"The final questions and their answers lie serenely coupled in it.

    No set of novels so richly recreates the last days of India under British rule--"two nations locked in an imperial embrace"--as Paul Scott's historical tour de force, " The Raj Quartet." "The Jewel in the Crown" opens in 1942 as the British fear both Japanese invasion and Indian demands for independence.

    In a perfect fusion of treatment and theme, this powerful novel tells the story of a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest in Japan at the height of the fearful persecution of the small Christian community.

    And as the boys grow into young men, they discover in the other a lost spiritual brother, and a link to an unexplored world that neither had ever considered before. In effect, they exchange places, and find the peace that neither will ever retreat from again. . . .

    But their passion is fated and jealousy, a love potion and the closeness of the spirit world are important factors.

    On top of that, most of his friends' families were moving to the suburbs. It would have been a long, dreary summer, but then a Mr. Mazeeck showed up and turned out to be more than he seemed. This now classic book was first published by Atheneum in 1966. It was selected by Scholastic Books for inclusion in the Arrow Book Club and later republished in a Dell Yearling edition in 1988.

    And it is in this exciting time and exotic place that a giant of an Englishman, Dirk Straun, sets out to turn the desolate island of Hong Kong into an impregnable fortress of British power, and to make himself supreme ruler…Tai-Pan!

    To save the long-term future of their village, the people in the Italian village of Santa Vittoria decide to hide over a million bottles of their famous (and expensive) wine from the occupying Nazis.

    Drawing from real-life characters and incidents, these sketches are as varied as people can be and quite interesting.

    Set in a small, dusty Texas town, it introduces Jacy, Duane and Sonny, teenagers stumbling towards adulthood, discovering the beguiling mysteries of sex and the even more baffling mysteries of love.

    Living high in the Alps in a German principality called Heiligenberg, our narrator tells us he's dutifully fulfilling his obligations as a Servant of Justice and acting as a daily witness to injustice masquerading as a court of law. One day in the courtroom he notices that the judge is much too engrossed in looking at something concealed in his folder to pay attention to the proceedings. The something turns out to be some pornographic photographs showing various other pillars of the town engaged in a variety of sexual activities with minors. The incident propels him on a mental journey back through his life: dreams and hallucinations, black-humor fantasies and suicidal drinking binges; the Roman catacombs, warm summer nights in Brooklyn; brothels in Stockholm, his childhood in Norway, and wanderings in Germany But aside from court records he has been keeping his own long and detailed account of man's cruelty to man in a massive twelve-volume study he calls his History of Bestiality. Acknowledging his Germanic past, the narrator realizes that all his attempts to perceive order in life lead only to his acceptance of the chaos of life. With echoes of Nietzsche and Sartre, we see him striving to live uncoerced by power, unpersuaded by friends, to take for himself the liberty of stating his critique in order to live in his own moment of truth, to stand far out at the edge of the abyss.

    Brown the hotelier, Smith the innocent American, and Jones the confidence man—these are the “comedians” of Greene’s title. Hiding behind their actors’ masks, they hesitate on the edge of life. They are men afraid of love, afraid of pain, afraid of fear itself...

    In the wake of his father's premature death, Jose Cemi comes of age in a turn of the century Cuba described in the Washington Post as "an island paradise where magic and philosophy twist the lives of the old Cuban bourgeoisie into extravagant wonderful shapes."

    Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.

    Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts. Omensetter's Luck meticulously brings to life a specific time and place as it illuminates timeless questions about life, love, good and evil.

    Fray Servando--priest, blasphemer, dueler of monsters, irresistible lover, misunderstood prophet, prisoner, and consummate escape artist--wanders among the vice-ridden populations of eighteenth-century Europe and the Americas, fleeing dungeons, a marriage-minded woman, a slave ship captain, and the Inquisition. Whether by burro, by boat, or by the back of a whale, Fray Servando's journey is at once funny and romantic, melancholy and profound--a tale rooted in history, yet outrageously hallucinatory."An impenitent amalgam of truth and invention, historical fact and outrageous make-believe . . . a philosophical black comedy."--The New York Times

    Round the market square the life of Caxley revolved, from horse-drawn drays to the noisy new motors and the aeroplanes which the young men of Caxley longed to fly, from the coronation of King Edward VII to the last flowering of the Empire, ending on the muddly battlefields of the Somme..For Sep it was the end of an era; for Bertie and Kathy, the beginning of happiness; and for young Edward, tasting his first glass of wine, there was a world of tomorrows.

    Astonished by each new complication, and yet resigned to a life of evasion, Herman navigates a crowded, Yiddish New York with a sense of perpetually impending doom.

    Through her summer affair with Nick Kazlik, a schoolmate from earlier years, she learns at last to reach out to another person and to make herself vulnerable.A Jest of God won the Governor General’s Award for 1966 and was released as the successful film, Rachel, Rachel. The novel stands as a poignant and singularly enduring work by one of the world’s most distinguished authors.

    John Emmerson was a lonely man.  He had a wife, a son, friends, but he was isolated from all the people and events about him by the tragedy of his past.  Then he met Cissie, and for the first time his loneliness eased a little.Cissie was everything his wife Ann was not.  She was warm, and compassionate, and generous.  And she was quick to sense the needs of a desolate, unhappy man.But Cissie was also a young widow:  poor, and with a young son to support.  And John Emmerson was one of the town's leading solicitors--a man of importance whose every move was watched by the local dignitaries...

    Second Edition. POKER is Tomaz Salamun's first book of poetry, originally published in 1966 in Slovenia. This edition, vibrantly translated by award-winning poet Joshua Beckman in collaboration with the author, makes POKER available in its entirety in English. Poker was a finalist for the PEN American prize for poetry in translation. " ...the poetry of Tomaz Salamun is truly one of the wonders of the literary world"—John Bradley (in Rain Taxi)."...the wonderfully mystical, synaesthetic, and visionary poems of this book make a strange yet immediate sense"—Noah Eli Gordon (in The Poetry Project Newsletter).

    In the morning, Tommy's bed lifts to the ceiling and plunks him into a tub of water. He then slides down a chute to get into his clothes and is fed breakfast from an "eating machine." When an electrical outage occurs, Tommy's life is turned upside down and he realizes (a bit abruptly) that "I really must turn over a new leaf."

    "Exhilarating....totally convincing...wonderfully fresh and human...Every page is vibrant with live people in live contact." -- Saturday Review

    A coal-mine explosion in a small mid-American town claims ninety-seven lives. The only survivor, a lapsed Catholic given to mysterious visions, is adopted as a doomsday prophet by a group of small-town mystics. "Exposed" by the town newspaper editor, the cult gains international notoriety and its ranks swell. As its members gather on the Mount of Redemption to await the apocalypse, Coover lays bare the madness of religious frenzy and the sometimes greater madness of "normal" citizens. The Origin of the Brunists is vintage Coover -- comic, fearless, incisive, and brilliantly executed. "A novel of intensity and conviction ... a splendid talent ... heir to Dreiser or Lewis." -- The New York Times Book Review; "A breathtaking masterpiece on any level you approach it." -- Sol Yurick; "[The Origin of the Brunists] delivers the goods . . . [and] says what it has to say with rudeness, vigor, poetry and a headlong narrative momentum." -- The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

    

    Flora Nwapa's first novel plants her story firmly in the world of women, where Efuru, beautiful and respected, is loved and deserted by two ordinary, undistinguished husbands.

    A. Nanga is a man of the people, as cynical as he is charming, and a roguish opportunist. When Odili, an idealistic young teacher, visits his former instructor at the ministry, the division between them is vast. But in the eat-and-let-eat atmosphere, Odili's idealism soon collides with his lusts--and the two men's personal and political tauntings threaten to send their country into chaos. When Odili launches a vicious campaign against his former mentor for the same seat in an election, their mutual animosity drives the country to revolution.Published, prophetically, just days before Nigeria's first attempted coup in 1966, A Man of the People is an essential part of Achebe's body of work.

    Driven by despairs as terrible as they are comic, David Brooke sets out to "project" himself into the lives of other people. One may wonder what ties connect the figures whose diverse experiences are conjured up by Brooke's uncanny necromancy, what are the sad or bizarre or lunatic strands that draw together characters as disparate as the endearing monster Duke Amerchrome, the controlled Oxonian Harry Tindall, reserved English bookseller Peter St. John, and Brooke's own detached father, among others. Gradually there emerges an intricate and fascinating pattern of meaning, at the heart of which lies a single metaphor that in a thousand ways tells us who we are.

    It's the award given each day to the child who has been most helpful. When Charley Cornett begins school no one expects him to win the award. Charley's not exactly the helpful type, he's more the curious type. He has to climb out on a tree limb to see how the apple is attached. And he has to hold his hand over the water tap to see if running water can be stopped. Nothing can stop Charley. Then one special day, a day full of rocks and snakes and books, Charley surprises his family and the entire school!

    

    

    Chilling account of a pathfinder unit at the disasterous battle of Arnhem.

    Eric Sweetscent has problems. His planet is enmeshed in an unwinnable war. His wife is lethally addicted to a drug that whips its users helplessly back and forth across time -- and is hell-bent on making Eric suffer along with her. And Sweetscent's newest patient is not only the most important man on the embattled planet Earth but quite possibly the sickest. For Secretary Gino Molinari has turned his mortal illness into an instrument of political policy -- and Eric cannot tell if his job is to make the man better or to keep him poised just this side of death.Now Wait for Last Year bursts through the envelope between the impossible and the inevitable. Even as it ushers us into a future that looks uncannily like the present, it makes the normal seem terrifyingly provisional -- and compels anyone who reads it to wonder if he really knows what time it is.

    Here on his island in the sun, Armes Holbrook falls in love with another man's wife, becomes enmeshed with a lovely half-caste who initiates him into the strange and sensual rites of voodoo, and plays a blazing and tumultuous role in the bloody revolution led by the giant slave, Henry Christophe...

    Setting: The Western Front, 1916-1917.A young French aviator swears vengeance on the German ace who killed his best friend and kills without mercy.

    Beginning with a wonderful portrait of tha author's remarkable father, the book follows Dos Passos through Harvard; through World War I as an ambulance driver in France & Italy; through the chaotic postwar Middle East; through the vast reaches of Soviet Russia; the 'Russian Experiment' & through the literary world on both sides of the Atlantic.

    BuckThe Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

    Analyse: Roman psychologique (formation).

    S. ForesterJane Eyre by Charlotte BronteMy Friend Flicka by Mary O'HaraAlone by Richard E. Byrd

    The Adventurers is a story of revolution and danger in the sultry jungles of South America.As a young boy, Diogenes Alejandro Xenos (“Dax”) witnesses the brutal rape and murder of his mother and sister by government troops—experiencing the drama of revolution, loss, and tragedy firsthand. He is sent to Europe by the victorious rebel leader to rebuild his country’s diplomatic and financial status post-revolution, and is immediately thrown into the elite environment of Europe’s jet set society of international bankers and diplomats.Outwardly, Dax lives a life of privilege as one of the continent’s most sought-after, hedonistic playboys—wanted by men and women alike, but for very different reasons. Inside, however, he channels his fear, anger and hatred for the new regime, which he realizes is as corrupt as the old, into a desire to disrupt the status quo. Once a favorite of the general-turned-dictator, Dax quickly becomes an outlaw in his own country, living on the fringes of society as a rebel hell-bent on a new revolution.This epic tale of escape from the horrors of a third world regime is one of Harold Robbins' most ambitious novels ever, combining his trademark sensuality with political intrigue, a globe-spanning variety of exotic locales, and themes that never seem to change—political intrigue, greed, power, money, violence, sex and betrayal.With Dax Xenos, Robbins thrills and excites us with one of his most memorable and intriguing characters—a flawed and complicated hero.

    Treece's final book caps an impressive oeuvre in somber hues.'' - Barron (ed), Fantasy Literature 4A-253.

    In Mojo Hand, it is the blues singer Blacksnake Brown who casts a spell over Eunice Prideaux, a light-skinned black woman from San Francisco. Eunice?s fascination with the blues doesn?t always mean being the helpless victim of whatever created them. The life she has to lead is her own and no one else?s. The haunting language of Mojo Hand has no equivalent in twentieth-century fiction - it is matched only by the music that is its subject.

    For the children get buried alive as a result of landslide. No one knows their whereabouts and they have to live in a strange house in total darkness, with almost nothing to eat and drink but goat’s milk, and only the sound of the cuckoo clock to help them count the hours of the twelve days which pass before they are rescued.In this dilemma Laurent comes out of his snail’s shell, but though the others accept him as their leader, they do not always obey him, especially his little sister Bertille. She brings them into even greater danger when she tries to break the rules. The children have to learn to love with rats, and Laurent gets badly wounded before he finally finds a way of signalling for help.This is a book you are certain to read twice – first quickly, to find out what happens, and then again slowly, to re-live the adventures and perhaps imagine how you would have managed in the same predicament. For all Puffin readers between 9 and 13.

    Her cousin has grown up in the city feeling helpless due to a leg injury. She and her cousin swap sandals -- trade places -- in order to discover new perspectives.

    

    One of the people in the spaceship tells Jo that he has to take an urgent message to Empire Star, and dies. Another collapses to form Jewel, a compact, multicolored, multiplexed crystalline entity. Empire Star is the story of Comet Jo's journey to deliver the message, as narrated by Jewel.

    Classic Literature, Literary Studies, Collected Works

    

    Certainly, Compact is one of the most compellingly original works of fiction of the postwar period. Composed--as if a musical score--of six intertwining narratives (each distinguished by its own voice, tense, and typeface), Compact has lost none of its remarkable freshness or groundbreaking innovation since its first appearance in 1966. But along with its striking originality, Compact is also a work rich in offbeat humor and great humanity. Compact is the story of a blind man living in a city of his own imagining. Confined to his deathbed, he engages in mental walks through the world's capitals. These sightless excursions explode in a plethora of musical arrangements, sexual encounters, and mysterious funeral rites. Meanwhile, a Japanese collector and his transvestite assistant watch over the blind man in exchange--upon the latter's death--for his magnificent tattooed skin. As a further ordeal, the protagonist finds himself prey to the whims of a sadistic French girl in the next apartment. A novelistic tour de force, Compact fully bears out La Tribune de Geneve's judgment of Maurice Roche's work as "the most important literary upheaval to hit France in the last decade."

    Ashes of Izalco brings together a Salvadoran woman and an American man who struggle over issues of love, loyalty, and sociopolitical injustice.