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#1

Colm Tóibín's "lovely, understated" novel that "proceeds with stately grace" (The Washington Post Book World) about an uncompromising judge whose principles, when brought home to his own family, are tragic.

Eamon Redmond is a judge in Ireland's high ... View details

Eamon Redmond stood at the window looking down at the river which was deep brown after days of rain. He watched the colour, the mixture of mud and water, and the small currents and pockets of movement...
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#2

One of the BBC's '100 Novels that Shaped the World'

Jean Rhys's spell-binding novel Wide Sargasso Sea, inspired by Jane Eyre and winner the Royal Society of Literature Award is beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range.

'There is... View details

They say when trouble come close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christop...
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#3

When Barbara Pym died in January 1980, this unpublished novel was found among her papers - written in 1963, at a time when her work was out of fashion. The publication after nineteen years of An Unsuitable Attachment therefore became an important lit... View details

'I sent my novel to Cape last week,' Barbara Pym wrote to me in February 1963. 'It is called (at present) An Unsuitable Attachment.'' It was her seventh, 'which seems a significant number'. The signif...
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#4

National Book Award Finalist

A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.

In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after th... View details

Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up. When the sun reache...
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#5

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

The searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. I... View details

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone be...
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#6

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, here is the universally acclaimed novel-winner of the Booker Prize and the basis for an award-winning film.

This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, an... View details

Tonight, I find myself here in a guest house in the city of Salisbury. The first day of my trip is now completed, and all in all, I must say I am quite satisfied. This expedition began this morning al...
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#7

Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem-ever since a traumat... View details

"Yes, there is," he said, pointing at his chest. "It's in here. It'sthe most discreet sort of number, so it never comes out where itcan be seen. But it's here." We fell silent for a moment, trying top...
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#8

American Journalist Jake Barnes is desperately in love with the beautiful Lady Brett Ashley. She moves seductively through the seemingly glamorous milieu of American and British expats, loving, living and partying in Paris in the 1920's. They're a he... View details

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact h...
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#9

This Man Booker Prize-winning novel is now a major motion picture.

A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and ... View details

We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versi...
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#10

MOST LOVED. MOST RED. Ten must-read modern classics.'He learned silence and did not insist upon his love.'This is the great forgotten novel of the last century - a quiet book; the story of a quiet life. William Stoner is a man who learns to contain h... View details

WILLIAM STONER ENTERED the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degr...
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