For ten years, he has persevered in the most hellish conditions. Deathly weak, he still has his wits about him and he senses that the end of the war is near. If he and the other living corpses in his barracks can hold on for liberation--or force their own--then their suffering will not have been in vain.Now the SS who run the camp are ratcheting up the terror. But their expectations are jaded and their defenses are down. It is possible that the courageous, yet terribly weak prisoners have just enough left in them to resist. And if they die fighting, they will die on their own terms, cheating the Nazis out of their devil's contract.

    Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.

    However, Life and Fate is only the second half of a two-part work, the first half of which was published in 1952. Grossman wanted to call this earlier work Stalingrad—as it will be in this first English translation—but it was published as For a Just Cause. The characters in both novels are largely the same and so is the story line; Life and Fate picks up where Stalingrad ends, in late September 1942. The first novel is in no way inferior to Life and Fate; the chapters about the Shaposhnikov family are both tender and witty, and the battle scenes are vivid and moving. One of the most memorable chapters of Life and Fate is the last letter written from a Jewish ghetto by Viktor Shtrum’s mother—a powerful lament for East European Jewry. The words of this letter do not appear in Stalingrad, yet the letter’s presence makes itself powerfully felt and it is mentioned many times. We learn who carries it across the front lines, who passes it on to whom, and how it eventually reaches Viktor. Grossman describes the difficulty Viktor experiences in reading it and his inability to talk about it even to his family. The absence of the letter itself is eloquent—as if its contents are too awful for anyone to take in.

    Basil, a sensitive artisan, is purchased from slavery and commissioned to create a decorative casing for the Chalice that Jesus used at the Last Supper. Basil travels to Jerusalem, Greece, and Rome, meets the apostles, braves the perils of persecution, and finally makes a fateful choice that allows him to “see” Jesus. The dramatic plot, compelling characters, and spiritual depth of The Silver Chalice made it one of the most popular historical novels of the twentieth century.

    Daumal's symbolic mountain represents a way to truth that "cannot not exist," and his classic allegory of man's search for himself embraces the certainty that one can know and conquer one's own reality.

    Fortunati, operator of a remote Congo hospital, with whom she gradually builds respect, and again during World War II, when she is ordered not to take sides. Ultimately, Sister Luke is forced to decide whether to remain in the convent or return to the outside world.Gabrielle/Sister Luke is stretched between her desire to be faithful to the rule of her congregation and her desire to be a nurse. As a nun she must remove all vestiges of "Gabrielle Van Der Mal" and sublimate herself into the devoted bride of Christ. As a nun there is no room for her personal desires and aspirations. Ultimately, the conflict between her devotion to the Church and the nursing profession, juxtaposed with her passionate Belgian patriotism and her love of her father (killed by Nazi fighter planes while treating wounded) bring her to an impasse, which serves as the dénouement of the novel.

    A short novel, that may also be viewed as a set of connected mini-narratives, it can also be considered as one of the foremost instances of metafiction in twentieth century Hindi literature. This book talks about the encounter of narrator with 3 different women during his teenage, youth & adulthood.

    They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover. With this reissue, The Price of Salt may finally be recognized as a major twentieth-century American novel.

    Russian writer Gaito Gazdanov arrived in Paris, as so many did, between the wars and would go on, with this fourth novel, to give readers a crisp rendering of a living city changing beneath its people’s feet. Night Roads is loosely based on the author’s experiences as a cab driver in those disorienting, often brutal years, and the narrator moves from episode to episode, holding court with many but sharing his mind with only a few. His companions are drawn straight out of the Parisian past: the legendary courtesan Jeanne Raldi, now in her later days, and an alcoholic philosopher who goes by the name of Plato. Along the way, the driver picks up other characters, such as the dull thinker who takes on the question of the meaning of life only to be driven insane. The dark humor of that young man’s failure against the narrator’s authentic, personal explorations of the same subject is captured in this first English translation. With his trademark émigré eye, Gazdanov pairs humor with cruelty, sharpening the bite of both.

    As the novel follows the course of Joyce's pregnancy, John deals with Joyce's shifting emotional moods, her growing interest in Roman Catholicism (from which John himself has fallen away), and termite infestation in the house. All of this is further complicated by John's problematic relationship with his father Nick, a retired bricklayer who isn't shy about sharing his own strong opinions about family life.

    But for Leslie, falling in love with a Texan was a lot simpler than falling in love with Texas. Upon their arrival at Bick's ranch, Leslie is confronted not only with the oppressive heat and vastness of Texas but also by the disturbing inequity between runaway riches and the poverty and racism suffered by the Mexican workers on the ranch. Leslie and Bick's loving union endures against all odds, but a reckoning is coming and a price will have to be paid.A sensational and enthralling saga, Ferber masterfully captures the essence of Texas with all its wealth and excess, cruelty and prejudice, pride and violence.

    But no one knows my true identity and no one ever shall."For it is the year 1453; and here in Constantinople a mighty Christian empire is dying brutally as the Moslem hordes storm its massive wall.

    Her books have sold millions of copies, and her characters and their stories have captured the imaginations of readers around the globe. Now, available for the first time in this country, comes one of Cookson's earliest and most stirring historical romances: "The Fifteen Streets." John O'Brien lives in a world where surviving is a continual struggle. He works long hours at the docks to help support his parents' large family. Many other families in the Fifteen Streets have already given up and descended into a dismal state of grinding poverty, but the O'Briens continue to strive for a world they are only rarely allowed to glimpse.Then John O'Brien meets Mary Llewellyn, a beautiful young teacher who belongs to that other world. What begins as a casual conversation over tea quickly blossoms into a rare love that should have been perfect. Fate steps in, however, when John is accused of fathering the child of a local girl, and Mary's parents forbid her to see him. The couple begins to realize that the gulf of the Fifteen Streets between them is a chasm they could never bridge-or might they still find a way?In these pages Catherine Cookson displays the irresistible plotting, scene-setting, and characterization that have made her a recognized master of historical and romance fiction. Fans of her novels, with their larger themes of romantic love and class conflict, will be delighted to find that even at the beginning of her illustrious career, Cookson had the power to captivate audiences. Filled with passion and compelling drama, "The Fifteen Streets" is a rare treat for lovers of romantic fiction.

    In a prison camp, British POWs are forced into labor. The bridge they build will become a symbol of service and survival to one prisoner, Colonel Nicholson, a proud perfectionist. Pitted against the warden, Colonel Saito, Nicholson will nevertheless, out of a distorted sense of duty, aid his enemy. While on the outside, as the Allies race to destroy the bridge, Nicholson must decide which will be the first casualty: his patriotism or his pride.

    But when Danny's family falls on hard times, moving from their comfortable home in Brooklyn to Manhattan's squalid Lower East Side, he is forced to leave his carefree childhood behind. Facing poverty and daily encounters with his violent, anti-Semitic neighbors, Danny must fight both inside and outside the ring just to survive. As his boxing becomes legendary in the city's seedy underworld, packed with wiseguys and loose women, everyone seems to want a hand in Danny's success. Robbins's colorful, fast-talking characters evoke the rough streets of Depression-era New York City. Ronnie, a prostitute ashamed of how far she's fallen and desperately in need of friendship; Sam, a slick bookie who wants to profit from Danny's boxing talent; and Nellie, a beautiful but lonely girl who refuses to believe Danny is beyond redemption -- each of whom has a different vision of Danny's future -- will help steer his rocky course. Gritty, compelling, and groundbreaking for its time, A Stone for Danny Fisher is a tale of ambition, hope, and violence set in a distinct and dangerous period of American history. A classic, sexy bestseller by Harold Robbins, reintroduced to a whole new generation of readers.

    Divided between her Puritan family at the Oxfordshire village's manor house and her relatives in the Gypsy community, she works using her skill in healing to help those in need. Her cousin Robert , a local squire, is gripped by the prospect of war. Following his boyhood hero, he leaves his family and travels away to fight for the Parliamentarian cause. While his wife Margaret and their twin children wait in the manor house for news about him. Left behind with her brother, Robert's daughter Jenny grows up under the shadow of conflict, until she encounters mysterious royalist Francis Leyland. While Froniga's gypsy cousins sometimes camp near her, and have befriended Yomen, who conceals a grand past, but is now a tinker and royalist spy. The women must choose between family loyalty and their own heart. As their lives entwine, the villagers struggle to stay true to their beliefs as war threatens to tear their community apart.

    Finlay series sand many other bestsellers. A master storyteller, A J Cronin presents possibly his most fascinating tale.

    Ignatius Loyola’s conversion and pilgrimage with the colorful and dangerous history of Spain and Italy in the early sixteenth century. The life of the very human, very great Basque nobleman who founded the Jesuit Order, makes for one of de Wohl’s finest novels.Seriously wounded at the siege of Pamplona in 1521, Don Inigo de Loyola learned that to be a Knight of God was an infinitely greater honor (and infinitely more dangerous) than to be a Knight in the forces of the Emperor. Uli von der Flue, humorous, intelligent and courageous Swiss mercenary, was responsible for the canon shot which incapacitated the worldly and ambitious young nobleman, and Uli became deeply involved in Loyola’s life. With Juanita, disguised as the boy Juan, Uli followed Loyola on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to protect him, but it was the saint who protected Uli and Juan. Through Uli’s eyes we see the surge and violence of the turbulent period in Jerusalem, Spain and Rome.Louis de Wohl has again created an exciting and spiritually inspiring novel for all readers of historical fiction.

    When the King's men despoil the monasteries and divide the wealth among the royal favorites, rebellion begins to brew in the north--and for a few weeks, the leader held the fate of a nation in his hands.

    Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those "excellent women," the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors--anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door--the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.

    His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade which seriously blots his Halberdier copybook. Men at Arms is the first book in Waugh's brilliant trilogy, Sword of Honour, which chronicles the fortunes of Guy Crouchback. The second and third volumes, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, are also published in Penguin Modern Classics.

    

    There is a series of jewel robberies on the Riviera that resemble his style and the police believe that the Cat is up to his old tricks again. A young lady vacationing in France suspects Robie at first, then offers to help him catch the burglar.

    For not only does Ralph Ellison's nightmare journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on the minds of both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be.As he journeys from the Deep South to the streets and basements of Harlem, from a horrifying "battle royal" where black men are reduced to fighting animals, to a Communist rally where they are elevated to the status of trophies, Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist ushers readers into a parallel universe that throws our own into harsh and even hilarious relief. Suspenseful and sardonic, narrated in a voice that takes in the symphonic range of the American language, black and white, Invisible Man is one of the most audacious and dazzling novels of our century.

    Once upon a time Whitey was a crooner with a million-dollar voice and a standing invitation from any woman who heard him use it. Until he had the bad luck to fall for Celia. And then nothing would ever be the same.In Street of No Return, David Goodis works the magic that made him one of the most distinctive voices in hard-boiled fiction, creating a claustrophobic universe in which wounded men and women collide with cataclysmic force.

    MacDonald, the beloved author of Cape Fear and the Travis McGee series, is now available as an eBook.   At a ferry stop along the Rio Conchos, the line of cars waiting to cross stretches to the horizon. Because of a bureaucratic blunder, the boat has been stalled, with no relief in sight for the drivers—many of them American, many growing impatient to reach the border. That kind of tension can do funny things to a person’s head . . . to a trembling killer looking over his shoulder . . . to a married man escorting a beautiful stranger on an ill-advised sabbatical . . . to a honeymooner determined to have her love returned. Many others are waiting, too. Some are desperate for a second chance. And it’s only a matter of time until someone snaps—especially when they’ve all been pushed too far under the scorching Mexican sun.   Features a new Introduction by Dean Koontz   Praise for John D. MacDonald   “The great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.”—Stephen King   “My favorite novelist of all time.”—Dean Koontz   “To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.”—Kurt Vonnegut   “A master storyteller, a masterful suspense writer . . . John D. MacDonald is a shining example for all of us in the field. Talk about the best.”—Mary Higgins Clark

    Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles's second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.

    She liked the simple things inlife - soft firelight and evenings at home. A quiet widow devoted to her only dear child, Sarah. Until she fell in with a fashionable crowd, going from party to party, trying things she would once have considered shocking and never quite thinking about the consequences. Why had she changed? And what was going to happen to her impressionable young daughter?Ann Prentice is in love with Richard Cauldfield and hopes for new happiness. Her only daughter, cannot contemplate the idea of her mother marrying again and wrecks any chance of her remarriage. Resentment and jealousy corrode their relationship as each seeks relief in different directions. Are mother and daughter destined to be enemies for life or will their underlying love for each other finally win through?

    Wicker's antique shop into Revolutionary days.......The Mirabelle was a three-masted schooner of more than usually trim lines. Even at the dockside, the curve of her bow gave an instant vision of how the waves would curl back as she drove forward over the sea. At the waterline, a clear light green contrasted well with the white of her sides. Above decks, the size of the masts and neatly furled sails showed at a glance that the Mirabelle was hardy enough to weather many a storm, and also that her crew were able and well trained.

    Paul’s rebellion is vintage Vonnegut—wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.Alternate cover edition here

    A deputy sheriff, Lou's known to the small-time criminals, the real-estate entrepreneurs, and all of his coworkers--the low-lifes, the big-timers, and everyone in-between--as the nicest guy around. He may not be the brightest or the most interesting man in town, but nevertheless, he's the kind of officer you're happy to have keeping your streets safe. The sort of man you might even wish your daughter would end up with someday.But behind the platitudes and glad-handing lurks a monster the likes of which few have seen. An urge that has already claimed multiple lives, and cost Lou his brother Mike, a self-sacrificing construction worker who fell to his death on the job in what was anything but an accident. A murder that Lou is determined to avenge--and if innocent people have to die in the process, well, that's perfectly all right with him.In The Killer Inside Me, Thompson goes where few novelists have dared to go, giving us a pitch-black glimpse into the mind of the American Serial Killer years before Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, in the novel that will forever be known as the master performance of one of the greatest crime novelists of all time.

    Fat, soiled Hagen rules this street of prostitutes, workers, dope-pushers - and lost souls. Yet people love and live on Roxton, as they do on any back street in your own home town.

    The epic tale of the outback Australian family, the Carmodys. The Carmodys live in the outback, travelling around, shearing, droving, making ends meet and looking for that one special place they can settle down in. Along the way, Paddy, his wife Ida, and their son, Sean, meet some of the most memorable characters in fiction. The Sundowners is a novel filled with kindness and happiness, as well as toughness and danger and is set against the magnificent backdrop of the wild, harsh and beautiful Australian landscape. In 1960 The Sundowners was turned into a film starring Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum and Peter Ustinov with a supporting cast including Chips Rafferty.

    Drawing on the West African Yoruba oral folktale tradition, Tutuola described the odyssey of a devoted palm-wine drinker through a nightmare of fantastic adventure. Since then, The Palm-Wine Drinkard has been translated into more than 15 languages and has come to be regarded as a masterwork of one of Africa's most influential writers. Tutuola's second novel, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, recounts the fate of mortals who stray into the world of ghosts, the heart of the tropical forest. Here, as every hunter and traveler knows, mortals venture at great peril, and it is here that a small boy is left alone.

    Immediately, the situation sparks the classic 'could it be an accident? Of course not...' and it isn't long before newspaperman Sam Evans begins to sense that something is wrong. But when he starts to link this death with other apparent accidents in the town, is his obsession taking him too far?

    Making his way to Paris at the end of World War II, Clébert took to living on the streets, and in Paris Vagabond, a so-called “aleatory novel” assembled out of sketches he jotted down at the time, he tells what it was like. His “gallery of faces and cityscapes on the road to extinction” is an astonishing depiction of a world apart—a Paris, long since vanished, of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast—and a no less astonishing feat of literary improvisation: Its long looping breathless sentences, streetwise, profane, lyrical, incantatory, are an adventure in their own right. Praised on publication by the great novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars, and embraced by the young Situationists as a kind of manual for living off the grid, Paris Vagabond—here published with the starkly striking photographs of Clébert’s friend Patrice Molinard—is a raw and celebratory evocation of the life of a city and the underside of life.