1984 – George Orwell (British)
Description George Orwell's celebrated 1948 vision of a world subsumed in tyranny and war. It describes the sequence of events by which Winston Smith, a London
clerk at the Ministry of Truth, comes to understand the true nature and aims of the government he serves, and portrays his doomed efforts to create a private life for
himself and his lover Julia. One of the bleakest political novels ever written, "1984" illustrates Orwell's despair that democracy could ever summon the will to
overcome communism in his lifetime.
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner (American)
Description "Absalom, Absalom!" is often considered to be Faulkner's greatest book, and one of his most compelling explorations of race, gender, and the burdens of
the past. The plot revolves around the character of Thomas Sutpen, son of poor whites in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Densely written and notoriously
"difficult," the novel explores the question of why Sutpen's son, Henry, killed Charles Bon, his friend and classmate, and the suitor of his sister, Judith. The action
shifts from the early 19th century, when this event took place, to the "present" (1909-1910), when Quentin Compson, a student at Harvard, becomes obsessed with
discovering the truth about his ancestor Sutpen--and hence about his family's past--and the relevance of that truth to the present.
Adam Bede – George Eliot (British)
Description: It tells of a young carpenter and his love for the pretty and superficial Hetty Sorrel who murders her illegitimate child by Arthur Donnithorne, a young
country squire, and is sentenced to deportation, and his eventual marriage to Dinah Morris, a Methodist preacher.
The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn – Mark Twain (American)
Description: The story of Huck's and Jim's quest for freedom on a raft on the Mississippi provides a panoramic view of Southern society, which Twain saw as beset by
greed, violence, and coldhearted brutality. At the end, Huck definitively abandons the conventional cant which he has been raised to believe in when he makes the
decision to go to hell rather than betray his friend Jim and send him back to slavery. The book has been banned from time to time, beginning with its publication
when it was deemed too subversive for children, until in the late 20th century when, despite its sympathetic attitude toward blacks and is violent denunciation of
slavery, it has been branded racist largely because Twain's use of dialect and "offensive" language.
– Edith Wharton (American)
Description: This is Edith Wharton's insider's look, and subtle critique, of New York society at a time when an address above 12th Street was considered the wild
frontier. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE plays out the delicacies of a love triangle between May Welland, born and bred to marry Newland Archer, a thoughtful barrister,
who in turn loves the infamous, unconventional, and attractive, Countess Ellen Olenska. The brazen Countess has left her Count behind in Europe and has returned to
New York for a reprieve from a bad marriage. Not only does Wharton paint a deliciously detailed portrait of old New York and the rules that governed upper-class
society, she has also provided readers with an entertainment of high order.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll (British)
Description: As he escorted the three young daughters of a colleague on a trip up the river Isis, Lewis Carroll invented "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," the story
of a little girl who tumbles down a rabbit hole. Full of such wonderfully eccentric characters as the Queen of Hearts, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat,
the Mock Turtle, and the Mad Hatter. The book is simultaneously a political allegory, a parody of Victorian children's literature, a fairy tale, a dream, and a child's
chronicle of growing up.
– Cormac McCarthy (American)
Description: This National Book Award winner tells the story of John Grady Cole who, at 16, finds himself at the dying end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from
the only life he has ever imagined for himself. "A true American original."--Newsweek.
Klay – Michael Chabon (American)
Description: It would make a nice comic book series--the cousins square-jawed and ham-fisted--but the depth of Chabon's thought, his sharp language, his
inventiveness and his ambition make this a novel of towering achievement.
Amelia – Henry Fielding (British)
Description: Amelia is tried to the utmost by the vagaries of her wilful, reckless husband, Captain Booth, but remains both lovable and loving under the severest
tests.
America is in the Heart – Carlos Bulosan (Filipino)
Description: First published in 1946, this autobiography of the well-known Filipino poet describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years
of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West. Bulosan does not spare the reader any of the horrors that accompanied
the migrant's life; but his quiet, stoic voice is the most convincing witness to the terrible events he saw.
– Philip Roth
Description: Set for the most part in New Jersey and spanning the period from the Second World War to the mid-1970s, this novel is narrated by Nathan
Zuckerman.As the book opens, Zuckerman "recalls an innocent time when golden boy Seymour 'the Swede' Levov was the pride of his Jewish neighborhood. . . . {He
than goes on to relate} how the Swede's life . . . {was} devastated by a child's violent act. When Merry Levov blew up her quaint little town's post office to protest the
Viet Nam war, she didn't just kill passing physician Fred Conlon, she shattered the ties that bound her to her worshipful father. Merry disappears, then eventually
reappears as a stick-thin Jain living in sacred poverty in Newark, having killed three more people for the cause." (Libr J)
The Aneid – Virgil (Greek/Latin)
Description: Book XI of the Aeneid covers four crucial days in Aeneas struggle against the Latins. In it, Virgil gives us the funeral of Pallas, the great Latin war-council,
Turnus plan to ambush Aeneas, and the aristeia and death of Camilla. K. W. Gransden sees the second half of the Roman national epic as Virgils Iliad. In his
introduction and commentary, he relates the themes and structure of Book XI not only to the rest of the Aeneid but also to relevant passages in the Iliad. Gransden
shows how, despite his adoption of the epic form, Virgil's style is influenced by Alexandrian miniaturism, Callimachean theory, and the poetry of the neoteroi
– Frank McCourt (British)
Description: Sometimes it's worth the wait. Having waited 40 years to tell his story, Frank McCourt doesn't pull any punches in his story of growing up dirt poor in
Limerick, Ireland. Having emigrated to America, McCourt's family returns to Ireland after his sister dies in Brooklyn. It is there that things turn from bad to worse
– Wallace Stegner
Description: Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel--the magnificent story of four generations in the life of an American family. A wheelchair-bound retired historian
embarks on a monumental quest: to come to know his grandparents, now long dead. The unfolding drama of the story of the American West sets the tone for
Stegner's masterpiece.
Animal Farm – George Orwell (British)
Description: A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress,
justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned--a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from
revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
Description: Anna Karenina is the wife of a prominent Russian government official. She leads a correct but confining upper-middle-class existence. She seems content
with her life as a proper companion to her dignified, unaffectionate husband and an adoring mother to her young son, until she meets Count Vronsky, a young officer
of the guards. He pursues her and she falls madly in love with him. Her husband refuses to divorce her, so she gives up everything, including her beloved son, to be
with Vronsky. After a short time, Vronsky becomes bored and unhappy with their life as social outcasts. He abandons her, returns to the military and is immediately
accepted back into society. Anna, a fallen woman, shunned by respectable society, throws herself under a train.
Another Country – James Baldwin (American)
Description Rufus, a black artist, falls in love with a white woman, but becomes enraged by the world's response to their affair, eventually driving his beloved mad
and committing suicide himself. The title refers to exile, racism, and sexual love.
Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley (British)
Description: Theodore, a young man nauseated by the facile piety and hollow curriculum of the school where he teaches, gives up his job to return to his father’s
house, to the literary and artistic London-which is not much better than the academic world.
– Ian McEwan
Description: Atonement is Ian McEwan’s finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel
is at its center a profound–and profoundly moving–exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution.
Antony and Cleopatra – William Shakespeare (British)
Description The queen of the Nile meets her match in Marc Antony, and the lovers destroy each other--yet triumph in ruin--in this great romantic tragedy.
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz – Mordecai Richler (Canadian)
Description: Duddy--the third generation of a Jewish immigrant family in Montreal--is combative, amoral, scheming, a liar, and totally hilarious. From his street days
tormenting teachers at the Jewish academy to his time hustling four jobs at once in a grand plan to "be somebody," Duddy learns about living--and the lesson is an
outrageous roller-coaster ride through the human comedy. As Richler turns his blistering commentary on love, money, and politics, The Apprenticeship of Duddy
Kravitz becomes a lesson for us all...in laughter and in life.
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner (American)
Description: "As I Lay Dying", a stream-of-consciousness novel narrated from 15 different points of view, depicts the Bundren family, a clan of poor whites who travel
to Jefferson, Mississippi, to bury their dead matriarch, Addie. This bleakly comic novel explores the nature of grief, community, and family.
As You Like It – William Shakespeare (British)
Description This virtuoso performance of Shakespeare's idyllic romance contains an optimistic philosophy of simple goodness.
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand (American)
Description: The story of a man who said he would stop the motor of the world--and did. This novel is the setting for the author's philosophy of Objectivism.
The Awakening – Kate Chopin (American)
Description: Here is the story of Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother. Edna experiences the first pangs of passion and desire--an awakening so intense that Edna
compromises herself--changing her life forever. Chopin's portrayal of a woman's quest for freedom is considered a landmark in American fiction.
Babbit – Sinclair Lewis (American)
Description: Sinclair Lewis created one of the most compelling and disturbing characters of American fiction in this portrait of a hardened, conniving, social-climbing
real-estate man in his classic work "Babbit". Through detailed depictions of the protagonist's home, work, and social life, a meticulous landscape is created,
representing the beliefs, aspirations, and failures of the American middle class.
Barchester Towers – Anthony Trollope (British)
Description The second novel in the Chronicles of Barsetshire continues the story of the conflict between High and Low Church begun in "The Warden". Trollope
introduces Mrs. Proudie, the bishop's wife, one of his most famously despicable characters. The plot revolves around the power struggle between her and Mr. Slope,
the bishop's chaplain, for control of diocesan politics.
Being Dead – Jim Crace
Description: The story is the least likely page-turner I've ever come across, and one of the most gripping. Its present action takes us from the moment just after their
death through their gradual decomposition, their corporeal transition from zoology to botany, until they are discovered days later, and the earth upon which their
corpses had been sprawled gradually erases any evidence that they were there: The sea grasses unbend themselves; the flies and crabs and gulls that ate their fluids
and flesh are hungry again; the sea wind blows; the indentations their bodies made on the sand dune drift over. Along the way, Crace tells three other stories: the
story of their lives together, the story (in reverse chronological order) of their morning together, and the story of their colleagues and relatives' search for the missing
couple.
Bel Canto – Anne Patchett
Description: Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful
Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening -- until a band
of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario
slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents become
compatriots.
– Toni Morrison (American)
Description: Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a
dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade.
Billy Budd – Herman Melville (American)
Description: Billy Budd, a handsome, angelic, and beloved young sailor, is wrongly accused of inciting mutiny. He lashes out in a rage and accidentally kills his accuser,
the demonic Claggart, with one blow. The ship's commander, Captain Vere, a conflicted man of principle, cries, "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must
hang." And a court martial does indeed condemn the saintly Billy to death. His last words are, "God bless Captain Vere." Billy Budd is widely interpreted as a Christ
figure, the victim of a kind of ritual sacrifice, after which order is restored. He is also seen as an innocent, Adam-like character who is destroyed by the evil that is
inescapable in the world.
Bleak House – Charles Dickens (British)
Description: Dickens's classic tale of greed, duplicity, and corruption. The story revolves around an inheritance case, Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, that has been contested in
the British courts for decades. Esther Summerson, the illegitimate daughter of Lady Dedlock and Captain Hawdon, lives at Bleak House as John Jarndyce's ward. She
does not know the truth of her origins, and when the lawyer Tulkinghorn begins to suspect her actual relation to Lady Dedlock, he is soon found murdered. Two of
the heirs in the case, Richard Carston and Ada Claire, marry and move into Bleak House with Jarndyce and Esther. The overwhelming irony in the novel is that, by the
time the case is finally settled, nothing remains of the estate.
Bless Me, Ultima – Rudolfo A. Anaya (Hispanic)
Description A bildungsroman about a young Mexican-American boy, Antonio, in a New Mexican village during the 1940s. He faces a choice that will determine the
course of his entire life: to follow his father's family's nomadic lifestyle, or to settle down to agriculture as his mother's family has done. Anaya draws on the SpanishAmerican folklore with which he grew up in this unique depiction of childhood Hispanic in the Southwest.
– Margaret Atwood (American)
Description: The Blind Assassin has enough mysteries to keep even a casual reader engaged, and with respect to solutions, it is less scrupulously committed to
ambiguity than Ms. Atwood's 1997 novel, Alias Grace. As with all of Ms. Atwood's recent fiction, The Blind Assassin, despite what sounds like a romantic plot, has
been scoured free of any trace of sentimentality. There is a steely quality to Ms. Atwood's writing that's a bit scary but also exhilarating; no one gets away with
anything, especially not her female narrators--and they know better than to try.
– Jose Saramago (Portuguese)
Blindness has a real plot, inspires real terror, and -- although we never learn their names -- is about believable, sympathetic characters. A man driving down the street
in an unnamed city is suddenly struck blind, setting off a highly contagious plague of "white sickness." The authorities take immediate but ultimately futile action by
quarantining victims and potential victims in an ill-equipped abandoned mental hospital. Things rapidly deteriorate as food is hoarded, factions develop, and anarchy
reigns. The one true hero is referred to as the "doctor's wife," who willingly accompanies her blind husband, as she can still see, and acts as a liaison between the
blind and the rest of the world.
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison (American)
Description: From the 1993 Nobel Prize-winner comes a novel "so charged with pain and wonder that it becomes poetry" (The New York Times). First published in
1965, The Bluest Eye is the story of a black girl who prays--with unforeseen consequences--for her eyes to turn blue so she will be accepted.
Brave New World – Alduous Huxley (British)
Description: A satirical novel depicting a scientific and industrialized utopia in which Ford and Freud are worshipped, eugenics policies have eliminated class conflicts
(while strengthening the division of the classes), and personal unhappiness is assuaged through drugs and pornography.
– Anne Tyler
Description: The author of the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Accidental Tourist pens another delightful tale of an ordinary couple. The Morans are just
average — she is scatterbrained and he whistles. Just when they think they've learned all there is to know about each other, they find out how extraordinary they
really are.
– Thorton Wilder
Description: Wilder's most famous novel ponders the significance of a random disaster. An inexplicable tragedy, a monk's quest for meaning: the story that earned
Wilder the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes.
Brothers Karamozov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Russian)
Description: The passionate Karamozov brothers spring to life, led by their roue of a father, who entertains himself by drinking, womanizing & pitting his three sons
against each other. The men have plenty ot fight over, including the alluring Grushenka. In the Idiot, meet the kindly, childlike Prince Myshkin, as he returns to the
decandent social whirl of 1860's St. Petersburg. Soon, the two most beautiful, sought after women in town are competing for his affections - in a duel that grows
increasingly dangerous
Candide – Voltaire
Description: Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in "the
best of all possible worlds." On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that
proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan. Fast, funny, often outrageous, the French philosophers immortal narrative takes
Candide around the world to discover that -- contrary to the teachings of his distringuished tutor Dr. Pangloss- all is not always for the best. Alive with wit, brilliance,
and graceful storytelling, Candide has become Voltaire's most celebrated work.
Captains Courageous – Rudyard Kipling (British)
Description: The boy hero is an American millionaire’s son, Harvey Cheyne. This spoiled youngster falls overboard, is picked up by a fishing dory and against his will is
hired by Disko Troop, the skipper, at ten dollars a month. By the time the fishing season is over, he has a different and much more health attitude toward life.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Tennessee Williams (American)
Description: The Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of seething passions that beset a Southern family in a shattering moment of revelation.
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (American)
Description Joseph Heller's manic, bleak, blackly humorous, and brilliant novel has become a classic of American literature, and "Catch-22" has entered the language
as a term describing a no-win situation. Set during the last months of World War II, Heller's novel tells the story of a bombardier, the hapless Yossarian, who is
convinced--quite rightly, of course--that people are trying to kill him.
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (American)
Description: J. D. Salinger's famous and enduring chronicle of Holden Caulfield's journey from innocence to experience is the quintessential coming-of-age novel.
Holden runs away to New York City from his vulgar and stifling prep school full of "phonies." After a series of illuminating failures and disasters, he goes home to see
his beloved sister Phoebe, and finally--through Phoebe--is able to accept his existence in an imperfect world.
Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood (American)
Description The contemporary story of a woman grappling with the tangled knot of her life. Returning to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art,
controversial painter Elaine Risley is engulfed by vivid images of the past. Strongest of all is the figure of Cordelia, leader of the trio of girls who initiated her into the
fierce politics of childhood and its secret worlds of friendship, longing, and betrayal.
Ceremony – Leslie M. Silko (American)
Description: "Demanding but confident and beautifully written" (Boston Globe), this is the story of a young Native American returning to his reservation after
surviving the horrors of captivity as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. Drawn to his Indian past and its traditions, his search for comfort and resolution
becomes a ritual--a curative ceremony that defeats his despair.
– Charles Frazier
Description: Cold Mountain is the story of Inman, a wounded and soul-sick Confederate soldier who, like his literary fellow-traveler Odysseus, has quit the field of
battle only to find the way home littered with impediments and prowled by adversaries. Inman's Penelope is Ada, a headstrong belle who has forsaken her place in
Charleston society in order to accompany her father -- a tubercular southern gentleman turned missionary -- to a new home in the healthy mountain air of North
Carolina. Frazier divides the narrative between Inman's homeward progress and Ada's struggle to make it on her own after her father dies, establishing an underlying
tension that is at once subtle and irresistible.
The Collector – John Robert Fowles (British)
Description: A psychological thriller involving a repressed clerk and butterfly collector who spends a fortune won on the football pools on the kidnapping of an art
student Miranda; the novel ends with her death and his plans to add another specimen to his collection.
– Alice Walker (American)
Description: Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and
attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually
learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided
by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.
– Jonathan Franzen
Description: Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue
and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed. Richly
realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Russian)
Description This 1866 novel is Dostoevsky's great fictional study of the criminal mind, in the character of the student Raskolnikov, who murders an aged pawnbroker.
Initially, Raskolnikov believes that the killing was entirely justified, but as the novel proceeds he becomes tortured by his guilt, and begins to question all his most
passionately held beliefs. Eventually, while the wily police inspector Porfiry Petrovich simply waits, Raskolnikov--prompted by Sonia, a prostitute who is devoted to
him--breaks down and confesses. Despite its bleak subject matter, the novel holds out the possibility of redemption; it is also an indictment of the social conditions in
which the action unfolds.
Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley (British)
Description: An amusing satire on the ill-fated love affair of sensitive young poet, Denis Stone.
The Crossing – Cormac McCarthy (American)
Description: This second volume of the Border Trilogy is about Billy and Boyd Parham, two brothers who explore the frontier in the boot heel of New Mexico. When
Billy returns after a long absence, he discovers that everything that he left behind has been transformed. It is then that he and his brother strike out into the unknown
frontier. McCarthy, author of "All the Pretty Horses," has been compared to everyone from Hemingway to Faulkner.
Cry the Beloved Country – Alan Paton (South African)
Description: Paton's deeply moving story of Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set against the backdrop of a land and people riven by racial inequality
and injustice, remains the most famous and important novel in South Africa's history.
Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmond Rostland
Description: Edmond Rostand's bittersweet melodrama tells the tale of France's master swordsman--Cyrano de Bergerac, a valiant soldier cursed with the face of a
clown. Gallantry, love, poetry, and failure all combine in this timeless classic.
Daisy Miller – Henry James (American)
Description "Daisy Miller" is often thought of as the quintessential James novel: the story of the innocent abroad who is corrupted by contact with an older, more
sophisticated society. Daisy, a delightfully uninhibited young American, scandalizes the European community in which she is a visitor with her high spirits and
disregard of ancient conventions. After an innocent but unwise tryst with an Italian admirer to see the Colosseum in Rome by moonlight, Daisy contracts malaria and
dies. The pathos of her death is compounded by the fact that another admirer, Winterbourne, is never entirely convinced that Daisy is merely the frank, innocent girl
she seems.
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (British)
Description: Dickens's classic autobiographical novel, describing a young man's rise in the world. David Copperfield, the narrator, is orphaned at a tender age and
raised first by his brutal stepfather (who halts his schooling and sends him to work in a factory), then by a kindly aunt. He trains for a career in law, but eventually
becomes a journalist and author. An ill-advised marriage brings him considerable unhappiness, but not long after his wife's death he is reunited with his childhood
sweetheart. A sprawling portrait of life in Victorian England, DAVID COPPERFIELD is perhaps Dickens's most popular work, and it contains many of the characters--Mr.
Micawber, Uriah Heep, Betsey Trotwood, Steerforth, and Little Emily--who gave Dickens his reputation as the finest literary portraitist of his age.
– James Joyce (British)
Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller (American)
Description: Willy Loman is a middle-class salesman with a loving wife, Linda, and two sons, Biff and Happy. Biff is now in his 30s, a former high school football hero
who wants to start a sporting goods store but has been unable to find the money to do so. Willy has also tried to raise Happy to be a man of influence, but has failed
at that. Willy's life of pathos and tragedy has, in this play, become an embodiment of the pursuit of the American Dream, a pursuit gone sour.
Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh (British)
Description: It recounts the chequered career of Paul Pennyfeather, sent down from Scone College, Oxford, for “indecent behavior,” as the innocent victim of a
drunken orgy. Forced to abandon a career in the church, he becomes a schoolmaster at Llanabba Castle, where he encounters headmaster Fagan and his daughters.
Delta Wedding – Eudora Welty (American)
Description A domestic novel set in Mississippi, by the famed Southern writer. Set on a plantation in the Mississippi delta, it portrays the daily dramas of the Fairchild
family as Dabney Fairchild prepares for her wedding.
Dinner at a Homesick Restaurant – Anne Tyler (American)
Description: With her grown children gathered around her, the dying Pearl Tull recalls the difficult years she spent raising them after their father's abrupt departure.
– Tim Winton (Australian)
Description: Luther Fox, a loner, haunted by his past, makes his living as an illegal fisherman — a shamateur. Before everyone in his family was killed in a freak
rollover, he grew melons and played guitar in the family band. Robbed of all that, he has turned his back on music. There's too much emotion in it, too much memory
and pain. One morning Fox is observed poaching by Georgie Jutland. Chance, or a kind of willed recklessness, has brought Georgie into the life and home of Jim
Buckridge, the most prosperous fisherman in the area and a man who loathes poachers, Fox above all. But she's never fully settled into Jim's grand house on the
water or into the inbred community with its history of violent secrets. After Georgie encounters Fox, her tentative hold on conventional life is severed. Neither of
them would call it love, but they can't stay away from each other no matter how dangerous it is — and out on White Point it is very dangerous.
– J.M. Coetzer
Description: Disgrace--set in post-apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape--is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A heartbreaking novel about a man
and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love.
Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen (British)
Description: Ibsen's tragedies of common people along with his staging and dialogue revolutionized modern concepts of drama. This edition contains three of Ibsen's
major works, in which his political and social satires expose the narrow provincialism of Norwegian town life.
Dombey and Son – Charles Dickens (British)
Description: Mr. Dombey is a purse-proud, self-contained London merchant, living in Portland Place, Bryanstone Square, with offices in the city. His god is wealth,
and his one ambition is to have a son, that the firm may be know as “Dombey and Son.” When Paul is born, his ambition is attained; his whole heart is in the boy, and
the loss of the mother is but a small matter. The boy’s death turns his heart to stone, and he treats his daughter Florence not only with utter indifference, but as an
actual interloper.
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Spanish)
Description: "Don Quixote" is the story of an aging gentleman who decides that he is a latter-day knight-errant, bound to sally forth to defend the world from evil. He
enlists as his squire a neighboring peasant, Sancho Panza. Together they have many adventures across Spain until the gentleman's friends are able to convince him to
return home and resume his old life.
Dr. Faustus - Christopher J. Marlowe
Description: The story of a controversial, disreputable astrologer in Germany during the 1500's.
The Egoist – George Meredith (British)
Description: The central character, the Egoist himself, is Sir Willoughby Patterne, rich and handsome, with a high position in the country, but totally blind to his own
arrogance and to the needs of the women he loves.
Emma – Jane Austen (British)
Description: First published in 1816, EMMA is about an unconventional heroine who possesses beauty, power, confidence, and wealth. She is also opinionated and
judgmental, scheming and cunning. She attempts to match an orphaned young woman, Harriet Smith, with someone of a higher-born class, instead of the farmer
Harriet prefers. The novel follows the two women as they weave in and out of love relationships that mirror the social climb. Denied any other way to advance, the
women in Austen's novels must marry to get ahead.
– Richard Russo
Description: Richard Russo's most ambitious novel is also his most gracefully told. Sweeping in its social scope but also achingly personal and beautifully detailed,
Empire Falls is a subtle drama about the plight of the working class in a decaying Northeast mill town.
An Enemy of the People - Henrik Ibsen (British)
Description: Five-act drama by Henrik Ibsen, published in 1882 as En folkefiende and performed in 1883. An Enemy of the People concerns the actions of Doctor
Thomas Stockmann, a medical officer charged with inspecting the public baths on which the prosperity of his native town depends. He finds the water to be
contaminated. When he refuses to be silenced, he is declared an enemy of the people. Stockmann served as a spokesman for Ibsen, who felt that his plays gave a
true, if not always palatable, picture of life and that truth was more important than critical approbation.
Equus – Peter Shaffer (American)
Description: In Equus, which took critics and public alike by storm and has gone on to become a modern classic, Peter Shaffer depicts the story of a deranged youth
who blinds six horses with a spike. Through a psychiatrist's analysis of the events, Shaffer creates a chilling portrait of how materialism and convenience have killed
our capacity for worship and passion and, consequently, our capacity for pain. Rarely has a playwrite created an atmosphere and situation that so harshly pinpoint
the spiritual and mental decay of modern man.
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton (American)
Description This tragic short novel tells the tale of Ethan Frome, who lives an isolated life in cold New England. When his mother dies, he marries his cousin Zeena for
companionship, rather than for love. When they hire Mattie Silver as a live-in household helper, Ethan and the young Mattie fall desperately in love. Inevitably, Zeena
discovers the affair.
The Eumenidies – Aeschylus
Description: The cycle of revenge in the Agamemnon family continues as the ghost of Clytemnestra calls upon the Furies to seek vengeance on her son, Orestes. The
gods step in to prevent any more violence, and Athena declares that she will preside over a trial in which Orestes stands accused of matricide, with Apollo acting in
his defense. After the acquittal of Orestes, the Furies threaten mass destruction and chaos in response to what they deem to be a vile injustice. But after Athena
quiets their rage with compassionate speeches, calm is once more restored after generations of violence and hatred. The chorus exits triumphantly in celebration of
peace and justice.
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury (American)
Description: Firemen burn thought-provoking books in this frightening view of the future. Story of a society in which all books are to be burned.
– Rohinton Mistry
Description The setting is Bombay, mid-1990s. Nariman Vakeel, suffering from Parkinson's disease, is the elderly patriarch of a small, discordant family. In a building
called Chateau Felicity, he and his two middle-aged stepchildren - Coomy, bitter and domineering, and her just-younger brother, Jal, mild mannered and acquiescent occupy a once-elegant apartment whose ruin is progressing as rapidly as Nariman's disease. Coomy has "rules to govern every aspect of [Nariman's] shrunken life,"
but even she cannot keep him from his evening walks. When he stumbles and breaks an ankle (fulfilling one of Coomy's nagging prophecies), she has hardly said "I
told you so" before she is plotting to turn his round-the-clock care over to her younger, sweet-tempered half sister. Roxana, her husband, and their two sons live in an
already overcrowded apartment, but Coomy knows that Roxana will not refuse her. What Coomy cannot know is that she has set in motion a great unraveling (and an
unexpected repair) of the family - and a revelation of its deeply love-torn past.
Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy (British)
Description: Bathsheba Everdene is courted by Gabriel Oak, a young farmer who becomes bailiff of the farm she inherits, by William Boldwood, who owns the
neighboring farm and, by Sergeant Troy, a handsome young adventurer. She marries Troy, who spends her money freely. Troy now accidentally meets his old love
Fanny Robin and her child in pitiful condition on the way to the workhouse and the next day finds them both dead.
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway (American)
Description: By turns romantic and harshly realistic, Hemingway's story of a tragic romance set against the brutality and confusion of World War I cemented his fame
as a stylist and as a writer of extraordinary literary power. A volunteer ambulance driver and a beautiful English nurse fall in love when he is wounded on the Italian
front.
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway (American)
Description: This masterpiece of time and place tells a profound and timeless story of courage and commitment, love and loss, that takes place over a fleeting 72
hours. Drawing on Hemingway's own involvement in the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls reflects his passionate feelings about the nature of war and the
meaning of loyalty.
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley (British)
Description Written in 1816 when she was only 19, in a horror-writing contest suggested by Byron, Mary Shelley's novel of "the modern Prometheus" chillingly
dramatized the dangerous potential of life created in the laboratory. A frightening creation myth for our own time, "Frankenstein" remains one of the greatest horror
stories ever written, and an undisputed classic.
Free Fall – William Golding (British)
Description: Sammy Mountjoy voluntarily engages in memory therapy and, by conjuring up fragments of his past, tries to give some form to his directionless
present. In such a purgation, detail is of the utmost importance; no memory is left untouched; no incident is too irrelevant; smell, moods, colors assume an almost
inordinate immediacy when a character is retracing the steps that led to his spiritual malaise. Sammy is seeking an answer to one burning question: “When did I lose
my freedom?’
The Glass Menagerie – Tennessee Williams (American)
Description: His first major success, a powerful semi-autobiographical play that explores the fragility of private dreamworlds.
Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin (American)
Description: A young black man in Harlem begins to confront the legacy of anger and guilt he has inherited from his family. The story also explores the ways in which
racial oppression has shaped the life of the family and the ways in which they try to use religion to establish order amid the chaos created by racism and sex. James
Baldwin's first major novel is based loosely on his own background.
– Pearl S. Buck (Chinese)
Description: This great modern classic depicts life in China at a time before the vast political and social upheavals transformed an essentially agrarian country into a
world power. Nobel Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life--its terrors, its passions, its ambitions, and rewards.
Goodbye Mr. Chips – James Hilton (British)
Description: It deals sentimentally with the life of a popular teacher in an English public school who has been known to several generations of boys as “Mr. Chips.”
– John Steinbeck (American)
Description: Forced from their home, the Joad family is lured to California to find work; instead they find disillusionment, exploitation, and hunger.
Green Mansions – W.H. Hudson (William Henry) (British)
Description: The hero, Mr. Abel, tells the tragic story of his love for the bird girl, Rima, an ethereal maiden whose jungle upbringing has brought her close to the
powers and beauty of nature. Abel has just succeeded in awakening the human emotion of love in the half-wild girl when she is killed by a band of savages.
– Russel Baker (American)
Description: Russell Baker is the 1979 Pulitzer Prize winner for Distinguished Commentary and a columnist for The New York Times. This book traces his youth in the
mountains of rural Virginia. When Baker was only five, his father died. His mother, strong-willed and matriarchal, never looked back. After all, she had three children
to raise. These were depression years, and Mrs. Baker moved her fledgling family to Baltimore. Baker's mother was determined her children would succeed, and we
know her regimen worked for Russell. He did everything from delivering papers to hustling subscriptions for the Saturday Evening Post. As is often the case, early
hardships made the man.
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift (British)
Description In Swift's bitter, witty satire of the state of England in the early 18th century, his hero, Lemuel Gulliver (the epitome of the average man), becomes, as he
travels, increasingly frustrated by the corruption and irrationality of the human race.
A Handful of Dust – Evely Waugh (British)
Description: It describes the infatuation of Lady Brenda Last with an idle, parasitic young man-about-town, John Beaver; which leads her to neglect her “madly
feudal” husband Tony, her son, and her country home of Hetton.
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (Canadian)
Description A fantasy of future life from the celebrated Canadian novelist. In the Republic of Gilead--formerly the United States--a fundamentalist regime has reduced
women to a state of servitude and suppressed all civil rights. The protagonist, a woman called Offred, becomes the Handmaid of the Commander, expected to bear
him a child in exchange for her freedom. Old enough to remember life before the revolution, Offred resists the new order and becomes involved in an underground
resistance movement.
The Heart of Midlothian – Sir Walter Scott (British)
Description: Effie Deans, the daughter of Scotch cow-feeder affectionately known to his friends as Doucie Davie, is seduced by George Staunton, son of the rector of
Willingham, and is brought to trial and sentenced to death for a child murder. Her loyal and plucky half sister, Jeanie Deans, determines to go to London to ask
George II for a pardon.
The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene (British)
Description: Set in West Africa, its hero is Scobie, an English Roman Catholic who is torn between his adulterous love for a young woman and his duty to his wife and
his religion.
Hedda Gabler – Henrick Ibsen (British)
Description: Dark psychological drama follows its reckless, manipulative heroine to her tragic end.
Hiroshima – John Hersey (American)
Description The most famous work of the Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist and reporter. An account of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, told from the perspective of
six survivors, it is written in a stark, objective voice that manages to be precise and all the more vivid for its understatement of events. A profoundly influential work
that have long since been established as one of the classic accounts of the Second World War.
– Michael Cunningham
Description: In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia
Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf's
last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Richard, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and
troubled mother, and his lifelong friend Clarissa, who strives to forge a balanced and rewarding life in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.
– Nancy Farmer
Description: Matt's last name is Alacrán, which means that he belongs to a powerful family that controls the drug Farms between the U.S. and the former Mexico.
But Matt's different; he's a clone in a world filled with dangers for his kind. His only protection from the brutal surroundings are El Patron, the elderly patriarch/drug
lord kingpin from which he was made, his caretaker Celia, and a bodyguard who has been assigned to him. Things fall apart when Matt learns the real reason for his
creation and he makes a harrowing escape to a promising -- yet frighteningly insecure -- world. With all the makings of a modern classic, The House of the Scorpion is
both shocking and intense, particularly because it looks toward an all-too-possible future. Matt is a courageous, sympathetic character, but his strong-willed fits of
anger, which mirror El Patron's, leave a bittersweet taste amid his good intentions. Another impressive book from Farmer, this novel is true science fiction genius.
House Made of Dawn - Momaday, N. Scott (American)
Description: In Momaday's first novel, Abel is a Jemez Indian returning to his tribe after World War II. An outsider among his own people because of his war
experiences and because of the fact that he is the illegitimate offspring of a Navajo, Abel is humiliated at a ceremony, then he murders the man who offended him.
After serving an eight-year sentence, Abel moves to Los Angeles, where he is confronted by the Reverend Tosamah, a Kiowa Indian based on a parodic view of
Momaday himself. Tosamah proceeds to victimize Abel because he is a "longhair"--an unassimilated Indian. Abel is victimized in other ways in Los Angeles, and
eventually returns to the Jemez reservation to bury his grandfather. Through the use of traditions from both Navajo and Jemez cultures, Abel is finally able to bring
together the shards of his identity into a coherent whole.
Howard’s End – E.M. Forster (Edward Morgan) (British)
Description: On the one hand are the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and their brother Tibby, who care about civilized living, music, literature, and
conversation with their friends; on the other, the Wilcoxes, Henry and his children Charles, Paul, and Evie, who are concerned with the business side of life and
distrust emotions and imagination. Margaret marries Henry Wilcox, to the dismay of both families, and her love and steadiness of purpose are tested by the resulting
strains and misunderstandings. Her marriage cracks but does not break. In the end, torn between her sister and her husband, she succeeds in bridging the mistrust
that divides them.
– Susan Sontag (American)
Description: In America is a big, juicy, surprising book-about a woman's search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the world of the theater-that
will captivate its readers from the first page. It is Sontag's most delicious, most brilliant achievement.
– Jhumpa Lahiri (Indian)
Description: With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive,
quite literally, at a cultural divide. A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make confessions that unravel their tattered domestic peace. An Indian
American girl recognizes her cultural identity during a Halloween celebration while the Pakistani civil war rages on television in the background. A latchkey kid with a
single working mother finds affinity with a woman from Calcutta who, among other things, is struggling to learn to drive. In the title story, an interpreter guides an
American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, these stories speak with
passion and wisdom to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story, Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her
ancestors and a baffling new world. Interpreter of Maladies introduces "a wonderful new voice in American fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri is a sensitive chronicler of the
immigrant experience. Interpreter of Maladies is a wise and sophisticated collection"
– Ralph Ellison (American)
Description: Compelling story of an anonymous black man who experiences a variety of adventures in the South and later in New York City during a fervent quest for
personal identity and social visibility.
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Description: A tale of the period following the Norman Conquest. The titular hero is Wilfred, knight of Ivanhoe, the son of Cedric the Saxon, in love with his father’s
ward Rowena. Cedric, however, wishes her to marry Athelstane who is descended from the Saxon royal line and may restore the Saxon supremacy. Richard I in the
guise of the Black Knight and Robin Hood as Locksley play prominent roles, and knights and palmers from the Holy Land, fair ladies, conspiracies and counterattacks, a
tournament and the burning of a great castle combine to give it a rich and varied color.
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë (British)
Description Charlotte Brontë's first novel, based in part on the author's own days in a brutal boarding school, tells the story of a spirited governess and her employer-the Byronic, brooding Mr. Rochester. This story of a plain, impoverished young woman who defies male expectations and the social conventions to become a strong
and fulfilled adult has become an enduring classic.
Jasmine - Bharati Mukherjee (Indian)
Description: When Jasmine is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village where she was born. But the force
of Jasmine's desires propels her explosively into a larger, more dangerous, and ultimately more life-giving world. In just a few years, Jasmine becomes Jane
Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker and the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee. Jasmine's metamorphosis, with its shocking
upheavals and its slow evolutionary steps, illuminates the making of an American mind; but even more powerfully, her story depicts the shifting contours of an
America being transformed by her and others like her - our new neighbors, friends, and lovers. In Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee has created a heroine as exotic and
unexpected as the many worlds in which she lives.
Jazz – Toni Morrison (American)
Description: In the afterglow of her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Beloved, Morrison moves to even higher ground--the story of Joe Trace, a door-to-door salesman
in his 50s, his mentally unstable wife, and his 18-year-old lover. Set in Harlem in the 1920s, the story captures the rhythms of the city and the bittersweet mood of
African American life at a moment in our history we assumed we understood.
Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding (British)
Description: A comic romance that begins as a parody of Richardson’s Pamela, with Joseph as Pamela’s brother and Mr. B. appearing as young Booby. Joseph is a
footman who marries a maidservant. His adventures with the high-born Lady Booby are modeled after those of Pamela and Mr. B., and, like Pamela, Joseph remains
virtuous.
The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan (Chinese)
Description: In 1949, four Chinese women--drawn together by the shadow of their past--begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks and "say"
stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club--and forge a relationship that binds them for more than three decades.
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy (British)
Description "Jude the Obscure" is perhaps the most vivid illustration of Hardy's belief that our lives are governed by dark and malevolent forces. Jude Fawley is torn
between his sensual nature and his equally strong lust for learning, two sides of his character that are personified by the two women in his life--the earthy Arabella
and the intellectual Sue Bridehead. Jude comes to a tragic end because of his inability to reconcile them. His attempts to rise above his humble origins, in spite of all
his efforts, prove impossible, as do his attempts to live an unconventional life outside of marriage with the woman he loves. The novel represents Hardy's strongest
attack on the insularity of English university life, and on marriage as a religious institution.
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson (British)
Description: Adventures of David Balfour in the year 1751. He was kidnapped and cast away, suffered on a desert isle, journeyed in the wild highlands, and made
acquaintance with Alan Breck Stewart and other notorious Highland Jacobites.
King Lear – William Shakespeare (British)
Description King Lear foolishly disinherits his loving and dutiful youngest daughter, only to realize he made a grave error in dividing his kingdom between the elder
two.
Kim – Rudyard Kipling (British)
Description: The Irish boy hero, Kimball O’Hara better known as Kim, is an orphan, shifting for himself in Lahore. He attaches himself to a holy man, an old lama from
Tibet who is on a quest for the mystic River of the Arrows, and together the pair roam about India.
Last Days of Pompeii – Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Description: The hero, Glaucus, is a noble young Athenian, in love with the beautiful Ione. Her guardian Arbaces, a priest of Isis and the villain of the story, makes
every effort to thwart the romance and win Ione for his own evil ends.
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (French)
Description Hugo's wrenching story centers on Jean Valjean, an honest peasant sentenced to five years' hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread, then 19 more for trying
to escape. Turned into a hardened and ruthless criminal by his experiences, he reforms, becomes mayor of a French town, but is tracked down by the pitiless
detective Javert for another obscure crime, and incarcerated. Escaping again from the brutal French prison, he befriends a prostitute named Fantine and her
daughter, Cosette. This 1862 novel is remarkable for its sympathetic portrayal of common people: prisoners, the poor, women of the streets--all the down-and-out
victims of the gross inequities of class in 19th-century Europe.
Lesson Before Dying, A – Ernest J. Gaines (American)
Description: Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, "A Lesson Before Dying" is an "enormously moving" ("Los Angeles Times") novel of one man
condemned to die for a crime he did not commit and a young man who visits him in his cell. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand
the simple heroism of resisting--and defying--the expected. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
– Yann Martel
Description: Meet Pi Patel, a young man on the cusp of adulthood when fate steps in and hastens his lessons in maturity. En route with his family from their home in
India to Canada, their cargo ship sinks, and Pi finds himself adrift in a lifeboat -- alone, save for a few surviving animals, some of the very same animals Pi's zookeeper
father warned him would tear him to pieces if they got a chance. But Pi's seafaring journey is about much more than a struggle for survival. It becomes a test of
everything he's learned -- about both man and beast, their creator, and the nature of truth itself. With a brilliant combination of sensitivity and a precise economy of
language, Martel develops a story some readers might find less than credible. But his capacity for the mysterious, and a true understanding of the depths of human
resilience will compel even the most skeptical of readers to continue on the fantastic journey with Pi, and an unusual 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
Light in August – William Faulkner (American)
Description: LIGHT IN AUGUST is the compelling story of Joe Christmas, an orphan of unknown ancestry who believes himself to be part-black. Like so many of
Faulkner's novels, this one deals with the importance of community, as well as the roles of race and gender in Southern life.
The Light That Failed – Rudyard Kipling (British)
Description: Through his experience as an illustrator in the Sudan, the hero, Dick Heldar, wins both professional success and a firm friend in the war correspondent
Torpenhow. He is in love with his foster sister Maisie, now also an artist, but Maisie is shallow and selfish and does not appreciate his devotion.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – Alan Sillitoe (British)
Description: A first-person portrait of a rebellious and anarchic Borstal boy who refuses both literally and metaphorically to play the games of the establishment.
Lost Horizon – James Hilton (British)
Description: Hugh Conway is a British consul at Baskul when trouble erupts in 1931 and all civilians are evacuated. He and three others board a plane lent by a
Maharajah. After they are airborne for several hours, they realize that they are headed in the wrong direction. When the pilot finally lands, the passengers find
themselves in Shangri-la, a utopian lamasery whose inhabitants know the secret of attaining long life. Believing that war is going to destroy all civilization, the High
Lama summons the newcomers to form the nucleus of a new civlization.
Love Medicine – Louise Erdrich
Description: The first book in Erdrich's Native American tetralogy that includes The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace is an authentic and emotionally
powerful glimpse into the Native American experience--now resequenced and expanded to include never-before-published chapters.
M. Butterfly – David Henry Hwang
Description: Inspired by an actual espionage scandal, a French diplomat discovers the startling truth about his Chinese mistress. This sweeping drama exposes
Western fantasies of Asia that led to the debacle of Vietnam.
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Description Flaubert's portrait of an adulteress who seeks freedom from a prosaic, disappointing life and ultimately is destroyed by her selfishness was considered
scandalous when it was published. Flaubert chose his subject to illustrate his belief that any aspect of life, however trivial or vulgar, could be a subject for literature,
and could be raised to the status of art by the quality of the writing.
The Magus – John Robert Fowles (British)
Description: A novel set largely on the Greek island of Phraxos, where British schoolmaster Nicholas D’Urfe, half guest and half victim, is subjected to a series of
mysterious apparitions and tableaux which, despite their naturalistic explanations, give the novel a narrative complexity and mythological dimension.
Major Barbara – George Bernard Shaw (British)
Description: Barbara, the granddaughter of an earl, is busy saving souls in the Salvation Army while her father, maintaining that poverty is the worst of crimes, runs a
munitions factory.
Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens (British)
Description: Because of his love for Mary Graham, the so-called hero is forced by his old grandfather to leave home and emigrate to America. He has some sadly
disillusioning experiences with real estate in an over-advertised swamp named Eden, and returns to England with little lover for anything American.
Mayor of Casterbridge, The – Thomas Hardy (British)
Description: The story of Michael Henchard who, in a moment of drunken despair, sells his wife at an auction and later in life regrets the act.
Medea – Euripides (Continental European)
Description: Deserted by Jason, whose life she saved at a great cost to herself and others, and forced into exile by the father of her rival in love, Medea plots a
barbaric revenge. The consequences wrought by her destructive actions, and by those who underestimate her bewitching power, are harrowing.
Member of the Wedding , The – Carson McCullers (American)
Description: Twelve-year-old Frankie cannot understand why everyone disapproves of her idea of going on her brother's honeymoon.
Middlemarch – George Eliot (British)
Description: With sure and subtle touch, Eliot paints a luminous and spacious landscape of life in a provincial town, interweaving her themes with a proliferation of
characters: an innocent idealist; a self-defeated young doctor; a naive young woman; and a cold man, who "lives too much with the dead".
Mill on the Floss, The – George Eliot (British)
Description: Maggie Tulliver, the heroine who has aspirations beyond her sex and station has atoned for her sin and, finally, dies trying to save the brother whose love
she could not win.
Misanthrope, The – Moliere (French)
Description: Moliere's "The Misanthrope" is the most humorous play written in any language. It centers around the character Alceste, who has a firm beleif in being
brutally honest all the time. The habit of others to speak harshly behind other's backs and hypocritically praise them to their faces drives him to the brink of insanity.
It irks him so much that his only wish would be to become a hermit in the mountains. If it weren't for his love of the beautiful Celimene. However, to make things
more complicated, she happens to be the queen of duplicitous thought. Alceste hates himself for loving a woman who behaves in the manner that irritates him the
most, but cannot bring himself to confront what troubles him. That, paired with the remarkably written exchanges between Alceste, his friend Philinte, the pompous
Oronte, and the many social courtiers and French aristocracy make this the ideal story to bring you to tears with laughter.
Moby Dick – Herman Melville (American)
Description: Melville tells the dual story of the initiation of young Ishmael, a schoolteacher, into the life of a seaman, and the tragedy of Captain Ahab's obsession
with the white whale. Another exploration of Melville's perennial themes of good vs. evil and the fundamental isolation of the human condition, MOBY-DICK is a
layered, complex, allusive book that is part rip-roaring adventure tale, part quest, part travel chronicle, part picaresque coming-of-age novel. At the end of the
wrenching narrative, Captain Ahab is killed in his mad attempt to defeat the whale, his ship destroyed, and all hands lost but young Ishmael, who lives to tell the tale
that would make Melville's reputation as one of the greatest American writers.
The Moon and Sixpence – William Somerset Maugham (British)
Description: It tells of Charles Strickland, a conventional London stock broker, who in middle life becomes interested in painting, changes completely in character,
and deserts his wife, family, and business in order to live and paint in Tahiti, where he takes a native mistress.
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe (British)
Description Defoe's 1722 novel about a spirited and oddly appealing ex-prostitute and thief, now reformed, is not only a disturbingly realistic look at London's
underworld, but one of the first works of fiction to explore the interior consciousness of its main character.
– Jonathan Lethem (American)
Description: Under the guise of a detective novel, Lethem has written a more piercing tale of investigation, one revealing how the mind drives on its own "wheels
within wheels."
Mrs. Dalloway – Viginia Woolf (British)
Description: Clarissa Dalloway, in her fifties, wife of an English MP, emerges from her house in Westminster one fine June morning to buy flowers for her party. And
by that simple act she entwines her life with the lives of others who will hear, with her, Big Ben toll away the hours of their destinies that day.
Mrs. Warren’s Profession – George Bernard Shaw (British)
Description: Modern parallels abound in the plight of Cambridge educated mathematics whiz Vivie Warren, who discovers that her comfortable upbringing was
financed in unspeakable ways. Shaw pits his clever heroine against a memorable gallery of rouges in this superbly intelligent & still-shocking comedy.
Murder in the Cathedral – T.S. Eliot (British)
Description: Eliot's most famous play, a poetic religious drama based on the murder of Thomas à Becket, was commissioned for the 1935 Canterbury Festival. It used
ritualistic devices to dramatize the murder, among them a chorus and a long set-piece sermon delivered by Becket at the climax of the play.
Native Son – Richard Wright (American)
Description: Bigger Thomas, a young black man in Chicago, murders two women and is condemned to death. Bigger, whose crimes escalate as the story takes its sad
and terrible course, feels that the act of murder is a kind of existential act, and is the only kind of freedom he has ever known. Wright deliberately avoided making his
protagonist a sympathetic character, wishing to accurately depict the dehumanization of blacks in American society, as well as his belief that Bigger, as a product of
his environment, is not truly guilty of the murders he committed.
Native Speaker – Chang-Rae Lee (American)
Description: Henry Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American--a native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to
elude him, his Korean heritage and language seem to drift further and further away, and Henry fears that in becoming a man of two worlds, he has betrayed both-and belongs to neither.
No-No Boy – John Okada
Description: A searing novel of Japanese-American internment. When the U.S. government began incarcerating its own Japanese-American citizens during World War
II, it asked them two questions: 1) Would they swear unqualified allegiance to the U.S. and defend it from foreign attack, and 2) Would they serve in the U.S. armed
forces? Men who answered "yes - yes" went to fight in special all-Japanese American squads created by FDR. Men who answered "no - no" were branded disloyal and
sent to camp. To say "No," i.e., to deny the validity of the question altogether, was not an option. Okada's searing book tells the story of one young man whose
strongest assertion of himself was a negation of the impossible circumstances he faced.
Northanger Abby – Jane Austen (British)
Description: NORTHANGER ABBEY is about a naive young woman whose head is full of the Gothic novels she onsumes, and who begins to imagine that life may well
be even stranger than fiction. Catherine Morland makes a touching, if somewhat charmingly brainless, heroine; Henry Tilney is a self-possessed and witty hero; and
the plot device in which Catherine sees General Tilney as a black-hearted villain out of a Gothic romance is ingenious and engrossing. In fact, this early work is full of
sustained and sparkling inventiveness, and exhibits the sharp and accurate social observations of Austen's more mature fiction.
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad (British)
Description: In an imaginary South American country, Costaguana, Charles Gould runs a silver
Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham (British)
Description: This novel’s hero is Philip Carey, a sensitive, talented, club-footed orphan who is brought up by an unsympathetic aunt and uncle. It is a study of his
struggle for independence, his intellectual development, and his attempt to become an artist. Philip gets entangled and obsessed by his love affair with Mildred, a
waitress. After years of struggle as a medical student, he marries a nice woman, gives up his aspirations, and becomes a country doctor.
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (American)
Description Steinbeck tells of two ranch hands who drift from job to job, always one stepahead of the law and a few dollars from the poorhouse.
Obasan – Joy Kogawa (Japanese)
Description: In this beautifully written novel, Kogawa takes on alienation, identity and memory in the touching story of a Japanese-Canadian family living through and
beyond World War II's discrimination. When her great-aunt Obasan's husband dies, main character Naomi returns to the home of her childhood to sort through
belongings and take care of details. As other members of her now-fragmented family gather at the house, old memories resurface and bring Naomi into crisis. As she
recalls the luxuriant home of her early childhood, the hardship and enforced moves of World War II, and the desolate, dusty town where her family ended up, Naomi
is forced to confront her past and look closely at her present. There are discoveries, too, to be made, about her once-strong Obasan, her distant brother Stephen, her
long-missing mother and the meaning of love, family and culture.
Old Man and the Sea, The – Ernest Hemingway (American)
Description: In language of great simplicity and power, Hemingway tells the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal--a relentless,
agonizing battle with a marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, considered one of Hemingway's best novels, is a stark portrait of endurance,
and the old man is one of his most fully realized characters.
Optimist’s Daughter, The – Eudora Welty (American)
Description: This story of jealousy and ambition begins when Laurel Hand, a Chicago widow, goes home to Mississippi to visit her sick father. Once there, she
discovers that her father is now married to Fay, a woman younger than herself. Laurel, quiet and demure, and the crass Fay take an immediate dislike to each other,
and their personality clashes are heightened by their competition for the Judge's affections and estate.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel – George Meredith (British)
Description: Sir Austin Feverel’s wife has run off with a poet, leaving him with their son Richard. Sir Austin, arrogant and ignorant, devises a “System” for Richard’s
education, which consists in keeping the boy at home (for schools are corrupting) and in trusting to authoritarian parental vigilance.
Othello – William Shakespeare (British)
Description This is the classic, broody story of Othello, a black general in the army, who loves the beautiful Desdemona.
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens (British)
Description: John Harmon, presumed dead, returns to claim his inheritance--and also to claim Bella Wilfer, the woman his father's will stipulates he must marry.
Wishing to discover Bella's true character, he hides his identity and becomes the secretary to the amiable Boffins, who were second in line to inherit the estate. Mr.
Boffin, by a series of machinations, ensures that Bella appreciates the worth of the "penniless" Harmon--whose real identity is of course revealed in the end, to the
joy of the honest Boffins, who refuse to succumb to the crass materialism displayed by most of the other characters. A scathing critique of the skewed values of midVictorian society, "Our Mutual Friend" is one of Dickens's most powerful, humorous, and appealing novels.
– Roddy Doyle (British)
Description: In Roddy Doyle's novel witty and poignant novel of working-class life in Dublin, 10-year-old Paddy copes with his parents' fights, his earthy neighborhood,
and the trials of his little brother Sinbad. PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA was the winner of the Booker Prize in 1993.
Paradise – Toni Morrison (American)
Description: Morrison's novel--her first since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993--is extraordinary for its breathtaking drive, stylistic panache, and
enlivening moral gravitas. Spanning the time from the Reconstruction to the 1970s, this powerful work deftly manipulates past, present, and future as it reveals the
interior lives of the citizens of a fictional, all-black town called Paradise.
Passage to India, A – E.M. Forster (British)
Description: In Forster's beautifully written novel about British India at the turn of the century, a simple misunderstanding erupts into hostility. The plot centers on
Aziz, a young doctor who is initially tolerant of the British presence in India. However, when he takes a group of Americans to the Caves of Marabar and an American
woman accuses him of raping her, his attitude changes. Imprisoned and then released when the woman recants, Aziz becomes thoroughly disillusioned and a
proponent of a Hindi-Muslim alliance against the British.
Phèdre –Jean Racine (French)
Description: A lean, high-tension version of a classic tragedy. The myth of Phaedra is one of the most powerful in all of classical mythology. As dramatized by the
French playwright Jean Racine (1639-99), the dying Queen's obsessive love for her stepson, Hippolytus, and the scrupulously upright Hippolytus' love for the
forbidden beauty Aricia has come to be known as one of the great stories of tragic infatuation, a tale of love strong enough to bring down a kingdom.
– August Wilson (American)
Description: Set in 1936, The Piano Lesson is a powerful new play from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. A sister and brother
fight over a piano that has been in the family for three generations, creating a remarkable drama that embodies the painful past and expectant future of black
Americans.
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov (Russian/American)
Description: PNIN was the last novel Nabokov wrote in America, in 1957 when he was teaching at Cornell. It is the story of a drab, gentle, lovable failure: Timofey
Pnin, an émigré Russian teacher at a mediocre upstate New York college who fails to get tenure and ultimately loses his job. Pnin's history amusingly resembles what
Nabokov's might have been had he been less brilliant and ambitious.
Point counter Point – Aldous Huxley (British)
Description: Presents a picture of the lives of British upperclass society and London intellectuals during the 1920’s. Frequent allusions to literature, painting, music,
and contemporary British politics occur throughout the book, and much scientific information is embodied in its background.
Portrait of a Lady, The – Henry James (American)
Description: An American heiress newly arrived in Europe, Isabel does not look to a man to furnish her with her destiny; instead she desires, with grace and courage,
to find it herself. Two eligible suitors approach her and are refused. She then becomes utterly captivated by the languid charms of Gilbert Osmond. To him, she
represents a superior prize worth at least 70 thousand pounds; through him, she faces a tragic choice.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A – James Joyce (Brititsh)
Description: Joyce's bildüngsroman--his first novel--traces the development of Stephen Daedalus, Joyce's alter ego. In order to pursue his artistic calling, Stephen, like
Joyce, must reject his family, religion, and native land. At the end of the novel, Stephen is about to forsake Dublin for Paris. Joyce, in PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, was an
early practitioner of the stream-of-consciousness technique, by means of which Stephen's interior life and growing self-awareness are rendered directly, so that the
reader has access not only to his conscious thoughts but to his unconscious as well.
– A.S. Byatt (British)
Description: Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in
1990. "On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession—the lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subject—she is profound,"
said The Sunday Times (London). The New Yorker dubbed it "more fun to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve [and] monstrous richness of detail
[make for] a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types." The novel traces a pair of young academics—Roland Michell and Maud Bailey—as they uncover a
clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and
scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.
The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene (British)
Description: Set in Mexico, this novel describes the desperate last wanderings of a whisky priest as outlaw in his own state, who, despite a sense of his own
worthlessness (he drinks, and has fathered a bastard daughter), is determined to continue to function as a priest until captured.
Praisesong for the Widdow – Paule Marshall (American)
Description: Avatar (Avey) Johnson is a West Indian-American widow in her 60s. Affluent, secure, she has lost touch with her Caribbean origins. After her husband
dies, however, Avey goes on a West Indian cruise and begins having anxious dreams about a great-great-aunt. She makes plans to escape her anxiety by returning to
New York City; while waiting for her flight, she relives memories of her marriage and how distanced she and her husband had both grown even from their own private
ceremonies and gestures. The following day, Avey travels to another island where she participates in an ancestral celebration, and begins a spiritual transformation.
Pudd’nhead Wilson – Mark Twain (American)
Description Mark Twain's classic satirical tale of race and identity. Roxana, a light-skinned slave nurse on a large Southern plantation, is desperate to give her son a
better chance at life than she had ever enjoyed, and so she switches him with the master's son. Years later, when Roxana's real son has turned to gambling, murder,
and theft, it is the country lawyer, Pudd'nhead Wilson, who unmasks the true identity of the two.
Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw (British)
Description: Brilliantly written play, with its theme of the emerging butterfly, is one of the most acclaimed comedies in the English language.
Rabbit, Run – John Updike (American)
Description The highly acclaimed saga of desire and regret, first published in 1959. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is typically Middle American--a small-town Protestant, a
former basketball star, a married man intent on making a name for himself in the community--whose life begins to unravel when he falls in love and deserts his wife.
Caught between his sense of duty and his intimations of life's real depth, he is unable to commit himself to one or the other.
The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence (British)
Description: This multi-generational novel deals with th estrong, vital, passionate Brangwen family, farmers and craftsmen of Nottinghamshire.
Raisin in the Sun – Lorraine Hansberry (American)
Description: The award-winning, now classic drama about a working-class African-American family on the South Side of Chicago--their hopes, their dreams, their
aspirations.
Rapture of Canaan, The – Sheri Reynolds (American)
Description: From the author of Bitterroot Landing--hailed by the Richmond State as "a splendid contribution to Southern literature"--comes a stunning story woven
around the themes of innocence and miracles in everyday life. When the granddaughter of the founder of an isolated religious community in South Carolina is
discovered to be pregnant, no amount of punishment will make her recant her statement that a holy child grows inside her.
The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham (British)
Description: Character study of a young American, a flyer in World War I, who returns to his home in Chicago in 1010, vaguely conscious that he is missing
something. To the horror of the girl who wants to marry him, he will not take a job; he wants to “loaf.” He foes to Paris and then to India in search of his ideal, and
finds a certain measure of personal peace, but succeeds in making life even more difficult for those who have tried to make him lead a conventional life.
Reivers, The – William Faulkner (American)
Description: Faulkner's great comic novel moves on the wheels of breathless suspense. Lucius Priest, Boon Hogganbeck, & Ned McCaslin "borrow" Lucius
grandfather's automobile at the beginning of a hilarious journey that pales in comparison to what awaits the reivers (plunderers or freebooters) in Memphiis. Ned
trades the auto for a most dubious racehorse. How the reivers grapple with the crisis is the mainspring of the story which leads from a brothel to a brush with the law
to the most bizarre horse racing in fact or fiction! The wild humor & the frenetic action will not, however, obscure to the listener that The Reivers, like all of Faulkner's
work, is about moving & tender human relationships & moral insights into human conduct
Remains of the Day, The - Kazo Ishiguro
Description: Ishiguro's subtly observed novel tells the story of a butler who has outlived his usefulness, and whose obtuseness has blinded him not only to the real
nature of his employer but to the workings of his own heart.
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe (British)
Description: The sole survivor on a doomed ship spends twenty-four years on an uninhabited tropical island.
Room with a View, A – E.M. Forster (British)
Description: A classic tale of British middle-class love, this novel displays Forster's skill in contrasting British sensibilities with those of foreign cultures, as he portrays
the love of a British woman for an expatriate living in Italy. One of Forster's earliest and most celebrated works.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Tom Stoppard (British)
Description: This is a most remarkable and thrilling play. In one bound Mr. Stoppard is asking to be considered as among the finest English-speaking writers of our
stage, for this is a work of fascinating distinction....Very funny, very brilliant, very chilling; it has the dust of thought about it and the particles glitter excitingly in the
theatrical air. Mr. Stoppard is not only paraphrasing Hamlet, but also throwing in a paraphrase of Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' for good measure
Saint Joan – George Bernard Shaw (British)
Description: A naive country maid from Domremy obeys voices from God & charms her way to the head of the French army & the coronation of the Dauphin. Her
simplicity confounds a world unready to accept her & is condemned for heresy.
– Salman Rushdie
Description: Banned in India before publication, this immense novel by Booker Prize-winner Rushdie (Midnight's Children) pits Good against Evil in a whimsical and
fantastic tale. Two actors from India, ``prancing'' Gibreel Farishta and ``buttony, pursed'' Saladin Chamcha, are flying across the English Channel when the first of
many implausible events occurs: the jet explodes. As the two men plummet to the earth, ``like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar,'' they argue, sing and are
transformed. When they are found on an English beach, the only survivors of the blast, Gibreel has sprouted a halo while Saladin has developed hooves, hairy legs
and the beginnings of what seem like horns. What follows is a series of allegorical tales that challenges assumptions about both human and divine nature. Rushdie's
fanciful language is as concentrated and overwhelming as a paisley pattern. Angels are demonic and demons are angelic as we are propelled through one illuminating
episode after another.
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (British)
Description: The Dashwood sisters are very different from each other in appearance and temperament; Elinor's good sense and readiness to observe social forms
contrast with Marianne's impulsive candor and warm but excessive sensibility. Both struggle to maintain their integrity and find happiness in the face of a competitive
marriage market.
– Anne Proulx
Description: The protagonist of this novel is a journalist whose wife has been killed with a lover in an automobile accident, leaving him with two small daughters.
Quoyle is "the son of immigrant parents from Newfoundland. . . . An aunt appears, . . . proposing that she, Quoyle, and the girls . . . return to the old family base and
make —or try to make — a living on Quoyle's Point, Capsize Cove, about two miles across the water from Killick-Claw (population 2,000), where the weekly paper
needs somebody to cover shipping news. . . . Quoyle surprises himself by doing well at the Gammy Bird. As he learns the local ropes, . . . he learns things he never
suspected about his forebears."
Shirley – Charlotte Bronte (British)
Description: The scene of the story is Yorkshire, and the period the latter part of the Napoleonic wars, when the wool industry was suffering from the almost
complete cessation of exports. In spite of these conditions, Robert Gerard Moore persists in introducing the latest labor-saving machinery, undeterred by the
opposition of the workers, which culminates in an attempt first to destroy his mill, and finally to take his life. To overcome his financial difficulties, he proposes to
Shirley Keeldar, and heiress of independent spirit, while under the mistaken impression that she is in love with him, he himself loves not her, but his gentle and
retiring cousin Caroline Helstone.
Shipping News, The – Annie E. Proulx (American)
Description: E. Annie Proulx focuses on a Newfoundland fishing town in a tale about a third-rate newspaperman and the women in his life-- his elderly aunt and two
young daughters-- who decide to resettle in their ancestral seaside home. The transformation each of the character undergoes following move is profound. A
vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family.
Silas Marner – George Eliot (British)
Description Falsely accused and embittered, Silas Marner becomes a miser alienated from humanity and who loves only his hoard of money, until a child comes to
him for shelter and redeems him through the power of love. This tale of simple people in small-town England has the unwarranted reputation of being moralistic and
saccharine; it is, in fact, one of George Eliot's most comic, balanced, and moving works of fiction.
Snow Falling on Cedars – David Guterson (Ameerican)
Description: Set on San Piedro, an isolated & ruggedly beautiful island in Puget Sound, where, in 1954, a Japanese-American fisherman is charged with murder.
Around his trial, David Guterson composes a haunting fugue of memory, guilt, & longing, whose themes include the childhood romance between a white boy & a
Japanese girl, a simmering land dispute, & the wartime internment of San Piedro's Japanese residents
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison (American)
Description: In Toni Morrison's powerful 1977 novel, Milkman Dead hears a strange story: his father and his aunt Pilate witnessed their father's murder, and Pilate
has carried his bones around with her for 20 years. Milkman travels south to find that this grandfather (who fled slavery and escaped, creating a myth of flight) has
been immortalized in folktales and songs. He and Pilate bury his bones at last; Pilate is killed; and Milkman is made free and powerful by his newfound connection to
his ancestors. Winner of the 1978 National Book Critics Award.
Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence (British)
Description: SONS AND LOVERS (1913) tells the story of young Paul Morel, son of the troubled union of an educated, upwardly mobile mother and an unlettered coal
miner father. Although in later life Lawrence regretted his brutal portrait of his father, the hero of his novel is most definitely his mother's boy who becomes
increasingly dissatisfied with his mean, impoverished home in a Nottinghamshire coal town. He is drawn to a young woman named Miriam, with whom he reads
poetry and speaks French; his mother fears Paul's attraction to Miriam will jeopardize her own relationship with him, and she succeeds in coming between them. Paul
then begins an affair with Clara, a married woman and a feminist. When Paul's mother becomes fatally ill and dies, Paul rejects his background for good, resolves to
forget both Miriam and Clara, and sets out with renewed resolution on a quest for a life of his own.
Sound in the Fury, The – William Faulkner (American)
Description: THE SOUND AND THE FURY, Faulkner's fourth novel, is his first true masterpiece, and many consider it to be his finest work. It was Faulkner's own
favorite novel, primarily, he says, because it is his "most splendid failure." Depicting the decline of the once aristocratic Compson family, the novel is divided into four
parts, each told by a different narrator.
South Wind – Norman Douglas (British)
Description: Bishop Heard, who serves as an observer and interpreter of the people and their problems, goes to Nepenthe to meet his cousin, Mrs. Meadows, to
escort her and her child to England. The bishop was introduced to Nepenthe society by Don Francesco, a priest he has met on the boat. One of the few
Englishwomen on the island was Miss Wilberforce, who frequently drank to excess and undressed in the streets at odd times of the day and night. Fortunately, the
bishop had developed a tolerant point of view while living among African natives, and he was able to accept these strange characters as he found them.
The Spire – William Golding (British)
Description: The story of Jocelin, Dean of the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary, who is obsessed with the vision of cappin his church with a spire. His master builder
warns him that the foundations cannot support the weight, but Jocelin pays no attention and proceeds with a plan that brings death, madness, but an eventual
triumph.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold – John Le Carre (British)
Description: The story of Alec Leamas, 50-year old professional (secret agent) who has grown stale in espionage, who longs to “come in from the cold” – and how he
undertakes one last assignment before that hoped-for retirement. Over the years Leamas has grown unsure where his workday self ends and his real self begins.
Stone Angel – Carol O’Connell (American)
Description NYPD sergeant Kathleen Mallory travels to the Louisiana town where her mother was stoned to death 17 years earlier to try and uncover the
circumstances surrounding that vicious attack.
– Carol Shields (American)
Description: The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman's life; a truly sensuous novel that reflects and illuminates the unsettled decades of our century. Born in
1905, Daisy Goodwill drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood and old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand
her own role, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her own story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.
Streetcar Named Desire, A – Tennessee Williams (American)
Description: Blanche DuBois, a fading Southern belle, arrives to see her sister Stella in New Orleans. An alcoholic, clinging to the Southern tradition, she criticizes
Stella for losing the family home to marry the rugged and crude Stanley Kowalski. Blanche lives in her own grieving, half-mad fantasy world; this ires Stanley, who
ruins her relationship with another man, rapes her, and further accelerates her descent into madness.
Sula – Toni Morrison (American)
Description: Written by one of the most important novelistsin America today, Sula is a rich and moving novel that traces the lives of two black heroines--from their
growing up together in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.
Sun Also Rises, The – Ernest Hemingway (American)
Description: Hemingway's first bestselling novel, the story of a group of Americans and English on a sojourn from Paris to Paloma, evokes in poignant detail, life
among the expatriates on Paris's Left Bank during the 1920s and conveys in brutally realistic descriptions the power and danger of bullfighting in Spain.
Tale of Two Cities, A – Charles Dickens (British)
Description: The timeless classic of love and sacrifice during the French Revolution! With insight and compassion, Dickens casts his tale with such memorable
characters as the evil Madame Defarge and her knitted patterns of death, the gentle Lucie Manette and her unfailing devotion to her downtrodden father, and the
courageous Sydney Carton, who would give his own love--and life--for a woman that would never be his.
Taming of the Shrew, The – William Shakespeare (British)
Description: In a battle between the sexes, Shakespeare has created a farce filled with practical jokes and sight gags which add fun to the story of how Petruchio tries
to win over Katherina.
Tess of the D’Urbevilles – Thomas Hardy
Description: The tragic history of a woman betrayed. . . Tess, the author contends, is sinned against, but not a sinner; her tragedy is the work of tyrannical
circumstances and of the evil deeds of others in the past and the present, and more particularly of two men’s baseness, the seducer and the well-meaning intellectual
who married her.
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (African)
Description: The bestselling novel of history and change in modern Africa. Obi Okonkwo is a young African Christian living in a missionary town in Nigeria. His religion
sets him at odds with many of his relatives, and tribal warriors in the region try to stir up resentment of the "foreigners" who preach the European religion. At the
same time, Okonkwo feels ill at ease with many of the missionaries. First published in 1959, "Things Fall Apart" is an incisive portrait of the division within the modern
African psyche.
– Jane Smiley (American)
Description: The author of The Age of Grief and Ordinary Love and Good Will has written a breakthrough novel--winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. When an Iowa
patriarch decides to turn over his thriving farm to his three daugters, he sets off a series of tragic events that will eventually rip apart his family.
– Julia Glass (British)
Description: This artfully constructed debut novel is told in three parts, each set in the month of June. As she tells the tales of love, loss, and the bonds between
members of a complicated Scottish family, Julia Glass poignantly explores the role of fate and serendipity in bringing people together, as well as the communication
gaps and shuttered emotions that often keep them apart.
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf (British)
Description: TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is a beautifully written novel in which Woolf fleshes out her notions of reality by using a three-part structure and an elegiac, odelike form to reveal the complexities of family politics. The autobiographical storyline follows Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, their children, an eccentric artist, and a family
friend over the course of many years.
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding (British)
Description: A milestone in the history of the English novel, Tom Jones draws readers into a world teeming with memorable characters. This epic of everyday life
chronicles the adventures of Tom Jones, who was abandoned as an infant and grows into a lusty, imprudent young man. Promising to mend his ways, Tom competes
with an abusive rival for the affections of a wealthy squire's daughter, and learns the truth about his identity, in this discerning comedy of human foibles and selfdiscovery.
Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain (American)
Description: In this classic coming-of-age tale, the hero is not the maverick iconoclast that Huck Finn is; his comic battles with prim conformity are essentially
harmless. In "Tom Sawyer", Twain effectively and lovingly recreates the pastoral world of his Hannibal, Missouri childhood.
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson (British)
Description: Young Jim Hawkins discovers a treasure map in the chest of an old sailor who dies under mysterious circumstances at his mother’s inn. He shows it to
Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawney who agree to outfit a ship and sail to Treasure Island. Among the new crew is the pirate Long John Silver and his followers who are
in pursuit of the treasure.
Turn of the Screw, The – Henry James
Description An innocent, impressionable young governess takes over the education of two delightful children, Flora and Miles, at an isolated country estate. She
becomes convinced that the children's former governess and a valet once employed on the estate--both now dead--have returned and are trying to gain control of
the children's souls. Her hysteria builds to a terrifying and tragic climax. James's novella demonstrates the idea that the horrors concocted by the imagination are far
worse than reality.
Twelfth Night – William Shakespeare (British)
Description: Set in a topsy-turvy world like a holiday revel, this comedy devises a romantic plot around separated twins, misplaced passions, and mistaken identity.
Juxtaposed to it is the satirical story of a self-deluded steward who dreams of becoming "Count Malvolio" only to receive his comeuppance at the hands of the
merrymakers he wishes to suppress. The two plots combine to create a farce touched with melancholy, mixed throughout with seductively beautiful explorations on
the themes of love and time, and the play ends, not with laughter, but with a clown's sad song.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beacher Stowe (American)
Description: This 1852 novel provides a powerful, historical look at the treatment of slaves in the pre-Civil War South.
Unvanquished, The – William Faulkner (American)
Description: The Sartoris family, who embody the antebellum ideal of Southern honor and its transformation through war, defeat, and Reconstruction, are the focal
point of this outstanding novel.
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray (British)
Description: The careers of Becky Sharp, the adventuress, and her husband, Rawdon Crawley, make an apt contrast to the humdrum lives of the good hero and
heroine, Dobbin and Amelia. The nobility, fashionable people about town, the mercantile aristocracy and the needy classes below them, are all portrayed in the most
lifelike way.
The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith (British)
Description: A story of the Vicar, Dr. Primrose, and his six children. The Vicar undergoes a series of terrible trials through no fault of his own, and is eventually
restored to prosperity.
Villette – Charlotte Bronte (British)
Description: The narrator, Lucy Snowe, poor, plain, and friendless, finds herself a post as teacher in a girls’ school in Villette, where she wins the respect of the
capable, if unscrupulous headmistress, Madame Beck, and gains authority over the boisterous girls. She becomes deeply attached to the handsome John Bretton, the
school’s English doctor, in whom she recognizes an acquaintance from her childhood, the son of her own godmother.
– Ha Jin (Asian)
Description: A masterful novel of love and politics. Ha Jin's book could hardly be less theatrical, yet we're immediately engaged by its narrative structure, by its wry
humor and by the subtle, startling shifts it produces in our understanding of the characters and their situation
Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett (European)
Description: A classic of modern theatre and perennial favorite of colleges and high schools. "One of the most noble and moving plays of our generation . . . suffused
with tenderness for the whole human perplexity . . . like a sharp stab of beauty and pain."--The London Times.
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
Description: Against the background of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in the early 1800s, Tolstoy's epic masterwork depicts five families that span the social spectrum-their their love affairs, intellectual struggles, and personal conflicts--and the cataclysmic effects of great events on ordinary people.
Warden, The – Anthony Trollope (British)
Description: The first of Trollope's Barsetshire novels, THE WARDEN explores the ethical dilemma of the Rev. Septimus Harding, the gentle, cello-playing warden of a
charitable home for elderly men. Unjustly accused of receiving money to which he is not entitled, the modest and self-doubting Harding insists on resigning, feeling
that his honor has been tarnished. Meanwhile, his repentant accuser (an overzealous surgeon) marries Rev. Harding's daughter, Eleanor.
Watch that Ends the Night, The – Hugh MacLennan (Canadian)
Description: Very interesting book. Takes you back to the time when the "in" thing to do was to go off and fight for a noble cause. Contains the piece of the Tragically
Hip sound "Courage" in it.
Way of All Flesh – Samuel butler (British)
Description: THE WAY OF ALL FLESH is a thinly disguised account of Butler's own Victorian childhood. Butler began the work in 1872; it was finally published in 1903, a
year after his death. With irony and wit, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning the conventional family-history novel inside-out.
Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster (British)
Description: The domineering Mrs. Herriton dispatches her son Philip and her daughter Harriet to Italy to bring back the baby born of her deceased son's wife Lilia
and an Italian named Gino. Lilia's former chaperone, Caroline, goes with them, hoping to adopt the baby to atone for her laxness in letting Lilia get mixed up with
Gino in the first place. Unexpectedly opposed by Gino, who turns out to be a devoted father, each member of this trio responds to Italy in his or her own way. The
prim Harriet is shocked by the Italians, but Philip and Caroline respond joyfully to their zest for life and freedom. The disputed baby meets a tragic end, Harriet
remains unchanged, but Philip and Caroline return to England changed, renewed, and with a greater appreciation for the spiritual.
Where the Heart Is – Billie Letts (American)
Description: Abandoned by her boyfriend at a Wal-Mart in Oklahoma, Novalee Nation, 17 years old and seven months pregnant, soon discovers the treasures hiding
in this small Southwest town.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Edward Albee (American)
Description: A play about a running fight between a wife and a husband.
Wide Sargasso Sea –Jean Rhys (British)
Description: This novel declares itself to be the history of Mr. Rochester's first wife--the madwoman in the attic in JANE EYRE, described by Charlotte Brontë only as "a
Creole heiress." Rhys (also from the Caribbean) was obsessed for years with the first Mrs. Rochester, and finally felt compelled to do justice to the figure Brontë gave
such short shrift to.
Winter in the Blood – James Welch (American)
Description: The author of Fool's Crow and Indian Lawyer presents an extraordinary, evocative novel about a young Native American coming to terms with his
heritage--and his dreams. "A nearly flawless novel about human life."
Winter of Our Discontent, The – John Steinbeck (American)
Description: Ethan Hawley, descendent of an old and proud New England family, is working as a clerk in a food store owned by a family of Italian immigrants. His wife
is restless and dissatisfied; his teenage children are troubled and discontented, hungry for the material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of
moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards.
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor (American)
Description: Wise Blood is the story of Hazel Motes of Eastrod, Tennessee. He returns from World War II and back at home falls under the spell of street preacher Asa
Hawks and his daughter, Lily Sabbath Hawks.
Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence (British)
Description: Echoing elements of Lawrence's own life, Women in Love delves into the mysteries between men and women as two couples strive for love against a
haunting backdrop of coal mines, factories, and a beleaguered working class.
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (British)
Description: Emily Bronte's novel is about two families in Yorkshire, a brooding Byronic hero, and a love that is stronger than death. WUTHERING HEIGHTS is her only
novel--unless it is true that, upon her death, her sister Charlotte burned the manuscript of another. Drawing on the Gothic tradition, it is a tale of obsession, and tells
the story of Catherine Earnshaw, a wilfull and romantic girl brought up to be a lady, and Heathcliff, the mysterious gypsy orphan. The relationship between these two
remains tempestuous to its end, and affects future generations of these complicated families. The novel's complex structure and point of view were ahead of their
time.
You Are Not a Stranger Here – Adam Haslett (American)
Description: Those setting collection policy in public libraries are often forced to base their decisions on genre alone and will buy a detective novel, for instance, at the
expense of a collection of short stories, especially one by a first-time author. Haslett's debut shows what is wrong with this approach. Courageous and compelling as
any in today's fiction, the despairing characters in these nine stories are all related to someone who has left or will leave them, usually owing to mental illness.
Zoot Suit – Luis Valdez (Hispanic American)
Description: A play by the most recognized and celebrated Hispanic playwright of our times.