All Books

Chichikov travels through provincial Russia purchasing 'dead souls' — serfs who have died since the last census but are still recorded on landowners' rolls, and can therefore be used as collateral for loans. The scheme is comic, opaque, and darkly satirical. Gogol described the novel as the first part of a Russian Divine Comedy.

When the Yoruba king dies, his horseman Elesin is required by tradition to follow him in ritual suicide. The British colonial officer—genuinely believing he is saving a life—intervenes. The intervention destroys more than it saves. Soyinka's masterwork, based on events that occurred in Oyo, Nigeria in 1946.

Miles Roby manages the Empire Grill in Empire Falls, Maine — a dying mill town owned entirely by the widow Francine Whiting. He has waited his whole life for things to resolve themselves. His marriage is failing, his teenage daughter is struggling, and the town is slowly emptying. Russo's Pulitzer Prize winner.

Arkady brings his friend Bazarov home to his father's estate. Bazarov is a nihilist — he believes in nothing except empirical science and rejects all authority, sentiment, and tradition. His conflict with the older generation, his unexpected passion for Madame Odintsova, and his death define the Russian novel's engagement with the question of what to believe.

A young girl is sent to spend the summer with relatives in rural County Wexford, Ireland, in the 1970s, and discovers for the first time what it means to be cared for unconditionally.

Nine stories about love's permutations—the love that turns into hate, the love that survives betrayal, the love that arrives too late. The title story begins with a prank that accidentally produces love; others explore what happens when desire outlives its object or arrives in a person who cannot recognize it.

Marlow travels up the Congo River in search of the mysterious ivory trader Kurtz — and discovers the horror at the heart of European imperialism.

A self-help book organised around Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time — using Proust's life and work to address questions about how to be happy, how to pay attention, and how to suffer productively.

17th-century Iceland under Danish rule. Jón Hreggviðsson, a peasant wrongly accused of murder, fights his case through the Danish courts for decades. His story becomes entangled with that of an Icelandic scholar who believes in Iceland's spirit and a beautiful woman who survives everything. Laxness's historical epic about Icelandic identity under colonial rule.

Eleven linked short stories following a nameless, druggy narrator through the American Midwest — car crashes, hospitals, petty crime, heroin, grace and violence in equal measure. Johnson's collection is one of the most acclaimed works of short fiction in American literature.

MIT physicist Max Tegmark explores the landscape of possible futures as artificial intelligence approaches and then surpasses human-level intelligence — and what choices humanity must make now.

Michael K, a gardener with a harelip, pushes his dying mother through a South Africa wracked by civil war, trying to reach her childhood home. He grows pumpkins in a ruined farm and is repeatedly captured by different authorities who cannot understand why he doesn't want anything. Coetzee's Booker Prize winner.

Nedra and Viri Berland live a beautiful life in a house on the Hudson River with their daughters, friends, dinner parties, and winters in Europe. The novel follows their marriage across two decades as it slowly unravels — not through drama but through the accumulation of small divergences.

Jason abandons Medea, his wife and the mother of his children, to marry the Corinthian princess. Medea, a foreigner and sorceress, takes revenge — poisoning the princess, and killing her own children to destroy Jason utterly. Euripides gave Medea her choice where earlier versions made it accidental.

John Self, an English director of beer commercials, is flying between London and New York trying to make a film. He drinks, overeats, watches pornography, fights, spends money he does not have, and is being manipulated by forces he cannot see. Amis's monstrous comedy of the 1980s money culture — narrated in a prose of extraordinary comic energy by one of fiction's great unreliable slobs.

William Gibson's groundbreaking cyberpunk novel coined the term 'cyberspace' and defined the aesthetic and concerns of an entire science fiction movement.

In the months after a nuclear war has killed every living thing in the Northern Hemisphere, the survivors in Melbourne wait for the radioactive cloud to reach Australia. On the Beach follows a small group of men, women, and a US submarine commander as they face the end of all human life with quiet, heartbreaking dignity.

Eight stories in which secrets—known but unspoken, felt but unconfirmed, buried but still alive—shape the lives of women in small Ontario towns and further afield. Among Munro's richest collections, containing 'Carried Away' (often cited as one of the greatest stories in English) and the title story about a girl who vanishes on a hike.

The al-Jawad family navigates the 1920s: Al-Sayyid Ahmad indulges his secret life of pleasure while maintaining the facade of pious paterfamilias; his sons Yasin and Fahmy pursue their own paths; and Kamal—Mahfouz's autobiographical child—discovers philosophy, unrequited love, and the first disillusionment of adulthood. The second volume of the Cairo Trilogy deepens every character established in Palace Walk.

The third canticle of The Divine Comedy — Dante ascends through the nine spheres of Heaven with Beatrice, encounters the souls of the blessed, and culminates in the vision of God as a point of light and the rose of the redeemed. The most theologically demanding and most visually dazzling part of the poem.

In a Parisian boarding house, the ambitious young Eugène de Rastignac encounters two extremes: old Goriot, who has sacrificed everything for daughters who abandon him, and the criminal Vautrin, who offers a ruthless shortcut to success. The central novel of the Comédie humaine and Balzac's most concentrated study of money and society.

Alien visitors briefly landed on Earth, then departed, leaving behind six Zones filled with mysterious and lethal artifacts. Stalkers illegally enter the Zones to retrieve these artifacts for sale on the black market. A Soviet SF classic and the basis for Tarkovsky's film Stalker, exploring humanity's relationship with the incomprehensible.

A collection of long-form journalism from The New Yorker, profiling extraordinary people who exist outside or at the edges of the law — a wine fraud artist, a drug lord's hitwoman, a whistleblower, a private investigator, a con artist. Keefe's best magazine work gathered in a single essential volume.

A wealthy dilettante travels periodically to a hot-spring resort in snow country and carries on an affair with Komako, a young geisha. The novel accumulates in vignettes rather than plot, capturing the quality of light on snow, the sound of a shamisen, the impossibility of knowing another person. Kawabata's most celebrated work.