Set in Mexico in the 1920s, this picaresque tale of a laconic American drifter overlays a powerful study of social injustice. Great storytellers often arise like Judaic just men to exemplify and rehearse the truth for their generation. The...
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell née Stevenson (1810–1865), often referred to simply as Mrs. Gaskell, was an English novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. She is perhaps best known for her biography of Charlotte...
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...
By NASA’s best guess, the crew of Apollo 8 are an even money chance of dying.
A long list of things could go catastrophically wrong as they attempt to park their supersonic spacecraft into stable lunar orbit.
But they get it done, paving...
"The Scarecrow" is the final volume of Ibrahim al-Koni's Oasis trilogy, which chronicles the founding, flourishing, and decline of a Saharan oasis. Fittingly, this continuation of a tale of greed and corruption opens with a meeting of the...
The young Dutch geologist Alfred Issendorf is determined to win fame for making a great discovery. To this end he joins a small geological expedition, which travels to the far North of Norway, where he hopes to prove a series of craters were caused...
Set at a boardinghouse in rural New Jersey in the summer of 1939, this novel revolves around four people who experience the comedies, torments and rare pleasures of family, romance and sex while on vacation from Brooklyn and the Depression. Billy...
Young Peony is sold into a rich Chinese household as a bondmaid — an awkward role in which she is more a servant, but less a daughter. As she grows into a lovely, provocative young woman, Peony falls in love with the family's only son. However,...