So when his friend Maury enlists his help to sort out a problem with an ex-film star, Joe is more than happy to help.

    Treated as a failure at school, and unhappy at home, Billy discovers a new passion in life when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk. Billy identifies with her silent strength and she inspires in him the trust and love that nothing else can, discovering through her the passion missing from his life. Barry Hines's acclaimed novel continues to reach new generations of teenagers and adults with its powerful story of survival in a tough, joyless world.

    These two novels show Lessing returning to an earlier narrative style with fresh power.

    From local bars to train yards to prison, it's the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. When he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust delves into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It's a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.

    Copperfield at a party. Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, they go in search of salvation: Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, where she finds solace among the women who live and work in its brothels; while Miss Goering becomes involved with various men. At the end the two women meet again, each changed by her experience. Mysterious, profound, anarchic and very funny, 'Two Serious Ladies' is a daring, original work that defies analysis.

    The novel deals with love in its two aspects, the self-gratifying and the impersonal; - The Nice And The Good - as they are embodied in a fascinating array of paired characters. The Nice And The Good leads through stress and terror to a joyous and compassionate Midsummer Nights Dream conclusion, in which the couples all sort themselves out neatly and omnia vincit amor.

    It tells of an ordinary American family overtaken by the devastating epidemic of the Spanish influenza of 1918. The book begins on the day before the armistice in a small midwestern town, and the events are seen from the perspective, in turn, of eight-year-old Peter Morison--called Bunny; of his older brother, Robert; and of their father. They are witnesses to a domestic tragedy that is written with beauty and a quite magnificent tenderness. William Maxwell has been described by The Washington Post as "one of America's most distinguished and distinctive stylists." John Updike has said that "Maxwell's voice is one of the wisest in American fiction; it is, as well, one of the kindest." The Times Literary Supplement declares that "Maxwell offers us scrupulously executed, moving landscapes of America's twentieth century, and they do not fade." The Saturday Review said,"They Came Like Swallows is one of those rare tales in which child-hood is reflected in the simplicity and intensity of its own experience."

    Lawrence's mesmerizing and unsettling 1926 novel is his great work of the political imagination.

    The mind- and language-bending adventures of Hemon's endearing protagonist Jozef Pronek.

    In On the Edge of Reason, his protagonist is a middle-aged lawyer whose life and career have been eminently respectable and respected. One evening, at a party attended by the local elite, he inadvertently blurts out an honest thought. From this moment, all hell breaks loose.... On the Edge of Reason reveals the fundamental chasm between conformity and individuality. As folly piles on folly, hypocrisy on hypocrisy, reason itself begins to give way, and the edge between reality and unreality disappears.--back cover

    Like Strindberg at that age, he is a prophet without honor, his achievements having won him distinction only in foreign countries. On the island he has to combat pig-headedness and ignorance, and he is settling down with much self-pity to a long grind, when that creature whom he classifies as only a short remove from the child comes to cause further disturbance - a woman. For a time the uninitiated will suspect that a pretty love story is in the make, but others will observe the scientific analysis which Borg applies to even his happiest moments.

    He observes the gradual but profound changes wrought on the English countryside by the march of progress.

    William Styron traces the betrayals and infidelities—the heritage of spite and endlessly disappointed love—that afflict the members of a Southern family and that culminate in the suicide of the beautiful Peyton Loftis.

    The compensations are a wife and child, and a gloriously anarchic imagination. The Busconductor Hines is a brilliantly executed, uncompromising slice of the Glasgow scene, a portrait of working-class life which is unheroic but humane.

    Its playful narrative techniques convey a profound message, personal and political, about humankind's inability to love and yet our compulsion to go on trying.