She likes to do the same as me: Take the structure of a potboiler/page-turner and see how far below the surface you can go. It's a contemporary, accessible, entertaining thriller—but so much more. There are lots of layers to this juicy tome, and it's insanely well-written. Keeps you thinking long after finishing. The movie’s pretty good too!
THE ADDICTIVE No.1 BESTSELLER AND INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON OVER 20 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE THE BOOK THAT DEFINES PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER
Who are you? What have we done to each other?
These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they weren't made by him. And then there are the persistent calls on…
I know Hemingway has fallen out of wokeness, but it's the original Lost Generation/Gen-X/Emo book about being young and partying through life (across Europe) while wondering what the hell does it all really mean? Toss a doomed love story and running with bulls in there, too and you have a classic.
Jake Barnes is a man whose war wound has made him unable to have sex—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Jake is an expatriate American journalist living in Paris, while Brett is a twice-divorced Englishwoman with bobbed hair and numerous love affairs, and embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. The novel is a roman à clef: the characters are based on real people in Hemingway's circle, and the action is based on real events, particularly Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s and a trip to Spain in 1925 for the Pamplona festival and fishing in the…
Her haunting classic that was always both on point and ahead of its time. Beloved was her big hit, but this was always my favorite. It’s sparse and slim—you can read it in a day—but it lingers with you. Made this young teenage white boy really think about race at a time when it was the furthest thing from my mind.
Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio.
Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterised her writing.
Chaucer may have invented the short story collection but James Joyce took them to untouched heights with this visceral and poignant work. Never a fan of his novels which I found way too dense, I think his lyrical style works best when tightly focused and restrained as in this book. Includes both "Araby" and "The Dead" - two of the five best short stories ever written (the other three are: The Lottery by Shirley Jackson; A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Hemingway; and Murder in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe)
A definitive edition of perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language
James Joyce's Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of "dear dirty Dublin" at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as "Araby," "Grace," and "The Dead," delve into the heart of the city of Joyce's birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners' speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and most profound, and this edition is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from…
His masterpiece and, in my opinion, the best novel of the 20th century. Yes, keeping track of all the names is a chore, but the magical realism will whisk you away and envelop you. How can you go wrong with a novel whose opening line is: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
Thailand. The Congo. Greece. Spain. America... Four continents and forty-plus years in the making.
The Man Who Screams at Nightfall is a landmark collection of short stories depicting a young man on a classic voyage of self-discovery, wandering the earth in search of some purpose in life. From childhood to parenthood and everything in between—these tales are raw and unflinching; at other times, poignant and moving. Get ready for a literary journey unlike any you've experienced before.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
