A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America's most enduring authors
In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set ... View details
I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked an...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
"Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare's life … here is a novel … so gorgeously written that it transports you." -The Boston Globe
England, 1580: Th... View details
Near the bottom, he pauses for a moment, looking back the way he has come. Then, suddenly resolute, he leaps the final three stairs, as is his habit. He stumbles as he lands, falling to his knees on t...
Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio.
Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her priv... View details
Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men with sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel. Rosemary Villanucci, our next-door friend who lives above her father's cafe, sits in a 1939 Buick eat...
A phenomenal worldwide bestseller for almost forty years, Richard Adams's Watership Down is a timeless classic and one of the most beloved novels of all time. Set in England's Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, co... View details
The primroses were over. Toward the edge of the wood, where the ground became open and sloped down to an old fence and a brambly ditch beyond, only a few fading patches of pale yellow still showed amo...
Heart of Darkness is the thrilling tale of Marlow, a seaman and wanderer recounting his physical and psychological journey in search of the infamous ivory trader Kurtz. Traveling upriver into the heart of the African continent, he gradually becomes o... View details
1869 Conrad’s father dies, also of tuberculosis; Conrad is adopted by his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, who lives in Poland. The completion of the Suez Canal effectively links the Mediterranean a...
"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."
Blind, broken by the death of his wife and bitterly disappointed by the Restoration, Milton dictated his sweeping biblical epic Paradise Lost to a series of helpers. While the struggle between God and S... View details
He went to school to old Mr. Gill, at Paul’s School. Went at his own charge only to Christ’s College in Cambridge at fifteen, where he stayed eight years at least. Then he traveled into France and Ita...
Locus Award
A brilliantly imaginative and poignant fairy tale from the modern master of wonder and terror, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Neil Gaiman's first new novel for adults since his #1 New York Times bestseller Anansi Boys.
This bewit... View details
There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the centre of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. ...
'A tender and touching love story, beautifully told' Observer 10 Best Debut Novelists of 2021
'A beautiful and powerful novel about the true and sometimes painful depths of love' Candice Carty-Williams, bestselling author of QUEENIE
'An unforgettab... View details
The first night you met, a night you both negate as too brief an encounter, you pull your friend Samuel to the side. There’s a bunch of you in the basement of this south-east London pub. A birthday ce...
National Bestseller
Ian McEwan's symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.
On a h... View details
THE PLAY—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe paper—was wr...
"The Book of Monelle" was the result of Schwob's intense emotional suffering over the loss of his love, a "girl of the streets" named Louise, whom he had befriended in 1891 and who succumbed to tuberculosis two years later.
Transforming her into the ... View details
Bonaparte the killer, at eighteen years of age, met a young prostitute by the iron gates of the Palais-Royal. She was pale, and she shivered in the cold. But “I had to live,” she told him. Neither you...