As part of a schedule of unorthodox therapies, Horner's nameless Doctor has him take a teaching job at a local teachers college. There Horner befriends the super-rational existentialist Joe Morgan and his wife Rennie, with whom he becomes entangled in a love triangle, with tragic results. The book deals with several issues that were controversial at the time, including racial segregation and abortion. (from wikipedia)

    Journey to the Alcarria is the best known of his vagabundajes, Cela’s term for his books of travels, sketchbooks of regions or provinces. The Alcarria is a territory in New Castile, northeast of Madrid, surrounding most of the Guadalajara province. The region is high, rocky, and dry, and is famous for its honey.Cela himself is “the traveler,” an urban intellectual wandering from village to village, through farms and along country roads, in search of the Spanish character. Cela relishes his encounters with the simple, honest people of the Spanish countryside—the blushing maid in the tavern, the small-town shopkeeper with airs of grandeur lonely for companionship, the old peasant with his donkey who freely shares his bread and blanket with the stranger. These vignettes are narrated in a fresh, clear prose that is wonderfully evocative. As the New York Times wrote, Cela is “an outspoken observer of human life who built his reputation on portray­ing what he observed in a direct colloquial style.”

    It is wintertime, late December: a species of "now." A narrator—Tsypkinis on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of St. Petersburg, a Dostoyevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything "right." Nothing is invented, everything is invented. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky. In a remarkable introductory essay (which appeared in The New Yorker), Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle that Summer in Baden-Baden has survived, and celebrates the happy event of its publication in America with an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel.

    As a depiction of South Africa, this novel is more revealing than a thousand news dispatches as it tells the story of a young woman cast in the role of a young revolutionary, trying to uphold a heritage handed on by martyred parents while carving out a sense of one's self.

    They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the twentieth century.In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis and their interactions with their small local community Chatwin comments movingly on the larger questions of human experience.

    It tells the story of Billy Fisher, a Yorkshire teenager unable to stop lying - especially to his three girlfriends. Trapped by his boring job and working-class parents, Billy finds that his only happiness lies in grand plans for his future and fantastical day-dreams of the fictional country Ambrosia.

    . . tells the story of Pedro Archanjo, mestizo, self-taught ethnologist, apostle of miscegenation, laborer, cult priest, and bon vivant. . . . Amado’s joyous, exuberant, almost magical descriptions of festivals, puppet shows, African rituals, local legends, fascinating customs, strange and wonderful characters . . . result in a richness and warmth that are impossible to resist.

    Zapparoni, a brilliant businessman, has turned his advanced understanding of technology and his strategic command of the information and entertainment industries into a discrete form of global domination. But Zapparoni is worried that the scientists he depends on might sell his secrets. He needs a chief of security, and Richard, a veteran and war hero, is ready for the job. However, when he arrives at the beautiful country compound that is Zapparoni's headquarters, he finds himself subjected to an unexpected ordeal. Soon he is led to question his past, his character, and even his senses....

    Arthur Daane, a documentary film-maker and inveterate globetrotter, has lost his wife and child in a plane crash. In ALL SOULS' DAY we follow Arthur as he wanders the streets of Berlin, a city uniquely shaped by history. Berlin provides the backdrop for Daane's reflections on life as he plans his latest project - a self-funded film that will show the world through Daane's eyes. With a new circle of friends - a philosopher, a sculptor and a physicist - Arthur discusses everything from history to metaphysics, and the cumulative power of remembered images and philosophical musings on the meaning of our contemporary existence comes to permeate the atmosphere of the book. Then one cold, wintry day, Daane meets the young history student Elik Orange and his world is turned upside down. Whenever this mysterious woman beckons, Daane is compelled to follow. ALL SOULS' DAY is, finally, an elegiac love story in which the personal histories of the characters are skilfully interwoven with the history of the countries in which they find themselves. It is also the poignant and affecting tale of a man coming to terms

    As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on her own writing, on the making of The Making of Americans, and on America.

    Isolated and secure, the residents lack nothing, yet one day, a doctor at the clinic goes on a suicidal shooting spree. Dr. Jane Sinclair is hired as his replacement, and her husband Paul uncovers the dangerous psychological vents that maintain Eden-Olympia's smoothly-running surface.

    It is generally regarded as the masterpiece of Conscience, which earned him the title "the man who taught his people to read".

    If Helping Verbs of the Heart was an homage to his mother, then this is a memorial to his father. It is actually two works in one. Book 1, "Numbered Sentences from the Life of the Esterházy Family", comprises 371 paragraphs, some elusively succinct, others pages long, that amount to a gloriously kaleidoscopic romp through the centuries that lie behind this European dynasty. Not that the name Esterházy is ever uttered: the main protagonist of each episode is invariably identified as "my father", whether he is an anti-Habsburg Kuruc insurrectionist or a Habsburg-loyal Labanc, a hammer of the Ottomans, a dying old man, a prisoner of war, a lord charming enough to enchant Goethe himself, or a childless man, to mention but a few of "my fathers", all evoked through the language and literature proper to each persona. This strategy of anonymity allows Esterházy to extend his typically vast net of quotations to sources that originally have no family connotations whatsoever, thereby lending broader significance to the particulars of this one family, however grand, and, vice versa, appropriating the general (European) experience to the family's specific circumstances. The baroquely exuberant proliferation of anecdotal gleanings and fragments of real and fictional history, drawing on a gamut of written genres, from maxims to parables, from confessional autobiography to the account books and chronicles, is ultimately threaded together by an unobtrusive, profoundly witty and wise philosophical vein.Book 2, subtitled "Confessions of an Esterházy family", is ostensibly a more conventional family novel. Its very subtitle alludes to an earlier Hungarian masterpiece of the genre, Confessions of a Bourgeois, 1934-35 by Sándor Márai. It consists of a series of snapshots of key events in the lives of the author's great-grandfather, grandfather, father and the young Esterházy himself. These are built up, over two hundred numbered passages, into a more or less chronological portrait of a century-and-a-half of steady decline of the family's fortunes. After 1945 the Esterházys suffered an almost catastrophic repeat of the confiscations and curtailment of liberties that befell them during the short-lived Commune of 1919 one that not only stripped them of their former rank and privileges but threatened their very subsistence. Largely anecdotal and often absurd in tone, much of this is recounted with great gusto from the author's personal perspective, not least the stories of his own childhood, such as being accidentally dropped into the baptismal font; the trek to a godforsaken village in July 1950 when an official deportation order resulted in the family being dumped in one of two rooms in a peasant couple's house; schooldays and trips to matches with his football-mad father. For all the vicissitudes and uncertainties it describes, the tone of his writing throughout is one of blithely upbeat humour and harmony, without a hint of reproach, regret or complaint."A captivatingly rich novel in terms of both its form and its stance. Certainly it is the most striking work of the fifty-year-old author's career to date, and I would evenventure to call it an epitome of the Esterházy oeuvre. Given its formal richness, however, it is in a way also a compendium of two to three centuries of Hungarianprose." -Péter Dérczy, Élet és Irodalom"This new novel is no less constructed of fragments than his earlier novels, and those are no less whole, but this has the widest span of any Esterházy composition to date: it is a sweeping, baroque work." -József Tamás Reményi, Népszabadság

    Beneath the once decorous surface of their lives, unsavories like blackmail and adultery are now to be glimpsed. As spooky as it is witty, poignant and wickedly hilarious, Memento Mori may ostensibly concern death, but it is a book which leaves one relishing life all the more.

    It takes Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose and their niece, Rachel, on a sea voyage from London to a resort on the South American coast. “It is a strange, tragic, inspired book whose scene is a South America not found on any map and reached by a boat which would not float on any sea, an America whose spiritual boundaries touch Xanadu and Atlantis” (E. M. Forster).