Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Waiting: A Novel (Vintage International)

Waiting: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Ha Jin

"In Waiting , Ha Jin portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedicated doctor torn by his love for two women: one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family's village. Ha Jin profoundly understands the conflict between the individual and society, between the timeless universality of the human heart and constantly shifting politics of the moment. With... (more)

Cat's Eye

by Margaret Atwood

Returning to the city of her youth for a retrospective of her art, controversial painter Elaine Risley is engulfed by vivid images of the past. Strongest of all is the figure of Cordelia, leader of the trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and... (more)

On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction and from the celebrated author of White Teeth comes another bestselling masterwork Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle , this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, ... (more)

The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an... (more)

In the Heart of the Country: A Novel

by J. M. Coetzee

A novel set in colonial South Africa, where a lonely sheepfarmer makes a bid for private salvation in the arms of a black concubine, while his daughter dreams of and executes a bloody revenge. From the author of DUSKLANDS and WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS.

England, England

by Julian Barnes

Booker Prize Finalist "Wickedly funny." -- The New York Times Imagine an England where all the pubs are quaint, where the Windsors behave themselves (mostly), where the cliffs of Dover are actually white, and where Robin Hood and his merry men really are merry. This is precisely what visionary tycoon, Sir Jack Pitman, seeks to accomplish on the Isle of Wight, a "destination" where tourists can find replicas... (more)

The Ground Beneath Her Feet: A Novel

by Salman Rushdie

In this remaking of the myth of Orpheus, Rushdie tells the story of Vina Apsara, a pop star, and Ormus Cama, an extraordinary songwriter and musician, who captivate and change the world through their music and their romance. Beginning in Bombay in the fifties, moving to London in the sixties, and New York for the last quarter century, the novel pulsates with a half-century of music and celebrates the power rock... (more)

Alias Grace

by Margaret Atwood

Years have passed since Grace was locked up, at the age of 16, for the murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper/lover Nancy Montgomery. Grace claims to have no memory of the murders. Should Dr Simon Jordan, an expert on amnesia, wake the part of Grace's mind which lies dormant?

In a Free State: A Novel (Vintage International)

In a Free State: A Novel (Vintage International)

by V. S. Naipaul

No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives. In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English... (more)

A Bend in the River

by V. S. Naipaul

'Brilliant and terrifying' - "Observer". I had to be the man who was doing well and more than well, the man whose drab shop concealed some bigger operation that made millions. I had to be the man who had planned it all, who had come to the destroyed town at the bend in the river because he had foreseen the rich future. 'Salim, the narrator, is a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast... (more)

Brick Lane: A Novel

by Monica Ali

After an arranged marriage to Chanu, a man twenty years older, Nazneen is taken to London, leaving her home and heart in the Bangladeshi village where she was born. Her new world is full of mysteries. How can she cross the road without being hit by a car (an operation akin to dodging raindrops in the monsoon)? What is the secret of her bullying neighbor Mrs. Islam? What is a Hell's Angel? And how must she comfort... (more)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Perennial Classics)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Perennial Classics)

by Muriel Spark

The elegantly styled classic story of a young, unorthodox teacher and her special--and ultimately dangerous--relationship with six of her students.

The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

Cy Parks is the Electric Michelangelo , an artist of extraordinary gifts whose medium happens to be the pliant, shifting canvas of the human body. Fleeing his mother's legacy -- a consumptives' hotel in a fading English seaside resort -- Cy reinvents himself in the incandescent honky-tonk of Coney Island in its heyday between the two world wars. Amid the carnival decadence of freak shows and roller coasters,... (more)

The Bookshop: A Novel

by Penelope Fitzgerald

In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar... (more)

The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, emerged late in life as one of the most remarkable English writers of the last century. She began her writing career in 1975 at the age of fifty-nine, and over the next two decades she published three biographies, nine novels, and a collection of short stories. Now three of her acclaimed novels are gathered here in one volume. The Bookshop is a postwar tragicomedy of... (more)

The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

In the early 1900s, Bessie Bawtry, a small child with big notions, lives in a South Yorkshire mining town in England. Precocious and refined in a land of little ambition and much mining grime, Bessie waits for the day she can escape the bleak, coarse existence her ancestors had seldom questioned. Nearly a century later Bessie's granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She... (more)

Haweswater

by Sarah Hall

The village of Marsdale is a quiet corner of the world, cradled in a remote dale in England's lovely Lake District. The rhythm of life in the deeply religious, sheltered community has not changed for centuries. But in 1936, when Waterworks representative Jack Ligget from industrial Manchester arrives with plans to build a new reservoir, he brings the much feared threat of impending change to this bucolic hamlet.... (more)

The Map of Love: A Novel

by Ahdaf Soueif

Booker Prize Finalist "Sweeping and evocative--. An unconventional love story."-- The Times (London) With her first novel, In the Eye of the Sun , Ahdaf Soueif garnered comparisons to Tolstoy, Flaubert, and George Eliot. In her latest novel, which was shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, she combines the romantic skill of the nineteenth-century novelists with a very modern sense of culture and... (more)

The Romantic: A Novel

by Barbara Gowdy

When she is nine-years-old, Louise Kirk’s mother disappears, leaving a note that reads only--and incorrectly--"Louise knows how to work the washing machine." It is not long before a strange couple and their adopted son, Abel, move in across the street. Louise quickly grows close with the exotic Mrs. Richter, but saves her stronger, more lasting affections for Mrs. Richter’s intelligent son. From this childhood... (more)

The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World's Religions

The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World's Religions

by Wayne Teasdale

Drawing on experience as an interreligious monk, Brother Wayne Teasdale reveals the power of spirituality and its practical elements. He combines a profound Christian faith with an intimate understanding of ancient religious traditions.

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Top Books

by Ha Jin

by Margaret Atwood

by Zadie Smith

by Doris Lessing

by J. M. Coetzee

by Julian Barnes

by Salman Rushdie

by Margaret Atwood

by V. S. Naipaul

by V. S. Naipaul

by Monica Ali

by Muriel Spark

by Sarah Hall

by Penelope Fitzgerald

by Penelope Fitzgerald

by Margaret Drabble

by Sarah Hall

by Ahdaf Soueif

by Barbara Gowdy

by Wayne Teasdale