Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

In 1948, a nineteen-year-old pearl diver's dreams of spending her life combing the waters of Japan’s Inland Sea are shattered when she discovers she has leprosy. By law, she is exiled to an island leprosarium, where she is stripped of her dignity and instructed to forget her past. Her name is erased from her family records, and she is forced to select a new one. To the two thousand patients on the island of... (more)

To Sir With Love

by E. R. Braithwaite, Edward Ricardo Braithwaite

The author's experiences as a teacher in the slums of London.

Wij waren allemaal goden; De Tour van 1948

Wij waren allemaal goden; De Tour van 1948

by Benjo Maso

1984

by George Orwell

George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision of "Negative Utopia" is timelier than ever-and its warnings more powerful.

Cry, the Beloved Country

by Alan Paton

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or valley. For fear will rob him of all if... (more)

The Loved One

by Evelyn Waugh

The more startling for the economy of its prose and plot, this novel's story, set among the manicured lawns and euphemisms of Whispering Glades Memorial Park in Hollywood, satirizes the American way of death and offers Waugh's memento mori.

A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this bestselling and critically acclaimed new work by "one of Israel's most gifted and prolific authors" (Helen Epstein, The Forward) is at once a family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history. It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small... (more)

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Tags: 1948

The Pearl Diver

by Jeff Talarigo