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Under the Tuscan Sun
At Home in Italy
by Frances Mayes
Frances Mayes--widely published poet, gourmet cook, and travel writer--opens the door to a wondrous new world when she buys and restores an abandoned villa in the spectacular Tuscan countryside. In sensuous and evocative language, she brings the reader along as she discovers the beauty and simplicity of life in Italy. An accomplished cook and food writer, Mayes also creates dozens of delicious seasonal recipes... (more)
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Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
Willa Cather's best known novel; a narrative that recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.
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Correcting the Landscape
by Marjorie Kowalski Cole
The editor of a small weekly newspaper in Fairbanks, Alaska, Gus Traynor is an independent spirit whose idealism has survived numerous tests. When big business interests threaten the breathtaking wilderness he cherishes, he joins forces with his best friend—an often self-serving developer—to take on the forces of progress. Soon, in his determination to preserve the dignity and heritage of his community, Gus is... (more)
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The Shadow of the Sun
by Ryszard Kapuściński
In 1957, Ryszard Kapuściński arrived in Africa to witness the beginning of the end of colonial rule as the first African correspondent of Poland's state newspaper. From the early days of independence in Ghana to the ongoing ethnic genocide in Rwanda, Kapuściński has crisscrossed vast distances pursuing the swift, and often violent, events that followed liberation. Kapuściński hitchhikes with caravans, wanders the... (more)
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The Soccer War
by Ryszard Kapuściński
Original Polish title: "Wojna futbolowa".Part diary and part reportage, The Soccer War is a remarkable chronicle of war in the late twentieth century. Between 1958 and 1980, working primarily for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuscinski covered twenty-seven revolutions and coups in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Here, with characteristic cogency and emotional immediacy, he recounts the stories... (more)
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The Painted Veil
by W. Somerset Maugham
Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, The Painted Veil is the story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic. Stripped of the British society of her youth and the small but effective society she fought so hard to attain in Hong Kong, she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess... (more)
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A House in Corfu: A Family's Sojourn in Greece
by Emma Tennant
This book is the story of Emma Tennant's parent's house, Rovinia, set above the bay in Corfu where legend has it Ulysses was shipwrecked and found by Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous. It is also the story of people like Maria, a miraculous cook and the presiding spirit of the house, and her husband, Thodoros, and of the inhabitants of the local village, high on the hill above the bay. Full of color and... (more)
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The Contract Surgeon
by Dan O'Brien
This beautifully written historical novel from one of the West's most popular writers tells the true story of the friendship between Valentine McGillicuddy, a young doctor plucked from his prestigious medical career and newly married wife to serve in the army during the Great Sioux War, and the great chief Crazy Horse. When Crazy Horse finally agrees to surrender to the United States, mistrust and treachery on... (more)
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Meaningful Life
by L. J. Davis
L.J. Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life , is a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption through real estate and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Davis’s novel, heads to New York, where he plans to make it big as a writer. Instead he finds a job as a technical editor, at which he toils away while passion leaks out of... (more)
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A Sicilian Romance
by Ann Radcliffe
In A Sicilian Romance (1790) Ann Radcliffe began to forge the unique mixture of the psychology of terror and poetic description that would make her the great exemplar of the Gothic novel, and the idol of the Romantics. This early novel explores the cavernous landscapes and labyrinthine passages of Sicily's castles and convents to reveal the shameful secrets of its all-powerful aristocracy.
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Heyday
by Kurt Andersen
Heyday is a brilliantly imagined, wildly entertaining tale of America’s boisterous coming of age–a sweeping panorama of madcap rebellion and overnight fortunes, palaces and brothels, murder and revenge–as well as the story of a handful of unforgettable characters discovering the nature of freedom, loyalty, friendship, and true love. In the middle of the nineteenth century, modern life is being born: the... (more)
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The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards
Kim Edwards’ stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother’s silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has Down Syndrome and makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives forever. He asks his... (more)
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Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come. This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to... (more)
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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, two very different magicians emerge to change England’s history. In the year 1806, with the Napoleonic Wars raging on land and sea, most people believe magic to be long dead in England — until the reclusive Mr. Norrell reveals his powers, and becomes a celebrity overnight. Soon, another practicing magician comes forth: the young, handsome and daring Jonathan Strange. He... (more)
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The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it--from garden seeds to Scripture--is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic... (more)
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The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the... (more)
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My Ántonia
by Willa Cather
Willa Cather, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, considered My Ántonia to be one of her best works, and critic H.L. Mencken claimed it was one of the best American novels ever written. Published in 1918, the novel compassionately and intimately traces the story of a Bohemian family as they settle on the Great Plains in Nebraska. This American classic is still lauded internationally by scholars and everyday readers.
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Dr. Laszlo Kreizler: Book 1
The Alienist
by Caleb Carr
The year is 1896, the place, New York City. On a cold March night, New York Times reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned to the East River by his friend and former Harvard classmate Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist, or "alienist." On the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, they view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy, a prostitute from one of Manhattan's infamous brothels.The newly... (more)
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Canon of Sherlock Holmes: Book 5
The Hound of the Baskervilles
by Arthur Conan Doyle
What's the real truth behind the legend of the hound of the Baskervilles? Is it really a devil-beast with crushing teeth and supernatural strength that's haunting the lonely moors? And also understand the human plot behind the hound of the Baskervilles...
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The Memory of Running
by Ron McLarty
Every decade seems to produce a novel that captures the public’s imagination with a story that sweeps readers up and takes them on a thrilling, unforgettable ride. Ron McLarty’s The Memory of Running is this decade’s novel. By all accounts, especially his own, Smithson "Smithy" Ide is a loser. An overweight, friendless, chain-smoking, forty-three-year-old drunk, Smithy’s life becomes completely unhinged... (more)

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