Literary

Proud Beggars

by Albert Cossery, Thomas W. Cushing & Alyson Waters

Early in Proud Beggars, a brutal and motiveless murder is committed in a Cairo brothel. But the real mystery at the heart of Albert Cossery’s wry black comedy is not the cause of this death but the paradoxical...

Negative Space

by Betsy Miller

After a recent miscarriage, a young artist shuts down emotionally. She separates herself from her feelings, seeing the world as a series of disconnected shapes and forms. As she returns to her art, she begins...

The Very Picture of You: A Novel

by Isabel Wolff

Where the eye sees the brushstroke, the heart sees the truth.

At thirty-five, Gabriella “Ella” Graham is a successful portrait artist in London. She captures the essential truth in each of her subjects’...

A Sound Among the Trees

by Susan Meissner

A house shrouded in time.

A line of women with a heritage of loss.

As a young bride, Susannah Page was rumored to be a Civil War spy for the North, a traitor to her Virginian roots. Her great-granddaughter Adelaide,...

Black Dogs: A Novel

by Ian Mcewan

In 1946, a young couple set off on their honeymoon.  Fired by their ideals and passion for one another, they plan an idyllic holiday, only to encounter an experience of darkness so terrifying it alters their...

The Book of Spies: An Anthology of Literary Espionage

by Alan Furst

An anthology of the world’s best literary espionage, selected by a contemporary master of the genre, Alan Furst.

Here is an extraordinary collection of work from some of the finest novelists of the twentieth...

Articles of War

by Nick Arvin

George Tilson is an eighteen-year-old farm boy from Iowa. Enlisted in the Army during World War II and arriving in Normandy just after D-day, he is nicknamed Heck for his reluctance to swear. From summers of...

The Trial of True Love

by William Nicholson

Bron is a thirty-year-old writer living in London, a seemingly incurable heartbreaker and dodger of commitment. He is fascinated by the symbolist artist Paul Marotte and has made the artist the center of a book...

Babylon Rolling: A Novel

by Amanda Boyden

Ariel May and her husband, Ed, have just moved to New Orleans with their two small children. Their neighbor, Fearius, is a fifteen-year-old just out of juvenile detention. Across the street, an elderly couple,...

The Quality of Mercy: A Novel

by Barry Unsworth

Barry Unsworth returns to the terrain of his Booker Prize-winning novel Sacred Hunger, this time following Sullivan, the Irish fiddler, and Erasmus Kemp, son of a Liverpool slave ship owner who hanged himself....

The Fat Years: A Novel

by Koonchung Chan

Banned in China, this controversial and politically charged novel tells the story of the search for an entire month erased from official Chinese history.

Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone...

The Map and the Territory

by Michel Houellebecq & Gavin Bowd

The most celebrated and controversial French novelist of our time now delivers his magnum opus—about art and money, love and friendship and death, fathers and sons.

The Map and the Territory is the story...

Morality Play

by Barry Unsworth

Booker Prize Finalist

The time is the fourteenth century. The place is a small town in rural England, and the setting a snow-laden winter. A small troupe of actors accompanied by Nicholas Barber, a young renegade...

Sacred Hunger

Man Booker Prize 1992

by Barry Unsworth

Winner of the Booker Prize

A historical novel set in the eighteenth century, Sacred Hunger is a stunning, engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed in the British Empire as it entered fully into...

Losing Nelson

by Barry Unsworth

Barry Unsworth’s Losing Nelson is a novel of obsession, the story of a man unable to see himself separately from the hero he mistakenly idolizes Admiral Lord Nelson. Charles Cleasby is, in fact, a Nelson biographer...

After Hannibal

by Barry Unsworth

Golden Umbria is home to breathtaking scenery and great art; it is also where Hannibal and his invading band of Carthaginians ambushed and slaughtered a Roman legion, and where the local place-names still speak...

The Little Friend: A Novel

by Donna Tartt

Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil.

The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named...

Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel

by Alice Munro

The only novel from Alice Munro-award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman--is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural...

The Woman in the Dunes

by Kobo Abe

The Woman in the Dunes, by celebrated writer and thinker Kobo Abe, combines the essence of myth, suspense and the existential novel.

After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an...

The Face of Another

by Kobo Abe

Like an elegantly chilling postscript to The Metamorphosis, this classic of postwar Japanese literature describes a bizarre physical transformation that exposes the duplicities of an entire world. The narrator...