Winner Betty Trask award 1992Shortlisted for Booker Prize 1993Set in post-war Hungary between 1944 and 1956, this ferociously funny and bitterly sad story follows the fortunes of two young men in the pursuit of sex and the avoidance...
Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes--each its...
The Magus (1966) is the first novel written (but second published) by British author John Fowles. It tells the story of Nicholas Urfe, a teacher on a small Greek island. Urfe finds himself embroiled in psychological illusions of a master...
The Beach is the most compelling adventure story of the last decade. It tells of a young traveling in Thailand, Richard, who is looking for that special, undiscovered place. When a fellow traveler dies, leaving Richard a map, he thinks he has...
Green remains a dim figure for many Americans. He stopped writing in 1952, at age 47, with just nine novels and a memoir behind him. In the last years of his life-he died in 1973-he became a kind of British Thomas Pynchon, agreeing to be...
A distinguished Shakespearean scholar found tortured to death…A lost manuscript and its secrets buried for centuries…An encrypted map that leads to incalculable wealth…The Washington Post called Michael Gruber's previous work...
Chaz Wilmot is a painter born outside his time. He possesses a virtuosic command of the techniques of the old masters. He can paint like Leonardo, Goya, Gainsborough-artists whose works sell for millions-but this style of painting is no longer...
'So I was the 6787th person in Beijing wanting to act in the film and TV industry. There were 6786 young and beautiful, or ugly and old people before me trying to get a role. I felt the competition, but compared with 1.6 billion people in China,...
In a snowbound village in the German mountains, a young woman discovers an extraordinary secret. Before she can reveal it, she disappears. All that survives is a picture of a mysterious medieval playing card that has perplexed scholars for...
In Joseph Heller's two best novels, Catch 22 and Something Happened, the narrative circles obsessively around a repressed memory that it is the stories' business finally to confront. We feel the tremors of its eventual eruption in each book even...