Our fiction collection is comprised of bestsellers and recommendations from our library team. We aim to provide a wide range of fiction titles to compliment your learning and develop a passion for reading.
To find more books and ebooks within our collection search eCore – Edinburgh College Online Resource Enquiry – Edinburgh College’s discovery service.
To reserve a book, or for more information please contact library@edinburghcollege.ac.uk
New Fiction Titles
The Life Impossible
Matt Haig
What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet . . .
When retired Maths teacher Grace is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.
Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the Balearics, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.
Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin
Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital in 1987. Playing together brings joy, escape, fierce competition – and a special friendship. Then, all too soon, that time is over and they must return to their normal lives.
When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station the spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love – creating virtual worlds to delight, challenge and immerse. Their collaborations make them global superstars but along with success, money and fame come betrayal and tragedy.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow takes us on a dazzling imaginative quest, examining identity, creativity and our need to connect.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
In 1982, wealthy businessman Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of the nicest part of Long Island. He is brutalised, held for ransom and then returned to his family. Carl, his wife and his three kids all try to move on with their lives, and resume their prized places in the ongoing saga of the American dream.
But nearly forty years later, when Carl’s mother dies, the trauma that has been bubbling beneath the Fletchers’ lives all this time surfaces at last. Finally, Carl allows himself to acknowledge what happened to him all those years ago, and face the question that’s been idling in his mind for a quarter of a century: where did the ransom go? And if he were ever to find the money, would it finally give him and his family the closure they’ve been yearning for?
Long Island Compromise spans generations, winding through decades of history all the way through to the wild present, dealing along the way with all the mainstays of American Jewish life. And through it all, it addresses timeless questions about wealth, trauma, and the American soul.
The Last Witch Of Scotland
Philip Paris
Being a woman was her only crime.
Scottish Highlands, 1727.
In the aftermath of a tragic fire that kills her father, Aila and her mother, Janet, move to the remote parish of Loth, north-west of Inverness. Blending in does not come easily to the women: Aila was badly burned in the fire and left with visible injuries, while her mother struggles to maintain her grip on reality. When a temporary minister is appointed in the area, rather than welcome the two women, he develops a strange curiosity for them that sets them even further apart from the community.
Then arrives a motley troupe of travelling entertainers from Edinburgh, led by the charismatic but mysterious Jack. It is just the distraction Janet, and particularly Aila, needs: for the first time in a long while, their lives are filling with joy and friendship, and a kind of hope Aila hasn’t known since her father’s death. But in this small community, faith is more powerful than truth, and whispers more dangerous even than fire.
Haunting and deeply moving, The Last Witch of Scotland is a story of love, loyalty and sacrifice, inspired by the true story of the last person to be executed for witchcraft in Britain.
The Wind That Lays Waste
Selva Almada
Translated by Chris Andrews
The Wind That Lays Waste begins in the great pause before a storm. Reverend Pearson is evangelizing across the Argentinian countryside with Leni, his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down. This act of God – or fate – leads them to the home of an aging mechanic called Gringo Brauer and his young boy named Tapioca.
As a long day passes, curiosity and intrigue transform into an unexpected intimacy between four people: one man who believes deeply in God, morality, and his own righteousness, and another whose life experiences have only entrenched his moral relativism and mild apathy; a quietly earnest and idealistic mechanic’s assistant, and a restless, sceptical preacher’s daughter. As tensions between these characters ebb and flow, beliefs are questioned and allegiances are tested, until finally the growing storm breaks over the plains.
Little Women : The Original Classic Novel Featuring Photos From the Film!
Louisa May Alcott
Discover Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel—now featuring gorgeous photos from Greta Gerwig’s big-screen adaptation–in this stunning keepsake reproduction of the book as seen in the film! Readers have been falling for the timeless story of sisters Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy as they navigate hardship and adventure in post-Civil War Concord, Massachusetts, for more than 150 years. This new keepsake edition of the classic novel is illustrated throughout with gorgeous black-and-white photos from the film adaptation written for the screen and directed by Greta Gerwig, and starring Timothée Chalamet, Chris Cooper, Laura Dern, Louis Garrel, James Norton, Bob Odenkirk, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan, Eliza Scanlen, Meryl Streep, and Emma Watson, perfect for a new generation of fans. It is the ultimate introduction to Lousia May’s Alcott’s classic tale as well as a must-have keepsake for fans of the film.
Read the ebook here (sign in with your Edinburgh College account)
Glorious Exploits
Ferdia Lennon
Ancient Sicily. Enter GELON: visionary, dreamer, theatre lover. Enter LAMPO: lovesick, jobless, in need of a distraction.
Imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, thousands of defeated Athenians hang on by the thinnest of threads.
They’re fading in the baking heat, but not everything is lost: they can still recite lines from Greek tragedy when tempted by Lampo and Gelon with goatskins of wine and scraps of food.
And so an idea is born. Because, after all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry.
It’s audacious. It might even be dangerous. But like all the best things in life – love, friendship, art itself – it will reveal the very worst, and the very best, of what humans are capable of.
What could possibly go wrong?
After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. While Haneen made a life here commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new.
When Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing Gertrude’s lines in classical Arabic with a dedicated group of men who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, all want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer and the warring intensifies, it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before the troupe. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.
Timely, thoughtful, and passionate, Isabella Hammad’s highly anticipated second novel is an exquisite story of the connection to be found in family and shared resistance.
“He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
Catherine Earnshaw had no idea that the boy her father took in from the streets of Liverpool would one day become her lover, her soul mate. Nor did she know that her decision to marry someone else would send him down the path of destruction.
Once a novel criticised for its display of mental and physical cruelty, Wuthering Heights is now a considered a 19th century classic. It’s themes of gender inequality and violence driven by passion still resonate with readers today.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
Mariana Enriquez
Translated by Megan McDowell
Welcome to Buenos Aires, a city thrumming with murderous intentions and morbid desires, where missing children come back from the dead and unearthed bones carry terrible curses.
These brilliant, unsettling tales of revenge, witchcraft, fetishes, disappearances and urban madness spill over with women and girls whose dark inclinations will lead them over the edge.