The Good Clean Fiction bookshelf
A little room for a good book.
Contemporary
by Maria Semple
Told through emails, letters, and school memos, this comic novel follows a teenager piecing together why her brilliant, reclusive mother vanished right before a family trip to Antarctica. Maria Semple's satire is sharp and very funny — a little biting about Seattle culture, but nothing racy, just genuinely clever farce.
Before you read
Read our approach to language, romance, and difficult subjects before choosing your next book.
How we choose our booksFind your copy
Retailer links may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. Read our disclosure.
LiteraryContemporary
Rachel Cusk
M has been one of the most recognisable faces in the world since she was a child. When a writer meets her in a bookshop and offers to set down her life, the project spreads out across olive groves, hotel rooms and film sets, and turns into something larger than one woman's story: a steady look at how anyone finds what matters inside an ordinary life. From the author of the Outline trilogy.
ContemporaryLiterary
Allegra Goodman
Collin James waits tables in Cambridge and gives what is left of himself to chalk drawings that the first rain takes away. Nina Lazare teaches high school and cannot hold her class, and her father built the virtual worlds her students would rather live inside. A love story set between a game studio and a classroom, about what art costs the person making it.
ContemporaryRomance
Kitty Arthur
Trudie works at a bookshop called The Nook and has kept her world small and safe since the loss that shrank it. Then handwritten letters from her aunt begin to arrive, one after another, each setting her a task: change the lives of five people inside a year. A warm small-town romance about being nudged back out into the world by someone who knew you well.
