The Gap in the Curtain is a supernatural story full of suspense. Guests at a country house party are enabled by an eccentric scientist to see a glimpse of an issue of the Times dated a year ahead of...
Wang Lung, rising from humble Chinese farmer to wealthy landowner, gloried in the soil he worked. He held it above his family, even above his gods. But soon, between Wang Lung and the kindly soil that sustained him, came flood and drought,...
In a brilliant illumination of the Renaissance mind, acclaimed Irish novelist John Banville re-creates the life of Johannes Kepler and his incredible drive to chart the orbits of the planets and the geometry of the universe. Wars, witchcraft, and...
A novel of love and growing up by Andreï Makine, whose bestselling Dreams of My Russian Summerswas hailed by the Los Angeles Timesas one of the "best autobiographical books of the century."
In the immense virgin pine...
In the world of fiction reviewing, extraordinary is an over-used word. Yet there really is no other way to describe Chinese author Xinran's second book, Sky Burial. It is extraordinary in so many ways-the subject matter, the setting, the central...
A whole generation has passed since The Young Lions and The Naked and the Dead, since the appearance of a novel worthy of a place in the literary roll call of the Second World War. Now, in Soldiers of ’44, Sergeant Buell (“Bull”) Docker,...
In the late summer of 1918 the war on the western front is grinding out its final months. The German army’s offensive has stalled; the Austro-Hungarian empire is on its knees; the Russian monarchy has fallen. The new Bolshevik government of...