All Books

A selection of Pessoa's critical essays, philosophical reflections, and shorter prose — including pieces by both Pessoa and his heteronyms, showing the full range of his intellectual world.

Tookie, a Native American woman who works at a Minneapolis independent bookshop (based on Erdrich's own Birchbark Books), is haunted by the ghost of the most annoying customer who ever died. Set during 2020 — the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the uprising that followed in the city where Erdrich lives.

Anton Waker, who has spent years laundering documents and facilitating his family's criminal enterprises, tries to go straight by taking an office job — only to find that the past is not easily outrun. Mandel's second novel is more overtly thriller-shaped than her debut, with multiple timelines and unreliable perspectives dissolving into a portrait of complicity.

Rousseau asks how humans can be both free and subject to law. His answer — the social contract, by which individuals submit to the general will — became the theoretical foundation of modern democracy, influenced the French Revolution, and is still the starting point for thinking about legitimate political authority.

A graduate student discovers a mysterious book in his university library that contains a story about his own childhood — and is drawn through it into an underground world of stories, doors, and a sea that smells of honey and blood.

A three-week love affair between Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox, a young Black woman, in San Francisco's North Beach — narrated in the long, breath-driven sentences Kerouac developed from jazz improvisation. Written in three nights, his most formally concentrated novel.

Dejima, 1799: the Dutch trading post is the only window between Japan and the Western world. Clerk Jacob de Zoet arrives hoping to restore his family's fortune and falls in love with a Japanese midwife student. Mitchell's most disciplined novel is a masterwork of historical fiction.

Thessaloniki (Salonika) in the early twentieth century: a city of Greeks, Jews, Turks, and refugees, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Mediterranean. The Thread follows two families — one Greek Orthodox, one from the city's ancient Jewish community — across eight decades of fire, war, occupation, and transformation, as the city loses its plurality and becomes something more singular. Hislop's most historically ambitious novel.

Lima's Leoncio Prado Military Academy: the cadets live under brutal hierarchy, organize theft rings, and maintain codes of silence. When a cadet is killed, someone informs. The search for the informer consumes the novel. Vargas Llosa's debut—written at twenty-six—was burned publicly in Peru and made him internationally famous.

The fourth Witcher novel. As Ciri, hunted across the Continent, fights to survive and to reach the mysterious Tower of Swallows, the saga fractures its timeline and circles its darkest material, building toward the brink of its conclusion.

A young governess at a remote English estate becomes convinced that the children in her charge are in contact with the malevolent spirits of two dead servants.

Mernissi's most scholarly work — a feminist reading of Islamic sacred texts arguing that the veil and the seclusion of women were political decisions made by the male elite in the early Islamic period, not divine commandments.

Claudia Lin works for Veracity, a secret company that investigates online dating profiles for clients who want to know if their matches are who they say they are. When a client turns up dead, Claudia finds herself investigating a case that could upend her understanding of digital identity, love, and the surveillance economy.

As the Greek fleet sails home from the ruins of Troy, the enslaved healer Ritsa accompanies the doomed prophet Cassandra toward Mycenae and the vengeful queen Clytemnestra, in Pat Barker's fierce conclusion to her Women of Troy trilogy.

Smith's investigation into the causes of national prosperity — the division of labour, free markets, the price system, and the folly of mercantilism. Published in 1776, it became the foundational text of modern economics and the primary intellectual source for arguments in favour of market capitalism.

A meditation on whiteness, grief, and a sister who died hours after birth — Han Kang's most lyrical and formally experimental work.

In Victorian England where pirates sail the sky in flying houses, a young lady thief named Cecilia Bassingwaite is targeted for recruitment — and finds herself entangled with the infuriating agent sent to either recruit or arrest her.

The first volume of The Last King of Osten Ard, Tad Williams's return to the world of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. Decades after the events of that trilogy, the aging King Simon and Queen Miriamele face a new threat as the immortal Norns stir again and a generation of new characters comes of age.

A sequel to The Silence of the Girls, following Briseis and the Trojan women through the aftermath of the war's end as the Greeks are stranded on the beach, unable to sail home, and old wounds refuse to heal.

Athens, 1941. The German occupation begins, and with it the great famine in which hundreds of thousands of Greeks die. Themis, a young woman from a divided Athens family — some Communist, some right-wing, all suffering — lives through the occupation, the resistance, the civil war that follows, and the decades of political fracture that define 20th-century Greek history. Hislop's most politically complex novel, spanning sixty years of Greek history.

Sixteen-year-old Kaye has spent her childhood moving between cities while her mother plays small venues. Returning to New Jersey, she discovers the faerie world she glimpsed as a child is real — and she is more entangled in its politics than she ever knew. Dark, seductive, and morally complicated, Tithe established the template for Holly Black's faerie fiction.

Tom Jones, a foundling of unknown parentage raised by the good-natured Squire Allworthy, is in love with the beautiful Sophia Western. Expelled from the estate, he travels toward London through a comic series of adventures, misidentifications, and encounters with English society at every level. Fielding's masterpiece and the most important comic novel in English before Dickens.

Danny and his friends—the paisanos of Monterey's Tortilla Flat district—live outside the conventional economy, drinking wine, pursuing women, and avoiding work. Steinbeck's first commercial success structures their adventures as a mock-Arthurian legend, with Danny's house as Camelot and the paisanos as his errant knights.

Digging swimming pools in the Florida Keys, Jack Reacher is found by a dying detective and pulled into a decades-old mystery from the Vietnam War. Lee Child's third Reacher thriller blends a propulsive hunt with one of the series' nastiest villains.