All Books

Jaromil is a poet from birth — his mother has decided so — and grows up to be a genuine revolutionary lyric poet who informs on his girlfriend to the secret police. Kundera's Prix Médicis-winning novel is a satire of the Romantic artist's egoism and the way revolutionary politics and artistic grandiosity feed each other.

Carol Milford, idealistic and educated, marries a doctor and moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, where she attempts to bring culture and reform to a town that does not want them. Lewis's breakthrough novel is the first great satire of American small-town life — the conformity, the anti-intellectualism, the material comfort as a substitute for meaning — and it made Lewis famous overnight.

A divorced journalist finds a heartbreaking love letter in a bottle on the beach and tracks down its author — a widower still grieving his lost wife — and must discover whether love can exist alongside grief that refuses to be finished.

NYPD Detective Kat Donovan finds a dating website profile that appears to be her father — the man who went missing eighteen years ago. Following it leads her into something far darker than she expected.

Will, a 'coloured' South African teenager, discovers his father Sonny—a political activist—is having an affair with a white woman who works for the anti-apartheid movement. The novel is narrated by Will and is about the cost of the political life on the family that sustains it. Gordimer's most personal meditation on the activist's divided loyalties.

Nana, daughter of the Lantier-Maheu family from L'Assommoir, rises from the Parisian slums to become the most celebrated courtesan of the Second Empire. Men ruin themselves for her; she ruins them. A study of female power and its relationship to the corruption of the Bonapartist regime.

The sequel to Things Fall Apart follows Okonkwo's grandson Obi Okonkwo, who returns to Lagos after education in England, hoping to resist corruption in the colonial civil service. Achebe's mordant second novel is about the generation that inherited colonialism's aftermath — caught between their elders' world and a Western modernity that has no genuine place for them.

The longest and most ambitious Clavell novel, set in Hong Kong in 1963 — the Noble House descended from Dirk Struan battles takeover bids, Chinese Communists, the KGB, American businessmen, and internal family conflict during a single tumultuous week. A sprawling portrait of Hong Kong at a pivotal moment in its history.

Barnes meditates on death — his own, his family's, his writers' — with the clarity and wit that characterize his fiction. Not quite memoir, not quite philosophy, the book is a sustained confrontation with what it means to live knowing the end is coming.

Single mother Jess Thomas is struggling to get by when tech millionaire Ed Nicholls offers her and her mismatched family a ride to Scotland for a maths competition — a road trip that changes both their lives.

In a near-future America consumed by anti-Asian sentiment and a PACT law criminalising anything deemed unpatriotic, twelve-year-old Bird's mother — a poet — has disappeared. Bird sets out to find her, following a trail of clues hidden in her mother's poems. A dystopian novel about the power of stories and what parents sacrifice for their children.

Aristotle's analysis of tragedy — its elements, its purpose, and its effects. Defines tragedy as an imitation of a serious action producing catharsis through pity and fear. Identifies the six elements of tragedy (plot, character, thought, diction, melody, spectacle) and argues that plot is the most important.

Alexander Portnoy, a Jewish-American man from Newark, unburdens himself to his psychoanalyst about his overbearing mother, his Jewish guilt, his masturbation, his complicated relationships with Gentile women, and his inability to reconcile the person his community wants him to be with the person he is.

Tashi, the African woman who appeared briefly in The Color Purple, undergoes female genital mutilation as an act of cultural solidarity and spends the rest of her life dealing with the trauma, eventually killing the woman who performed the procedure. Walker's most confrontational novel — a direct political act about female genital cutting as a cultural and feminist issue.

Three interlocking stories set in the southern Appalachian mountains over one summer — a wildlife biologist tracking coyotes, an elderly farmer and his new neighbour arguing about insects, and a young widow tending her orchard.

Set in the same universe as the Imperial Radch trilogy but following different characters, Ingray Aughskold steals a prisoner from a secure facility as part of a scheme to impress her mother, and finds herself in the middle of a diplomatic crisis involving the authenticity of her people's historical artefacts.

Two stories about Seymour Glass: 'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,' narrated by Buddy on Seymour's wedding day when he fails to appear, and 'Seymour: An Introduction,' in which Buddy tries and fails to describe his brother. The second story is a meditation on the impossibility of capturing a person in language, and a portrait of obsessive love as a form of artistic blockage.

Will, an orphan boy at Castle Redmont who dreams of becoming a knight, is instead chosen as apprentice to Halt — the kingdom's most enigmatic and skilled Ranger — and must develop the arts of stealth, archery, and tracking to help face a rising evil threatening the kingdom.

One hundred colonists arrive on Mars in 2026 to begin humanity's first permanent settlement — and the political and philosophical fault lines that will define the planet's future immediately emerge.

Tom Ripley has settled into comfortable French country life at his villa Belle Ombre with his wealthy wife Héloïse. He is co-managing a scheme to sell forged paintings attributed to a dead artist named Derwatt. When an American collector arrives convinced the paintings are fraudulent, Ripley must manage the situation — which escalates, as Ripley situations always do. The second Ripley novel, fifteen years after The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Shipwrecked alone on a tropical island near Trinidad, Robinson Crusoe survives for twenty-eight years — building a shelter, growing food, domesticating animals, maintaining a calendar, and eventually encountering the man he calls Friday. Often called the first English novel, and the founding text of the survival narrative.

A mysterious young woman arrives in the small coastal town of Southport, North Carolina, and starts over with a new name. She keeps her distance — from her neighbours, from the widowed store owner Alex who is drawn to her, and from the past she is fleeing. Safe Haven is Sparks' most thriller-adjacent novel, blending domestic danger with his signature romance.

Set during the Mercenary War in Carthage (240-238 BC), Flaubert's archaeological novel follows mercenary soldier Mâtho's obsession with Salammbô, daughter of Hamilcar Barca and guardian of the sacred veil — a deliberate departure from domestic realism into extreme historical otherness.

When the moon inexplicably breaks apart, scientists calculate that Earth will become uninhabitable within two years. The surviving remnant of humanity must learn to live in space — and the seven women who survive a catastrophic orbital crisis become the mothers of all future humanity.