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"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974." So begins Middlesex, the riveting story of a hermaphrodite named Calliope Stephanides, written by the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides. Middlesex won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
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In this postapocalyptic novel, a father and son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other.
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In this candid memoir, Poitier recounts the inspiring story of his rise from childhood poverty in the Bahamas to a life marked by grace, success, and material and spiritual riches.
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Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps.
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This exclusive 3-volume boxed edition contains Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August, as well as a special reader's guide with an introduction by Oprah Winfrey.
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This great modern classic depicts life in China at a time before the vast political and social upheavals transformed an essentially agrarian country into a world power. Nobel Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life—its terrors, its passions, its ambitions, and its rewards.
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Vladimir Nabokov called Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina "one of the greatest love stories in world literature." Set in imperial Russia, Anna Karenina is a rich and complex meditation on passionate love and disastrous infidelity.
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McCullers tells the story of young Mick Kelly, a 12-year-old girl growing up during the Great Depression. Mick is a gifted pianist--as was McCullers--who longs to escape her dreary Georgia town and find a career in music. In her alienation from her surroundings, she finds comfort in befriending a deaf-mute, John Singer, who lives in her family's boarding house. The ironically named Singer is devastated when his only real friend--another deaf-mute--goes mad and is institutionalized.
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A beguiling mix of politics, magic, romance, and sex, the saga of the mysterious history of the Buendia family of the village of Macondo does nothing less than recapitulate the entire history of the human race.
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Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s.
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This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel awakened the American reading public to the plight of migrant workers and made Steinbeck famous worldwide. One of the most popular novels of the Great Depression, it has come to be regarded as a classic work of social realism and was made into an acclaimed movie.
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An epic novel spanning five generations travels from haunted Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, to the bloody battlefields of World War I, to the emerging 1920s New York City jazz scene, telling a story of inescapable family bonds, attempted murder, and forbidden love.
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The eagerly awaited novel from the author of the award-winning Such a Long Journey is set in India in the mid-1970s. A "State of Internal Emergency" has been declared, and in the days of bleakness and hope that follow, four disparate people find their lives becoming unexpectedly and inextricably entwined.
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The Lambert family isn't doing well. Alfred has Parkinson's disease and a bad case of alienation from his wife, Enid. Gary is a banker with a heart of steel. Chip is in New York City trying to find himself, but losing the battle. And Denise is stuck in a destructive affair with someone very unsuitable. Enid is hoping to steal away with Alfred for a long-postponed cruise, but as things start to spiral out of control, the Lamberts must examine where they are, where they have been, and what exactly it means to be a family in the latter half of the 20th century.
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Mingling historical fact with fiction, Lalita Tademy's epic novel is based on the lives of four generations of African American women and is the result of years of exhaustive research and an obsessive odyssey to uncover her family's past.
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Malika Oufkir was born into extreme privilege as the daughter of the king of Morocco's closest aide. But in 1972, her life of luxury came to a crashing halt. Her father was executed for attempting to assassinate the king, and she and her family were imprisoned for two decades. Stolen Lives is the story of their resilience and their resolve to live in freedom.
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Set in 1956, this is the story of Icy, a 10-year-old girl with Tourette's syndrome who has been raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky by her grandparents. She does her best to hide the jerks and spasms brought on by her disorder, but the other kids call her the Frog Child, and eventually Icy is sent to a children's asylum. Upon her return, she meets the eccentric Miss Emily, who assists her in assimilating into the world again.
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In upstate New York, the Mulvaneys are a wealthy and magnetic family--attractive, charismatic, promising. But after 25 years, the family begins to slide, then fragment, then shatter, and soon there is nothing left of the dynasty. Judd, the youngest of the clan, begins to search for the reasons behind the downfall, and as he uncovers family secrets, he begins to bring the Mulvaneys slowly back together in a spirit of healing and compassion.
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This second novel by Andre Dubus 3rd (son of acclaimed writer Andre Dubus) is about an Iranian immigrant who stumbles into a complex struggle over the possession of a California house with the down-on-her-luck woman who used to own it and the sheriff who is in love with her.
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The year is 1919, and--for reasons that eventually become clear--Amanda Starkey leaves the big city to go home and live with her sister Mattie, whose husband has been wounded in World War I and has not yet returned. Mattie drowns in the pond just before Carl, her husband, returns, leaving their little girl, Ruth, whose upbringing is eventually shared between Amanda and Carl. The truth about Mattie`s drowning eventually emerges, along with other buried secrets, as Carl and Amanda struggle to forge some kind of family and future for Ruth.
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