Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Final, Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey

The Final, Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey

by Patrick O'Brian

At the time of his death, Patrick O'Brian had begun to write a novel to follow on from Blue at the Mizzen. These are the chapters he had completed of the final voyage of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin -- the greatest friendship of modern literature THE FINAL VOYAGE OF JACK AUBREY...with a FOREWORD by William Waldegrave. The story picks up from the end of Blue at the Mizzen when Jack Aubrey receives the news, in... (more)

The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel

by Andrew Sean Greer

"We are each the love of someone's life." So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli , a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other. Born with the physical appearance of an elderly man, Max grows older mentally like any child, but his body appears to age backwards, growing younger every year. And yet, his physical curse proves to be a blessing, allowing him to try to win the heart of the same woman... (more)

A Bone From a Dry Sea (21st Century Reference)

A Bone From a Dry Sea (21st Century Reference)

by Peter Dickinson

Two parallel stories present a young prehistoric female who is instrumental in advancing her people and a modern-day girl who joins her father, a paleontologist, in discovering important fossil remains in Africa. Reprint. AB. NYT. SLJ. H.

I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe, the master social novelist of our time, the spot-on chronicler of all things contemporary and cultural, presents a sensational new novel about life, love, and learning--or the lack of it--amid today's American colleges. Our story unfolds at fictional Dupont University: those Olympian halls of scholarship housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with... (more)

I feel like the Morning StarGregory Maguire

I feel like the Morning Star

by Gregory Maguire

Three teenagers in a post-holocaust survival colony find that their shelter has become a prison and decide to break out.

The Bridges of Madison County

by Robert James Waller

Robert Kincaid, a photographer and free spirit, and Francesca Johnson, the farm wife waiting for the fulfillment of a girlhood dream, reveal what it is like to love and be loved so intensely that life is never the same again. Reprint."

The King in the Tree : Three Novellas

by Steven Millhauser

From the author of Edwin Mullhouse and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Martin Dressler : three dazzling novellas about the many shapes of love. “Revenge” is a tour de force about erotic love and betrayal, told through the voice of a woman showing her home to a stranger with a disturbing secret. As the once-happy wife moves from living room to bedroom, she insinuates herself into her guest’s (and the reader’s)... (more)

Troilus and Cressida

by William Shakespeare

With new editors who have incorporated the most up-to-date scholarship, this revised Pelican Shakespeare series will be the premiere choice for students, professors, and general readers well into the twenty-first century. Each volume features: • Authoritative, reliable texts • High quality introductions and notes • New, more readable trade trim size • An essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare and essays... (more)

What If?

The World's Foremost Historians Imagine What Might Have Been

by Robert Cowley, Stephen Ambrose

Historians and philosophers alike have pondered the crucial turning points of history-events that forever altered the course of civilization, and set the stage for the world in which we live today. In these essays, some of the most respected minds of our time ask the question "What If..." George Washington had never made his miraculous escape from the British on Long Island in the dawn of August 29, 1776? ... (more)

Dawn of Empire: A Novel

by Sam Barone

Five millennia ago, on the eastern bank of the river Tigris, the course of human history changed forever . . . The people of Orak cherish their peaceful village and the life they have made. Though not proficient with the bow or sword, they possess a weapon far stronger: the ability to coax food from the ground. This is why the barbarian leader Thutmose-sin hates and fears them. As his marauding clan of... (more)

The War Prayer (Harper Colophon Books)

by Mark Twain

Written by Mark Twain during the Philippine-American War in the first decade of the twentieth century, The War Prayer tells of a patriotic church service held to send the town's young men off to war. During the service, a stranger enters and addresses the gathering. He tells the patriotic crowd that their prayers for victory are double-edged-by praying for victory they are also praying for the destruction of the... (more)

Promised to Me (COMING TO AMERICA)

by Robin Lee Hatcher

After a wait of over ten years, Karola Breit finally receives word from her betrothed in America to join him, but then she discovers that he’s a recent widower with two children. Books four of the Coming to America Series.

No Country for Old Men

by Cormac McCarthy

In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of his famed Border Trilogy . The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When... (more)

The Border Trilogy: Book 2

The Crossing

by Cormac McCarthy

In The Crossing , Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth. In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to... (more)

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

by Janna Levin

Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems sent shivers through Vienna’s intellectual circles and directly challenged Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dominant philosophy. Alan Turing’s mathematical genius helped him break the Nazi Enigma Code during WWII. Though they never met, their lives strangely mirrored one another—both were brilliant, and both met with tragic ends. Here, a mysterious narrator intertwines these parallel... (more)

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less

by Terry Ryan

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry, and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s. Standing up to the church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated ideas about women, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for innovation, all the while raising her six sons and four daughters with the... (more)

V for Vendetta: From Script to Film

A comprehensive behind-the-scenes chronicle of the movie V for Vendetta , which is based on the popular cult graphic novel of the same name. V for Vendetta: From Script to Film will contain production ephemera including: storyboard art, character sketches, original script, still photos, and art from the original graphic novel. V for Vendetta: From Script to Film will also contain observations by reclusive... (more)

The Tango Singer: A Novel

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

A hypnotic novel in which an American student’s quest to find the greatest living tango singer leads him deep into the labyrinth of Argentina ’s past. It is 2001, and inflation is spiraling out of control in Argentina as Bruno Cadogan, an American graduate student specializing in Borges, arrives in Buenos Aires. Cadogan is on the trail of Julio Martel, an elusive tango singer rumored to be even better than... (more)

Dead in Dixie

by Charlaine Harris

Becoming Madame MaoAnchee Min

Shelfari Book Activity

Browse Subjects: historical fiction

Top Books

by Patrick O'Brian

by Andrew Sean Greer

by Peter Dickinson

by Tom Wolfe

by Gregory Maguire

by Robert James Waller

by Steven Millhauser

by William Shakespeare

The World's Foremost Historians Imagine What Might Have Been

by Robert Cowley, Stephen Ambrose

by Sam Barone

by Mark Twain

by Robin Lee Hatcher

by Cormac McCarthy

by Cormac McCarthy

by Janna Levin

by Terry Ryan

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

by Charlaine Harris

by Anchee Min