Dan Fesperman has made a living by writing about dangerous and unseemly people and places since his days as a journalist, when he was a foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. Now traveling on his own dime, his books draw upon his experiences in dozens of countries and three war zones. His novels have won two Dagger awards in the UK and the Dashiell Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers. His thirteenth novel, Winter Work, will be published in July by Knopf. He lives in Baltimore.
The Double Game is a spy novel, but it's also about the power of books, and their enduring hold on our imaginations. The main character, Bill Cage, grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, coming of age as a foreign service brat whose father moved them from city to city -- Berlin, Prague, Budapest and Vienna. He learned about these new homes partly by reading his dad's vast collection of spy novels.
Years later, as an up-and-coming journalist, Cage interviews his favorite author, spy-turned-novelist Edwin Lemaster, who reveals that while working for the CIA in those same cities that he'd briefly considered spying for the enemy. The story creates a brief stir, but more than two decades later Cage receives an anonymous note hinting that he should have dug deeper.
What's not to like when the main character is a self-styled "book detective" making his way through the hidden passages and darker alleys of the world of rare antiquarian books? Lucas Corso seeks to authenticate an old manuscript by Alexander Dumas, but his quest takes an eerie turn as the events and characters he encounters along the way begin to replicate those found in Dumas's fiction. This delightful 1993 novel was meta before meta was cool, and is deeply rewarding for any bibliophile.
#1 International Bestseller"A thriller of marvelous intricacy" (The New York Times Book Review), The Club Dumas is a provocative literary thriller that playfully pays tribute to classic tales of mystery and adventure.Lucas Corso is a book detective, a middle-aged mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found dead, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters…
Part memoir, part history, and part true crime story, this non-fiction gem is the author's love letter to the public library -- as a concept, as a gathering place, and as a priceless repository for books and knowledge. She builds her tale around the 1986 arson fire that burned down the Los Angeles Public Library, and the library's subsequent rebuilding and renaissance.
Susan Orlean’s bestseller and New York Times Notable Book is “a sheer delight…as rich in insight and as varied as the treasures contained on the shelves in any local library” (USA TODAY)—a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries. “Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book” (The Washington Post).
On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished,…
One of my favorite novels of any type or genre, this book gives us the story of two lonely and obsessive literary scholars, would-be competitors whose lives and work intertwine as they pursue the long-buried secrets of what they suspect may have been a forbidden love affair between two Victorian poets, more than a century earlier. Rich in wit, style and intellectual pleasures, this winner of the 1990 Booker Prize will keep you turning the pages even as it dazzles with its knowledge and depth.
Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.
Bennett offers a cheeky take on the power of reading with this whimsical but keenly observed novel in which Queen Elizabeth, while searching for a wayward corgi, stumbles upon a bookmobile parked outside Buckingham Palace. To be royally polite she checks out a novel, begins reading it later, and soon finds herself craving another. This quickly leads to a reading habit bordering on obsession, as the world inside her mind begins to broaden more than she could have imagined.
It was the corgis' fault. When they strayed through the grounds of Buckingham Palace, the Queen discovered the City of Westminster travelling library. The Queen has never had much time for reading - pleasure has always come second place to duty - though now that one is here I suppose one ought to borrow a book. She is about to discover the joys of literature, albeit late in life. One book leads to another and the Queen is soon engrossed in the delights of reading. However, this uncommon reader creates an uncommon problem. The royal household dislikes the Queen's new…
As rich, dense, and dark as a chocolate fudge layer cake, this is a novel to luxuriate in. With great precision and grim historical detail, Eco escorts you into the heart of a murderous medieval conspiracy involving the printing, reading, hoarding, and control of books and manuscripts at a 14th-century Benedictine abbey, in an era when some of the world's most enticing knowledge was jealously kept under wraps, making it dangerous enough to kill for.
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective.
William collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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