It is 1839 and tension has been rapidly mounting between China and British India following the crackdown on opium smuggling by Beijing. With no resolution in sight, the colonial government declares war.
One of the vessels requisitioned...
The latest masterpiece — perceptive, funny, insightful, affecting — from the Nobel Prize — winning author.
Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s newest novel, The Discreet Hero, follows two fascinating characters...
All Dan wanted was to be a good husband and father, to provide for his wife and daughter, to keep them fed, warm, and safe. But then the malevolent godlike beings called the Masters arrived, and their darkness spread across the world, reshaping...
Set in Provence during the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, the Black Death in the 14th century, and World War II, this novel follows the fortunes of three men — a Gallic aristocrat, a poet and an intellectual who joins the Vichy...
Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe.
'Twas the night (okay, more like...
London, 1936. Gordon Comstock has declared war on the money god; and Gordon is losing the war. Nearly 30 and ‘rather moth-eaten already,’ a poet whose one small book of verse has fallen ‘flatter than any pancake,’ Gordon has given up a...
Mixing fiction, history, psychoanalysis, and personal fantasy, "Teresa, My Love" follows Sylvia Leclercq, a French psychoanalyst, academic, and incurable insomniac, as she falls for the sixteenth-century Saint Teresa of Avila and becomes consumed...
Eimear McBride's debut tells, with astonishing insight and in brutal detail, the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an...
Stunned by his mother's recent death and appalled by the way his father sleepwalks through life, Jerry Renault, a New England high school student, ponders the poster in his locker — Do I dare disturb the universe?
Part of his universe is...
Jude The Obscure, an almost unbearably sad story about love and sexual desire mapped into the peculiar English matrixes of class and destiny in the Victorian 19th century, has come to be recognized as one of Hardy's most important novels. It tells...