Fool's Gold (Modern Greek Writers)


Maro Douka - 1979
    The child of a well-to-do family, Myrsini enthusiastically joins the underground resistance, making common cause with a varied cast of characters from backgrounds very different from her own. After an early failed love affair she gets engaged to George, a political prisoner, only to find her human instincts increasingly difficult to reconcile with her idealistic philosophy once he is released. The story moves towards its climax as Myrsini becomes involved in the bloody events of 17th November 1973, when tanks were used to evict students from the Athens Polytechnic. At the same time the fortunes of Myrsini's family form a backdrop at once touching and bizarre to an impressionable girl's unflinching search for a true identity, both for herself and for her country.

The Glass Bees


Ernst Jünger - 1957
    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....

The First Garden


Anne Hébert - 1988
    When word comes that her long-estranged daughter, Maud, has disappeared in Quebec City, she decides to return home, accepting the part of Winnie, the old crone in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, at a local theatre. The visit unexpectedly turns into a devastating confrontation with her past and present illusions, as Flora finds she must come to terms with all the roles she has ever played in life, as actress, woman, mother, child, and lover.

Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.


Edith Œnone Somerville - 1899
    As the straight-man narrator, observer, and regular butt of hundreds of hilarious trials and mishaps, Major Yeates never ceases to be surprised, is usually not amused, and can't stop himself from loving his Irish neighbors.-500 Great Books by Women.

The Lion of Flanders


Hendrik Conscience - 1838
    It is generally regarded as the masterpiece of Conscience, which earned him the title "the man who taught his people to read".

The Holder of the World


Bharati Mukherjee - 1993
    Once again, Bharati Mukherjee proves she is one of our foremost writers, with the literary muscles to weave both the future and the past into a tale that is singularly intelligent and provocative."--AMY TANThis is the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, "a person undreamed of in Puritan society." Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal, India, with her husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course, "translating" herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja.It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an "asset hunter" who stumbles on the scattered record of her distant relative's life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces together details of Hannah's journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief that with "sufficient passion and intelligence, we can deconstruct the barriers of time and geography...."

Indigo


Marina Warner - 1992
    Inspired by Shakespeare's magic play The Tempest, prizewinning writer Marina Warner refashions the drama to explore the restless conflicts between the inhabitants of a Caribbean island and the English family who settled it. From that violent moment in the seventeenth century when the English buccaneer Kit Everard arrives at Enfant-Beate, the islanders' fate is intertwined, often tragically, with that of the Everards. The voices that map the fortunes of those born, raised, or landed on the island pass from the wise woman Sycorax in the past, a healer and a dyer of indigo, to the native nanny Serafine Killebree, who transforms them to fairy tales for the two little Everard girls in London in the 1950s. At the center of the modern-day story is the relationship between these two young women: Xanthe, the golden girl, brash and confident, and Miranda, self-conscious and uneasy, who struggles with her Creole inheritance. When Xanthe decides they should return to Enfant-Beate to restore their fortunes, she binds the family closer to its past and awakens a history marked with passions and portents that takes the two women on very different paths of discovery. Sensuous and earthy, humorous and magical, Indigo is a novel of powerful originality and imagination.

Blaming


Elizabeth Taylor - 1976
    Upon their return to England, Amy is ungratefully reluctant to maintain their friendship, but the skeins of their existence seem inextricably linked as grief gives way to resilience and again to tragedy. Reversals of fortune and a compelling cast of characters, including Ernie, ex-sailor turned housekeeper, and Amy's wonderfully precocious granddaughters, add spice to a novel that delights even as it unveils the most uncomfortable human emotions.

A World of Love


Elizabeth Bowen - 1955
    When twenty-year-old Jane finds in the attic a packet of love letters written years ago by Guy, her mother’s one-time fiance who died in World War I, the discovery has explosive repercussions. It is not clear to whom the letters are addressed, and their appearance begins to lay bare the strange and unspoken connections between the adults now living in the house. Soon, a girl on the brink of womanhood, a mother haunted by love lost, and a ruined matchmaker with her own claim on the dead wage a battle that makes the ghostly Guy as real a presence in Montefort as any of the living.

Arcadia


Jim Crace - 1992
    Expensively insulated from the outside world, he nonetheless finds that memories of his impoverished childhood will not be kept so easily at bay. Focusing on the one area of vitality and chaos that remains in the streets below him, he formulates a plan to leave a mark on the city – one as indelible and disruptive as the mark the city left on him.

The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll


Álvaro Mutis - 1993
    His extravagant and hopeless undertakings, his brushes with the law and scrapes with death, and his enduring friendships and unlooked-for love affairs make him a Don Quixote for our day, driven from one place to another by a restless and irregular quest for the absolute. Álvaro Mutis's seven dazzling chronicles of the adventures and misadventures of Maqroll have won him numerous honors and a passionately devoted readership throughout the world. Here for the first time in English all these wonderful stories appear in a single volume in Edith Grossman's prize-winning translation.

The Third Wedding


Costas Taktsis - 1963
    The German Occupation, the Civil War and life itself seen through the eyes of two Athenian women.

Bartleby & Co.


Enrique Vila-Matas - 2000
    D. Salinger, Bartleby Co. could be described as a meditation: a walking tour through the annals of literature. Written as a series of footnotes (a non-work itself), Bartleby embarks on such questions as why do we write, why do we exist? The answer lies in the novel itself: told from the point of view of a hermetic hunchback who has no luck with women, and is himself unable to write, Bartleby is an utterly engaging work of profound and philosophical beauty.

The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman


Andrzej Szczypiorski - 1986
    With these, and a set of false papers, she has slipped out of the ghetto, passing as the wife of a Polish officer, until one day an informer spots her on the street and drags her off to the Gestapo. At times a dark lament, at others a sly and sardonic thriller, The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is the story of the thirty-six hours that follow Irma's arrest and the events that lead to her dramatic rescue as the last of Warsaw's Jews are about to meet their deaths in the burning ghetto.

Indian Summer


Adalbert Stifter - 1857
    It is in fact the baron's own reminiscences which give the book its title.