Readings.com.au: American Fiction 20th Century

The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western

In the early years of the 20th Century, a huge Victorian mansion stands isolated from the world in the Dead Hills of Eastern Oregon.

It is home to Professor Hawkline, his beautiful daughters, and the secret laboratory that lies hidden in the basement deep beneath the house. But something has gone horribly wrong with the professor’s experiments. He has disappeared and the monster he has unwittingly created is loose somewhere in Hawkline Manor.

So the Hawkline sisters send for professional killers to destroy the monster and rescue their father from oblivion. But even as the hired gunslingers plot its destruction, the Hawkline Monster howls and roars while its diabolic blend of mischief and evil takes hold.

Cloudsplitter

Owen Brown is the last surviving son of America's most famous political terrorist, John Brown, who in 1859 raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, intending to galvanise the Southern slaves into rebellion. Now Owen tells John's story.

This incredible novel recreates pre-Civil War America, when slavery was tearing the country apart, and tells of one man's passage from abolitionist to guerrilla fighter and, finally, martyr.

Herzog

Is Moses Herzog losing his mind? His formidable wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend and he is left alone with his whirling thoughts, yet he still sees himself as a survivor, raging against private disasters and those of the modern age. His head buzzing with ideas, he writes frantic, unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, the living and the dead, revealing the spectacular workings of his labyrinthine mind and the innermost secrets of his troubled heart.

A masterpiece...Herzog's voice, for all its wildness and strangeness and foolishness, is the voice of a civilization, our civilization' The New York Times Book Review

Year Of Pleasures

A woman rediscovers meaning in life - a rich and deeply satisfying novel by the bestselling author of THE ART OF MENDING and OPEN HOUSE. When Betta Nolan's husband dies, she honours a promise she made to him to move to a small town and start a new life. Without minimizing her great sorrow, she nevertheless attempts to find pleasure on a daily basis. The Year of Pleasures is about deliberately acknowledging the solace found in ordinary things: a warm bath, good food, the beauty of nature, music, art found in museums and in gardens. Above all, it is about the various kindnesses people can and do offer one another. Betta's journey from grief to joy is an inspiring reminder of what is available to us all, regardless of our life circumstances. It suggests that no matter who we lose, life can still give bountifully to those who will receive.

Tooth And Claw

This new collection of short stories from T.C. Boyle finds him at his mercurial best. Inventive, wickedly funny, sometimes disturbing, these are stories about drop-outs, deadbeats and kooks. Take the man who shares his apartment with a wildcat won in a drunken bet; the drive-time shock jock hallucinating from sleep deprivation for a publicity stunt; the suburban woman who joins a pack of dogs, eating rabbits and baying at the moon. With a unique deftness of touch and a keen eye for the telling detail, Boyle has mapped the strange underworld of America.

In Watermelon Sugar

In Watermelon Sugar is an hypnotic novel about a group of people living in a commune, supporting themselves by making things out of watermelon sugar.

Good Earth

Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there," wrote Pearl Buck. In The Good Earth she presents a graphic view of a China when the last emperor reigned and the vast political and social upheavals of the twentieth century were but distant rumblings for the ordinary people. This moving, classic story of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his selfless wife O-lan is must reading for those who would fully appreciate the sweeping changes that have occurred in the lives of the Chinese people during this century.

Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life: its terrors, its passions, its ambitions and rewards. Her brilliant novel -- beloved by millions of readers -- is a universal tale of the destiny of man.

Tales Of Ordinary Madness

With Bukowski, the votes are still coming in. There seems to be no middle ground-people seem either to love him or hate him. Tales of his own life and doings are as wild and weird as the very stories he writes. In a sense, Bukowski was a legend in his time . . . a madman, a recluse, a lover . . . tender, vicious . . . never the same . . . these are exceptional stories that come pounding out of his violent and depraved life . . . horrible and holy, you cannot read them and ever come away the same again.

Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

The anarchic, phenomenally strong–selling classic from the godfather of the Beats: revitalised with a cool new jacket and an anecdote packed P.S. section.

WELCOME TO INTERZONE...

Say hello to Bradley the Buyer, the best narcotics agent in the business. Attend international playboy A.J.‘s annual party, where the punch is to be treated with extreme caution. Meet Dr ‘Fingers‘ Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid and his giant centipede, ‘The Complete American De–anxietized Man.‘ And enter the dark and infernal mind of Bill Lee as he pursues his daily quest for the ultimate merchandise...

Provocative, influential, morbidly fascinating, Naked Lunch is an apocalyptic ride through the darker recesses of the human psyche.

In Cold Blood

Controversial and compelling, In Cold Blood reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Truman Capote's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved. At the centre of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, who, vividly drawn by Capote, are shown to be reprehensible yet entirely and frighteningly human. The book that made Capote's name, In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative.
'The American dream turning into the American nightmare... a remarkable book.'
Tony Tanner, Spectator

Wonder Boys

The book of the hit film starring Michael Douglas, Toby Maguire, Frances McDormand and Robert Downey Jr. From the author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction from the author of Wonder Boys. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a heart-wrenching story of escape, love and comic-book heroes set in Prague, New York and the Arctic.

One night in 1939, Josef Kavalier shuffles into his cousin Sam Clay's cramped New York bedroom, his nerve-racking escape from Prague finally achieved. Little does he realise that this is the beginning of an extraordinary friendship and even more fruitful business partnership. Together they create a comic strip called 'The Escapist', its superhero a Nazi-busting saviour who liberates the oppressed around the world. The Escapist makes their fortune, but Joe can think of only one thing: how can he effect a real-life escape, and free his family from the tyranny of Hitler?

Michael Chabon's exceptional novel is a thrilling tight-rope walk between high comedy and bitter tragedy, and confirms his position as one of the most inventive and daring of contemporary American writers. In Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, he has created two unforgettable characters bound together by love, family and cartoons.

Girl With A Pearl Earring

Using the famous painting by Vermeer as an inspiration, A Girl With a Pearl Earring is a brilliant historical novel about the corruption of innocence, Griet, the young daughter of a tilemaker in seventeeth century Holland, obtains her first job as a servant in Vermeer's household. Tracy Chevalier shows us through Griet's eyes, the complicated family, the society of the small town of Delft, and life with an obsessive genius. Griet loves being drawn into his artistic life and leaving her former drudgery, but the cost to her own survival may be high . . .

I Heard The Owl Call My Name

Mark Brian, a young Anglican priest who has not long to live, is sent to the Indian village of Kingcome in the wilds of British Columbia.

While sharing the hunting and fishing, the festivals and funerals, the joys and sorrows of a once-proud tribe, Mark learns enough of life to be ready to die.

On a cold winter evening when he hears the owl call his name, Mark understands what is to come . . .

An outstanding and much-acclaimed first novel. The author’s perception, wisdom and insight give her unique story the quality of a legend or fable.

White Noise

First published in 1984, White Noise, one of DeLillo's most highly acclaimed novels, tells the story of Jack Gladney and his wife Babette who are both afraid of death. Jack is head of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. His colleague Murray runs a seminar on car crashes. Together they ponder the instances of celebrity death, from Elvis to Marilyn to Hitler. Through the brilliant and often very funny dialogue between Jack and Murray, Delillo exposes our common obsession with mortality and delineates Jack and Babette's touching relationship and their biggest fear - who will die first?

Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

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Ragtime

Welcome to America at the turn of the twentieth century, where the rhythms of ragtime set the beat. Harry Houdini astonishes audiences with magical feats of escape, the mighty J. P. Morgan dominates the financial world and Henry Ford manufactures cars by making men into machines. Emma Goldman preaches free love and feminism, while ex-chorus girl Evelyn Nesbitt inspires a mad millionaire to murder the architect Stanford White. In this stunningly original chronicle of an age, such real-life characters intermingle with three remarkable families, one black, one Jewish and one prosperous WASP, to create a dazzling literary mosaic that brings to life an era of dire poverty, fabulous wealth, and incredible change - in short, the era of ragtime.

House Of Sand And Fog

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American Psycho

Patrick Bateman is twenty-six. He works on Wall St. He is charming, handsome, rich, successful . . . and one of the most vicious killers in history.

"American Psycho" is a funhouse mirror held up against modern culture. It is a nightmare cityscape of extremities - the high glamour of designer labels and cocktail parties on the surface, and a writhing mass of violence rotting it at the core.

Now, the most controversial book of the last decade is the most controversial film of 2000. Starring Christian Bale as Bateman, it includes a stellar cast of Hollywood's hottest actors including Willem Dafoe, Reese Witherspoon, Chlo Sevigny and Jared Leto.

Tracks

By turns reticent, garrulous, spiritual and profane, Nanapush, like the Native American culture he belongs to, is a living contradiction – alien, beguiling, strong and dying...

Set in North Dakota, at a time in the early twentieth century when Indian tribes were struggling to keep what little remained of their lands, ‘Tracks‘ is a tale of passion and deep unrest. Over the course of ten crucial years, as tribal land and trust between people erode ceaselessly, men and women are pushed to the brink of their endurance – yet their pride and humour prohibit surrender. The reader will experience shock and pleasure in encountering a group of characters that are compelling and rich in their vigour, clarity, and indomitable vitality.

Middlesex

Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lefty and Desdemona must flee the Turks who are invading their crumbling city in the Ottoman Empire, and decide to head for America. What this unusual brother and sister do not realise is that a rare genetic mutation is following them. It secretly travels with them first to Detroit, and then to suburbia, through prohibition and the race riots of 1967. And in the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that develops between them leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls.

Through eight decades — and one unusually awkward adolescence — Jeffrey Eugenides’ long-awaited second novel is a breathtaking vision of the American Dream and a modern fable of crossed bloodlines, immigration, the intricacies of gender, and deep, untidy desire.

As I Lay Dying

Successive episodes in the death and burial of Addie Bundren are recounted by various members of the family circle, principally as they are carting their mother's coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, in order to bury her among her people. As the desires and fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular speech of the South, the author builds up an impression as epic as the old Testament, as earthly and comic as Chaucer, as American as HUCKLEBERRY FINN.

The Great Gatsby

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald brilliantly captures both the disillusion of post-war America and the moral failure of a society obsessed with wealth and status. But he does more than render the essence of a particular time and place, for in chronicling Gatsby's tragic pursuit of his dream, Fitzgerald recreates the universal conflict between illusion and reality.
'A classic, perhaps the supreme American novel.'
John Carey, Sunday Times, Books of the Century

Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle

The eighty-year-old Mrs Clea Threadgoode tells Evelyn Couch about her life, she escapes the Rose Terrace Nursing Home and returns in her mind to Whistle Stop, Alabama in the thirties where the Whistle Stop Cafe provides good barbecue, good coffee, love and even an occasional murder.

Sportswriter

Frank Bascombe has a younger girlfriend and a job as a sportswriter. To many men of his age, thirty-eight, this would be a cause for optimism, yet Frank feels the pull of his inner despair and especially of his recent losses - his preferred career has ended, his wife has divorced him, and a tragic accident took his elder son. In the course of this Easter weekend, Frank will lose all the remnants of his familiar life, though he will emerge heroic with spirits soaring. This is a magnificent novel that propelled Richard Ford into the first rank of American writers.

Cold Mountain

A soldier wounded in the Civil War, Inman turns his back on the carnage of the battlefield and begins the treacherous journey home to Cold Mountain, and to Ada, the woman he loved before the war began. As Inman attempts to make his way across the mountains, through the devastated landscape of a soon-to-be-defeated South, Ada struggles to make a living from the land her once-wealthy father left when he died. Neither knows if the other is still alive.

Princess Bride

First published in 1973, The Princess Bride is a cult book which later became a cult film. It tells the story of Buttercup, the most beautiful girl in the world. And of fencing, fighting, torture, poison, true love, hate, revenge, giants, hunters, bad men, good men, beautifulest ladies, snakes, spiders, beasts, chases, escapes, lies, truths, passion, and miracles.

Catch-22

At the heart of Joseph Heller's bestselling novel, first published in 1961, is a satirical indictment of military madness and stupidity, and the desire of the ordinary man to survive it. It is the tale of the dangerously sane Captain Yossarian, who spends his time in Italy plotting to survive.

The Old Man And The Sea

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. It was THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA that won for Hemingway the Nobel Prize of Literature. Here, in a perfectly crafted story is a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of a man's challenge to the elements in which he lives.

The Outsiders

The Socs's idea of having a good time is beating up greasers like Ponyboy.

Ponyboy knows what to expect and knows he can count on his brothers and friends - until the night someone takes things too far.

A ground-breaking, timeless story from a brilliant writer.

Mr Norris Changes Trains

First published in 1933, Mr Norris Changes Trains portrays a series of encounters in Berlin in the early thirties between the narrator, William Bradshaw, and the camp and mildly sinister Mr Norris. Piquantly evocative of the atmosphere in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, it is a novel that has achieved the status of a modern classic, combining a vivid depiction of people and places with the forcefulness of an ironic political parable.

On The Road

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognised as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.
'A paean to what Kerouac described as "the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being".'
Sunday Times

One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest

Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy - the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey's extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness.

The Poisonwood Bible

The Poisonwood Bible tells the story of an American family in the Congo during a time of tremendous political and social upheaval. The story is 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 all 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. This tale of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction, over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa, is set against one of history's most dramatic political parables. The Poisonwood Bible dances between the darkly comic human failings and inspiring poetic justices of our times. In a compelling exploration of religion, conscience, imperialist arrogance, and the many paths to redemption, Barbara Kingsolver has written a novel of overwhelming power and passion.

To Kill A Mockingbird

Set in a sleepy town in South Alabama during the Great Depression in the 1930s, this multi-layered story dissects the white and black communities of the American South. Told with gentle humour, it focuses on religious turpitude and the ambivalence of adult morality.

Tales Of The City

A naive young secretary forsakes Cleveland for San Francisco, tumbling headlong into a brave new world of laundromat Lotharios, cut throat debutantes, and Jockey Shorts dance contests. The saga that ensues is manic, romantic, tawdry, touching, and outrageous - unmistakably the handiwork of Armistead Maupin.

The Border Trilogy

Cormac McCarthy's monumental trilogy together for the first time in one volume.

The Border Trilogy chronicles the coming-of-age of two young men in the south west of America. John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, two cowboys of the old school, are poised on the edge of a world about to change forever. Their journeys across the border into Mexico, each an adventure fraught with fear and pain, mark a passage into adulthood, and eventual salvation.

McCarthy's clean, hard language evokes the physicality of an unforgiving landscape, the determination of the characters who roam within it, and the vanishing world of the Old West, where blood, violence and dying are conditions of life. Beautiful and brutal, filled with sorrow and humour, The Border Trilogy is both an epic love story an exhilarating elegy for the American Frontier.

Bright Lights, Big City

You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might become clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not So begins our nameless hero's trawl through the brightly lit streets of Manhattan, sampling all this wonderland has to offer yet suspecting that tomorrow's hangover may be caused by more than simple excess. Bright Lights, Big Cityis an acclaimed classic which marked Jay McInerney as one of the major writers of our time.

Tropic Of Capricorn

Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" chronicles his life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn's ethnic neighborhoods and Miller's outrageous sexual exploits, "The Tropic of Capricorn" is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature.

Tropic Of Capricorn

A riotous and explosive mixture of joys and frustrations, Tropic of Capricorn chronicles Miller‘s early life in New York, from his repressive Brooklyn childhood spent amongst ‘a galaxy of screwballs‘ to frantic, hilarious years of dead–end jobs and innumerable erotic adventures. Irreverent and ironic, Tropic of Capricorn is both a comic portrait of the irrepressible Miller himself and a scathing attack on respectable America, the very foundations of which he hoped to shatter.

The publication of Tropic of Capricorn and its sister–volume Tropic of Cancer in Paris in the 1930s was hailed by Samuel Beckett as ‘a momentous event in the history of modern writing‘. The books were subsequently banned in the UK and the USA for nearly thirty years.

Beloved

Terrible, unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the farm where she lived as a slave for so many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe's new home is not only haunted by the memories of her past but also by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Lolita

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.'
Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. This seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabokov's dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures.
'Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine... You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalised assent.
Martin Amis, Observer

Delta Of Venus Modern Classic

In Delta of Venus Anais Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own 'language of the senses', she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning. Her second volume of erotic writings, Little Birds, is also published by Penguin.
'Anais Nin excites male readers and incites female readers... and she comes against life with a vital artistry and boldness.'
The New York Times Book Review

Fight Club

Tyler Durden, a charismatic psychopath starts a fight in a bar's parking lot that attracts a group of disenchanted men. They start a bare-knuckle fight club with the following set of rules:

   1. You don't talk about fight club.
   2. You don't talk about fight club.
   3. When someone says stop, or goes limp, even if he's just faking it, the fight is over.
   4. Only two guys to a fight.
   5. One fight at a time.
   6. They fight without shirts or shoes.
   7. The fights go on as long as they have to.
   8. If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.

Tyler eventually gathers the most devoted fight club members and forms "Project Mayhem," a cult-like organization that trains itself as an army to bring down modern civilization.

The Bell Jar

This terse account of an American girl's breakdown and treatment gains its considerable power from an objectivity that is extraordinary considering the nature of the material. Sylvia Plath's attention had the quality of ruthlessness and...imagery and rhetoric is disciplined by an unwinking intelligence. Stephen Wall in the Observer

The Shipping News

Winner of The Irish Times International Fiction Award and America's National Book Award, this story features Quoyle, a failed journalist, a failed husband and a born loser who heads for a remote corner of Newfoundland with his two daughters and eccentric aunt.

Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1994

Winner, Irish Times International Prize

* Winner, National Book Award

The Crying Of Lot 49

Oedipa Maas, recent heiress, enquires into the nature of her inheritance: trying to understand her own life and the motivation of her dead lover, she is led on am ambiguous trail of clues. The moment of revelation hovers on the horizon like a mirage. Pynchon's shortest novel, and one of his best.

Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world - and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder - and rebirth - of man's spirit.

Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

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Portnoy's Complaint

The famous confession of Alexander Portnoy's who is thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgetable childhood.

The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye is the ultimate novel for disaffected youth, but it's relevant to all ages. The story is told by Holden Caulfield, a seventeen- year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Throughout, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves: the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection.

Lazy in style, full of slang and swear words, it's a novel whose interest and appeal comes from its observations rather than its plot intrigues (in conventional terms, there is hardly any plot at all). Salinger's style creates an effect of conversation, it is as though Holden is speaking to you personally, as though you too have seen through the pretences of the American Dream and are growing up unable to see the point of living in, or contributing to, the society around you.

Stone Diaries

This is the story of Daisy Goodwill, from her birth on a kitchen floor in Manitoba, Canada, to her death in a Florida nursing home nearly ninety years later. Her ordinary life is made extraordinary in the telling.

The Pilot's Wife

As a pilot's wife in the New England mill town of her birth, Kathryn Lyons has learned to expect intense exhilaration, occasional boredom and long spells apart from her husband - but nothing prepares Kathryn for the late-night knock at the door informing her that he has died in a crash.

Even before the plane is located in waters off the coast of Ireland, the tragedy becomes the subject of a media feeding frenzy. Could there by any truth to the bizarre, disturbing rumours that Jack Lyons led a secret life? Struggling with her grief, and fighting the urge to protect herself and her precocious daughter from the mystery surrounding the crash, Kathryn is determined to learn who her husband really was, whatever that knowledge may cost.

A Thousand Acres

Larry Cook‘s farm is the largest in Zebulon County, Iowa, and a tribute to his hard work and single–mindedness. Proud and possessive, his sudden decision to retire and hand over the farm to his three daughters is disarmingly uncharacteristic.

Ginny and Rose, the two eldest, are startled yet eager to accept, but Caroline, the youngest daughter, has misgivings. Immediately, her father cuts her out.

In A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley transposes the King Lear story to the modern day, and in so doing at once illuminates Shakespeare‘s original and subtly transforms it. This astonishing novel won both of America‘s highest literary awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics‘ Circle Award.

Angle Of Repose

Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. Through the prism of one family, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel illuminates the American present against the fascinating background of its past.

Grapes Of Wrath

Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning epic, The Grapes of Wrath, remains his undisputed masterpiece. Set against the background of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, it tells of the Joad family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel west in search of the promised land. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and broken dreams, yet out of their suffering Steinbeck created a drama that is intensely human, yet majestic in its scale and moral vision; an eloquent tribute to the endurance and dignity of the human spirit.

Agony And The Ecstasy

Irving Stone's powerful and passionate biographical novel of Michelangelo. His timeThe turbulent Renaissance, the years of poisoning princes, warring popes, the all-powerful Medici family, the fanatic monk Savonarola.His lovesThe frail and lovely daughter of Lorenzo de Medici; the ardent mistress of Marco Aldovrandi; and his last love, his greatest love - the beautiful, unhappy Vittoria Colonna.His geniusA God-driven fury from which he wrested the greatest art the world has ever known.

Joy Luck Club

A story of four mothers and their first generation Chinese American daughters.

The Secret History

Truly deserving of the accolade Modern Classic, Donna Tartt's novel is a remarkable achievement - both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an

A Confederacy Of Dunces

The ordinary folk of New Orleans seem to think he is unhinged as well. Ignatius ignores them as he heaves his vast bulk through the city s fleshpots in a noble crusade against vice, modernity and ignorance. But his momma has a nasty surprise in store for him. Ignatius must get a job. Undaunted, he uses his new-found employment to further his mission - and now he has a pirate costume and a hot-dog cart to do it with . . .

The Accidental Tourist

How does a man addicted to routine cope with the chaos of everyday life? Macon does his best. He writes Armchair Tourist guidebooks that soothe the travel-hating business man. Even when his son, Ethan, is murdered and his wife leaves him, Macon folds his anguish neatly back into place and adapts the household routine on to more efficient lines. So when he meets Muriel, dog trainer from the Meow-Bow dog clinic - thin, chaotic, outrageous, vulnerable - he considers that his defences against love and pain are in excellent working order. Bending glorious comedy with aching sadness, Anne Tyler's novel maps out the landscape of a man's hesitant heart with tenderness, sharpness and unputdownable truth.

Rabbit, Run

It's 1959 and Harry Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre life. Because, as he knows only too well,after you've been first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate'.

Slaughterhouse Five

Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller – these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

Color Purple

Set in the deep American south between the wars, this is the classic tale of Celie, a young poor black girl. Raped repeatedly by her father, she loses two children and then is married off to a man who treats her no better than a slave. She is separated from her sister Nettie and dreams of becoming like the glamorous Shug Avery, a singer and rebellious black woman who has taken charge of her own destiny. Gradually Celie discovers the support of women that enables her to leave the past behind and begin a new life.

The Age Of Innocence

Newland Archer and May Welland are the perfect couple. He is a wealthy young lawyer and she is a lovely and sweet-natured girl. All seems set for success until the arrival of May's unconventional cousin Ellen Olenska, who returns from Europe without her husband and proceeds to shake up polite New York society. To Newland, she is a breath of fresh air and a free spirit, but the bond that develops between them throws his values into confusion and threatens his relationship with May.

Evidence Of Things Unseen

This poetic novel, by the acclaimed author of John Dollar, describes America at the brink of the Atomic Age. In the years between the two world wars, the future held more promise than peril, but there was evidence of things unseen that would transfigure our unquestioned trust in a safe future.

Fos has returned to Tennessee from the trenches of France. Intrigued with electricity, bioluminescence, and especially x-rays, he believes in science and the future of technology. On a trip to the Outer Banks to study the Perseid meteor shower, he falls in love with Opal, whose father is a glassblower who can spin color out of light.

Fos brings his new wife back to Knoxville where he runs a photography studio with his former Army buddy Flash. A witty rogue and a staunch disbeliever in Prohibition, Flash brings tragedy to the couple when his appetite for pleasure runs up against both the law and the Ku Klux Klan. Fos and Opal are forced to move to Opal's mother's farm on the Clinch River, and soon they have a son, Lightfoot. But when the New Deal claims their farm for the TVA, Fos seeks work at the Oak Ridge Laboratory -- Site X in the government's race to build the bomb.

And it is there, when Opal falls ill with radiation poisoning, that Fos's great faith in science deserts him. Their lives have traveled with touching inevitability from their innocence and fascination with "things that glow" to the new world of manmade suns.

Bonfire Of The Vanities

Tom Wolfe's modern American best-selling satire tells the story of Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street "Master of the Universe" who has it all - a Park Avenue apartment, a job that brings wealth, power and prestige, a beautiful wife, an even more beautiful mistress.

Suddenly, one wrong turn makes it all go wrong, and Sherman spirals downward in a sudden fall from grace that sucks him into the ravenous heart of a New York City gone mad during the go-go, racially turbulent, socially hilarious 1980s.

Revolutionary Road

Hailed as a masterpiece from the moment of its first publication, Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple whose empty suburban life is held together by the dream that greatness is only just round the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their hopes and ideals, betraying in the end not only each other, but their own best selves.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept

In poetic prose Elizabeth Smart writes of her affair with English poet George Barker, and the implications of this for a woman in 1940s America. This edition also includes Rogues & Rascals, considered a sequel to the original story, that describes the lonely life of an unmarried mother in post-war London. It is a powerful and romantic plea for love as the driving force for life.