Rama, a young scholar, meets Madeleine at a university in France. Though they seem to be made for each other, at times they are divided, a huge cultural gulf separating them. Can they preserve their identities, or must one sacrifice one s...
Skipper, an ex-World War II naval Lieutenant and the narrator of Second Skin, interweaves past and present — what he refers to as his "naked history" — in a series of episodes that tell the story of a volatile life marked by pitiful losses, as...
Your Face Tomorrow, Javier Marías's daring novel in three parts culminates triumphantly in this much-anticipated final volume. Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, with its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, with its wit and...
Halfway into Michael Ondaatje's new novel, Anil's Ghost, there is a scene so quietly devastating that it alone makes the novel worth reading. It is the mid-1980s, and a civil war is raging on the tiny island nation of Sri Lanka. Each day, fresh...
In an era when everything is an event, and nothing just happens naturally, it's hard not to be suspicious of the a novel that is the first ever to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, by a Russian émigré who has been compared...
From preface: In naming this second part of The Forsyte Chronicles "A Modern Comedy" the word Comedy is stretched, perhaps as far as the word Saga was stretched to cover the first part. And yet, what but a comedic view can be taken, what but...
Rory Connor was a gambling man and he had a gambler’s luck. From the day he was born, his mother had known that Rory would be the one to make something of his life. At seven years old he was earning money from odd jobs and by fourteen, he was in...
From Publishers Weekly
South African novelist Coetzee takes Fyodor Dostoyevski as his protagonist in a novel set amidst the political ferment of 19th-century Russia.
From Library Journal
St. Petersburg is poised for revolution as Fyodor...