All Books

The second volume of the Dark Star trilogy retells the story of Black Leopard Red Wolf from the perspective of Sogolon the Moon Witch — the woman whom the Tracker accused of lying in the first novel. An African-mythology-rooted epic that deliberately inverts the reader's assumed loyalties.

Artur Sammler—Polish-Jewish, seventy years old, half-blind from a Nazi massacre he survived by crawling out of a mass grave—moves through 1960s New York observing the chaos of the counterculture with a survivor's cold clarity. A meditation on civilization, death, and what we owe each other.

An all-Black Oklahoma town founded by freed slaves attacks a nearby convent housing women who have fled their former lives. The third novel in Morrison's Beloved trilogy, Paradise asks what happens when a community built to protect its own becomes as oppressive as the society it fled.

Twelve-year-old Yusuf is left as a debt-pawn with a prosperous merchant and travels with him into the African interior on trading expeditions. Set on the Swahili coast at the turn of the twentieth century, as German colonial rule begins to transform East Africa, this coming-of-age novel draws on the Quranic story of Yusuf and the Biblical Joseph.

From 1988 to 1990, Annie Ernaux was obsessed with a married man. She did nothing but wait for him to call, and recorded the experience with the clinical precision of a social scientist examining a specimen—herself. The shortest of her major books, and a landmark in writing about female desire.

Ka, a Turkish poet living in exile in Frankfurt, returns to Turkey to cover a string of suicides among young women and falls into a snowbound city—Kars, near the Armenian border—where a political coup is unfolding and the battle between secularism and political Islam is playing out in miniature. Three days, heavy snow, and a love affair that may or may not be real.

On a private Caribbean island, a beautiful Black model named Jadine and a mysterious stranger named Son collide—she has assimilated into white wealth, he represents something older and more dangerous. Morrison's most openly confrontational novel about race, class, and the seductions of belonging.

A young Romanian woman rides a tram to her regular interrogation by the Securitate—where she is accused of sewing notes into men's suits asking foreign buyers to marry her and take her out of Romania. The entire novel takes place during a single tram ride, the narrator's mind moving between memory, fear, and the peculiar clarity of someone accustomed to terror.

Galip's wife Rüya disappears, along with her half-brother Celâl—Istanbul's most famous newspaper columnist. As Galip searches for them through the city's streets, tekkes, and archives, reading Celâl's old columns for clues, the line between searcher and searched-for begins to dissolve. Pamuk's most labyrinthine novel.

An elderly Briton couple journey across post-Arthurian Britain to find their son in a land afflicted by a strange mist of collective forgetfulness, eventually uncovering a buried atrocity that the forgetfulness was designed to conceal.

Harriet and David Lovatt build a perfect large family in the 1960s English countryside, filling their house with children and relatives. Then their fifth child, Ben, is born: strange, immensely strong, and not quite human. The novel tracks what happens to a family—and a marriage—when one member refuses all social and emotional norms.

An engineer attempts to build the world's first space elevator from a mountain peak in Sri Lanka, while contending with religious opposition, engineering challenges, and the island's own ancient history. Won both Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Chinese peasant farmers are ordered to plant garlic by the local government, producing a glut that the government then refuses to buy. When the farmers take their protest to the county seat, the response is brutal. Told in three voices—a blind street musician, a villager in prison, and a young woman—Mo Yan's most overtly political novel.

1980s London: Alice Mellings lives in a squat with a group of leftist radicals, cleaning up after them, cooking, begging money from her bourgeois parents, keeping the house. The group is drifting toward terrorism. Lessing's most explicitly political late novel—and a devastating portrait of idealism in decay.

Lila Mae Watson is the first Black female elevator inspector in a segregated American city. When an elevator she has certified in good order falls in free-fall, she becomes a suspect in a larger conspiracy involving the city's two warring schools of elevator inspection: the Empiricists and the Intuitionists.

A group of Romanian-German university students live under the suffocating surveillance of Ceaușescu's secret police, the Securitate. As friends disappear, are recruited as informers, or die in circumstances ruled suicide, the narrator—like Müller herself—survives by clinging to language, loyalty, and an almost ferocious attention to the physical world.

Abbas, a Zanzibari man who came to England decades ago and built a family in Norwich, suffers a stroke and in its aftermath his children begin to discover that their father has been hiding a past he has never shared—a first family, an earlier life, a silence that was also a form of protection.

The motley crew of the tunneling ship Wayfarer accepts a long job crossing the galaxy to build a wormhole, and the journey — not the destination — is the entire point.

Bobby Western, a salvage diver in 1980s New Orleans, investigates a sunken plane where a passenger is missing from the manifest — and finds himself pursued. Alternating with Bobby's story are his dead sister Alicia's hallucinatory visions.

A special investigator is sent to a coal-mining region where there are rumours that officials are eating babies prepared as delicacies. His investigation collapses into drunkenness and corruption. Interpolated throughout are letters between 'Mo Yan' and an aspiring writer named Li Yidou, whose own stories appear in the novel. One of the most formally experimental works of Chinese fiction.

Briseis, the enslaved queen who becomes Achilles's war-prize, narrates the Trojan War from the ground level of the Greek camp, where women survive at the mercy of the men who own them.

The Pyrenees crack and the entire Iberian peninsula breaks off from Europe, drifting into the Atlantic. Five Portuguese and Spanish strangers—who each experienced a mysterious personal event just before the detachment—are drawn together as the peninsula sails toward an unknown destination. Saramago's most playful and politically charged novel.

Mary, mother of Jesus, is old and living in Ephesus, watched over by two men who want her testimony. She tells them what she saw — the wedding at Cana, the raising of Lazarus, the crucifixion — without consolation, without miracles, without the story they want. She fled the crucifixion. She does not believe her son was the son of God.

A Venetian scholar is captured by Ottoman forces in the seventeenth century and given as a slave to a Turkish man of learning who looks exactly like him. Over years of intellectual collaboration and obsessive mutual study, the two men—master and slave, East and West—begin to exchange identities.