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Here is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman, " Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about...
2) The bell jar
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[This book] chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under-- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche...
3) Snow
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Everyman's Library volume 338
Summary
"Returning to Turkey from exile in the West, Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head scarves in school. But the epicenter of the suicides, the eastern border city of Kars, is also home to the radiant and newly divorced Ipek, a friend of Ka's youth, whom he has never forgotten and whose spirited younger sister is a leader of the rebellious schoolgirls. As a fierce snowstorm...
5) Lolita
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The most controversial classic novel of the 20th century, Lolita tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is aroused to erotic desire only by a young girl. Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of...
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Everyman's library volume no. 235
Multiple titles for book club discussion groups
Everyman's library volume 235
Multiple titles for book club discussion groups
Everyman's library volume 235
Summary
"For fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights, the unprepossessing and saturnine Florentino Ariza, one of the three central characters of this incomparable novel, waits to possess Fermina Daza, the young woman who once promised him her love and then, in a moment of blinding but ambiguous insight, refused him. To while away the long years of his vigil, he enters into six hundred and twenty-two liaisons and "countless fleeting adventures."...
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In this hard-hitting novel, first published in 1924, the murky personal relationship between an Englishwoman and an Indian doctor mirrors the troubled politics of colonialism. Adela Quested and her fellow British travelers, eager to experience the "real" India, develop a friendship with the urbane Dr. Aziz. While on a group outing, Adela and Dr. Aziz visit the Marabar caves together. As they emerge, Adela accuses the doctor of assaulting her. While...
8) The prince
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The world-renowned philosopher's classic treatise reveals the techniques and strategies for gaining and keeping political control. "How we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather bring about his own ruin than his preservation. Therefore, it is necessary to learn how not to be good, " wrote Machiavelli.
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First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to What he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the White Army and the Bolshevik Reds of the Russian civil war. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's...
10) Bleak House
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Bleak House is one of Dickens' finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a brilliant comic writer. It is at once a complex mystery story that fully engages the reader in the work of detection, and an unforgettable indictment of an indifferent society. Its representations of a great city's underworld, and of the law's corruption and delay, draw upon the author's personal knowledge and experience....
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"Over one hundred and fifty years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French nobleman and an astute political scientist, came to the United States to evaluate the meaning and actual functioning of democracy. Democracy in America is the classic treatise on the American way of life that he wrote as a result of his visit." "Tocqueville discusses the advantages and dangers of the majority rule -- which he thought could be as tyrannical as the rule of...
13) Howard's End
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The disregard of a dying woman's bequest, a girl's attempt to help an impoverished clerk, and the marriage of an idealist and a materialist intersect at an estate called Howards End. There, the lives of three families become entangled. The Wilcoxes, who own the estate, are a wealthy family who made their fortune in the American colonies. The Schlegel siblings-Margaret, Helen, and Tibby-are lively socialites whose spirited and active lifestyles are...
14) Beloved
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After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
15) The rainbow
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Lawrence traces a circuitous journey through three generations--alternating voices of three generations of Brangwen women--from the Polish widow to her Brangwen husband, her daughter to another Brangwen, and eventually the "heiress" of Brangwen memories, Ursula. A novel about a journey towards the understanding of love.
16) The trial
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"A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life--including work at a bank and his relations with his...
17) Cranford
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A gently comic picture of life in an English country town in the mid-nineteenth century, Cranford describes the small adventures of Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, two middle-aged spinster sisters striving to live with dignity in reduced circumstances. Rich with humor and filled with vividly memorable characters?including the dignified Lady Glenmire and the duplicitous showman Signor Brunoni?Cranford is a portrait of kindness, compassion, and hope.
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A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in this masterpiece of tragic fiction. Hardy's 1891 novel defied convention to focus on the rural lower class for a frank treatment of sexuality and religion. Then and now, his sympathetic portrait of a victim of Victorian hypocrisy offers compelling reading.
19) The good soldier
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HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.
'Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.'
Just before the First World War, two young couples meet in Germany. The seemingly perfect yet brittle relationship of the Ashburnhams soon gives way to unhappiness and betrayal, and respectability to adultery and deception. The Dowells...
20) The castle
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Kafka's last novel, The Castle is set in a remote village covered almost permanently in snow and dominated by a castle and its staff of dictatorial, sexually predatory bureaucrats. The novel breaks new ground in exploring the relation between the individual and power, asking why the villagers so readily submit to an authority which may exist only in their collective imagination. Published only after Kafka's death, The Castle appeared in the same decade...