Literary

Mrs. Kimble

Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award 2004

by Jennifer Haigh

In her masterful first novel Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer Haigh delivers the riveting story of three women who marry the same man.

Ken Kimble is revealed through the eyes of the women he seduces: his first wife, Birdie,...

Soldiers of Salamis

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2004

by Javier Cercas

In the final moments of the Spanish Civil War, a writer and founding member of Franco's Fascist Party is about to be shot, and yet miraculously escapes into the forest. When his hiding place is discovered, he...

Gilead

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2005, National Book Critics Circle for Fiction 2004

by Marilynne Robinson

2005 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction 2004 National Book Critics Circle Winner In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears....

The Girl Who Played Go: A Novel

Kiriyama Prize for Fiction 2004

by Shan Sa

As the Japanese military invades 1930s Manchuria, a young girl approaches her own sexual coming of age. Drawn into a complex triangle with two boys, she distracts herself from the onslaught of adulthood by playing...

The Master

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2006, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction 2004

by Colm Toibin

Like Michael Cunningham in The Hours, Colm Tóoacute;ibíiacute;n captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Brilliant and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James,...

Correcting the Landscape

Bellwether Prize 2004

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...

A Distant Shore

Commonwealth Best Book Prize 2004

by Caryl Phillips

Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved to a housing estate in a small village. Solomon is a night-watchman, an immigrant from an unnamed country in Africa. Each is desperate for love. And...

The Early Stories: 1953-1975

PEN/Faulkner 2004

by John Updike

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

A harvest and not a winnowing, this volume collects 103 stories, almost all of the short fiction that John Updike wrote between 1953 and 1975. “How rarely it...

The Line of Beauty

Man Booker Prize 2004

by Alan Hollinghurst

The National Bestseller, Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.

"One can't get enough of Hollinghurst's sentences...If you value style, wit, and social...

My Name Is Red

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2003

by Orhan Pamuk

At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century...

The Great Fire

National Book Award for Fiction 2003

by Shirley Hazzard

A great writer's sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict     The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which...

Middlesex

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2003

by Jeffrey Eugenides

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage...

Train

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction 2003

by Pete Dexter

Train is a 18-year-old black caddy at an exclusive L.A. country club. He is a golf prodigy, but the year is 1953 and there is no such thing as a black golf prodigy. Nevertheless, Train draws the interest of...

The Caprices

PEN/Faulkner 2003

by Sabina Murray

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction in 2003, The Caprices is a collection of stories artfully told across the theatre of the Pacific Campaign of World War II. An Anglo-Indian cavalryman, his homeland...

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

Giller Prize 2003

by M.G. Vassanji

Vikram Lall comes of age in 1950s Kenya, at the same time that the colony is struggling towards independence. Against the unsettling backdrop of Mau Mau violence, Vic and his sister Deepa, the grandchildren...

The Seduction of Water

Hammett Prize 2003

by Carol Goodman

Iris Greenfeder, ABD (All But Dissertation), feels the “buts” are taking over her life: all but published, all but a professor, all but married. Yet the sudden impulse to write a story about her mother,...

Property

Women's Prize for Fiction 2003

by Valerie Martin

Valerie Martin’s Property delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery’s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet,...

The Known World

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2005, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2004, National Book Critics Circle for Fiction 2003

by Edward P. Jones

In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of...

Vernon God Little

Man Booker Prize 2003, Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2003

by Dbc Pierre

In the town jail of Martirio - the barbecue sauce capital of Central Texas - sits fifteen-year-old Vernon Little, dressed only in New Jack trainers and underpants. He is in trouble. His friend Jesus has just...

The Elementary Particles

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2002

by Michel Houellebecq

An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel–part Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis-that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence....