

A magical whimsical intense rollercoaster journey through a turn of the century circus filled with mystery, intrigue and true love.

The premise is simple: Susan receives the manuscript of a novel written by her ex-husband, Edward Sheffield. Susan begins to read Edward's dark thriller, along the way telling her own story, and the story of the breakdown of their marriage.

This collection first appeared in print in Prague before 1968, but was then banned. The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with complex erotic games.

The opening sentence - 'It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it.' - sets the tone of an elegiac, meditative and also deeply involved novel, obsessed with the nature of desire, love and longing.

The Pink Hotel, Anna Stothard's stunning second novel is a tale about finding love in the most unlikely of places, and how sometimes you can only know who you are by discovering who you are not.

An icy satire on what constitutes a useful human life, The Unit is an unflinching yet curiously affecting read.

A man finds himself surrounded by women who are becoming paler, more silent and literally smaller.

In this beautiful and assured collection, Daniyal Mueenuddin works and reworks the eternal themes of life, love and death. His control never wavers - neither does his compassion.

Expanding their Modern Classics series, Penguin have now published two collections of novellas and short stories by the celebrated Chinese writer Eileen Chang, containing several perfectly-formed examples of her writing about 30s and 40s Hong Kong and Shanghai.

The dual heritages of India and Wales come together in this funny, bittersweet tale spanning four generations of Patels from dancer and poet, Tishani Doshi

Set in modern Tokyo, with the Capulets and Montagues recast as organised-crime rivals, this racy retelling gets to the heart of the love story and the foolish rivalry that dooms it.

As the sun goes down at the end of the match he realises that love, like cricket, is more than just a game. He sees one last chance to get his life into focus, if only there is time.

This collection features work by some of the foremost women writers of this century: Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, Dorothy Parker and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

An act of random circumstance takes Australian tourist John into a café in a suburb of Paris one day. That tiny twist of fate changes John’s life forever, as he falls for the Tunisian niece of the café owner and ends up staying for 16 years.

Writing stories that are extravagant and fanciful, fifteen-year-old Angel retreats to a world of romance, escaping the drabness of provincial life.

In this second collection, the women have moved on, but their relationships are all on the turn in some way.

Written in similes that drip with cultural relevance, rhythmical intelligence and poetical sibilance, she weaves textures into a simple tale where a punk rock girl falls in love with a hip-hop guy and obsesses over the perfect memory of a summer they once spent together.

When Adrian Tomine was asked by his wife-to-be to document the lead-up to their wedding in a comic book that would be given out as a party favour, he soon found himself with a fully-fledged graphic novel on his hands.

This funny book is known for its portrayal of independent yet eccentric women and its depiction of love as being the ultimate goal despite its true course running far from smoothly.

Coward has selected seven tales from Sade's compendious four-volume collection of short stories for this publication.

Hall's debut novel is being billed in most women's magazines as the perfect summer read. I can see why, and not just because of the title. The Book of Summers is an evocative, highly visual novel which conjures a picture of a country most of us - or at least me - know little about: Hungary.

Claudia Rubin is in her heyday. Wife, mother, rabbi and sometime moral voice of the nation, it is she whom everyone wants to be with at her older son’s glorious February wedding. Until Leo becomes a bolter and the heyday of the Rubin family begins to unravel…

Katy Hayes' short stories chart the terrain of human relationships.

The Bird Room is a contemporary look at love and lust in the grimy underbelly of an information-age city. Trysts and solicitations are made online, furtive texts are sent and the boundaries between your 'dream-relationship and your 'dream' relationship blur into a vague grey complexion and 4-day stubble.

Behind a crumbling facade of seeming normality, secrets begin to stir within the Lux family home. Jean Lux, constrained academic wife and guilty mother, is waiting for excitement - and it will come from an unexpected source.

The Pleasant Light of Day, is a somewhat gentler affair (than Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse). ‘Uprooted’ is a sort of Irish version of ‘In the Neighbourhood’, weaving together the disparate lives of people drawn to one small coastal town, but the tone is elegiac rather than despairingly bitter.

Meet Oliver Tate, 15. Convinced that his father is depressed ('Depression comes in bouts. Like boxing. Dad is in the blue corner') and his mother is having an affair with her capoeira teacher.

It is not hard to see why Zoë Heller's second novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2003: it is a precise and in parts hilarious account of a relationship between Sheba, a pottery teacher at a north London school, and Connolly, one of her students.

Taking the pilgrimage about which Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales as a starting point, K M Grant has written a gentle tale centred on young pilgrim Belle.

A debut collection about families, lovers, loss, sex and survival, set mostly in Austin, Texas, and featuring a cast of the unemployed, the unsuccessful, and the addicted.

These stories take an uncompromising look at love and desire in the twenty-first century.

This is a deftly assembled collection of short stories about the everyday flow of human lives, and unexpected moments that can shift those lives off (or back on) course.

At the heart of this sweeping, panoramic novel, set in Regency London and Spain during the Peninsular War, stands the lively, outspoken Harriet, poised on the threshold of the adult world.

From silent hidden love to a lifetime reminiscence of an immigrant's England.

From the moment Tory Pace's mother serves up a joint of meat that may well be the blown-off leg of the local butcher, whose shop took a direct hit from a German bomb, it's clear that Gerard Woodward's Nourishment is going to be a darkly humorous novel.

Dunn's latest novel centres on the fourth wife of Henry VIII and the events which would lead to her ultimate execution by order of her husband, but Dunn's unique approach to this piece of history is to create a contemporary coming-of-age tale dressed in the trappings of the Tudor court.

Daniel Clowes’ latest exercise in dysfunctional love affairs smitten by misanthropy concerns the titular, Mister Wonderful, Marshall, a neurotic divorcee who goes on a first date, with the obvious ‘complications’ ensuing.

Moliner’s sharpest weapons are saved for relationships, interrogating love for the competitive sport it really is.

There is in this collection an underlying heartbreak, a sense of regret in the characters for what might have been.

Second collection (her first was Come to Me) from American writer Bloom.

This is, truly, a stunning debut novel. In fact, reading it was the experience of being taken oddly and slowly by surprise (if such a thing is possible, that’s what happened) so that what seemed a beautifully written but somehow rather shallow book revealed itself to be so serious, so thoughtful, and full of such depth that I felt stupid for not having realised before.

This Austrian-born Californian writer has entwined a story about love, ambition and loss around the period in history that sits like a scar on the country's beautiful landscape: the Vietnam War.

This impressive debut from Deborah Kay Davies starts with Meg, a benefits worker who quickly falls into a dark and damaging relationship with a man recently released from prison.

Bridget Jones wants to have it all - and once she's given up smoking and got down to 8st 7 she will.

A sweet, sun-drenched, heart-felt love affair. Evie Wyld's debut novel slips across hard-edged themes of masculine expression, war, paternal relationships and grief with such beauty and ease that it feels like she is already an old hand.

These stories reveal Parks' deeply-felt preoccupations with the inner workings of the human psyche.

There is pain and desolation beneath the surface of these stories, which makes them more powerful and compelling than anything she has written.

For 15-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined.

Florentino Ariza has never forgotten his first love. He has waited nearly a lifetime in silence since his beloved Fermina married another man. No woman can replace her in his heart.