George Bowling, the hero of Orwell's comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money…
Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden y…
“As sharp and lucent and alarming as a piece of broken crystal.”― Deborah Eisenberg, author of Your Duck Is My Duck The last of the four novels Jean Rhys wrote in interwar Paris, Good Morning, Midnigh…
Few aristocratic English families of the twentieth century enjoyed the glamorous notoriety of the infamous Mitford sisters. Nancy Mitford's most famous novel, The Pursuit of Love satirizes British ari…
'With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly t…
Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last…
We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination—in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C....
Howards End is considered by many to be E. M. Forster’s masterpiece. First published in 1910, this beguiling and completely captivating tale explores social conventions, codes of conduct, and relation…
This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around him - he has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost…
In Time's Arrow the doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home. And all the…
As their holiday unfolds, Colin and Maria are locked into their own intimacy. They groom themselves meticulously, as though there waits someone who cares deeply about how they appear. Then they meet a…
Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride is inspired by "The Robber Bridegroom," a wonderfully grisly tale from the Brothers Grimm in which an evil groom lures three maidens into his lair and devours them, …
D. H. Lawrence's controversial classic, The Rainbow, follows the lives and loves of three generations of the Brangwen family between 1840 and 1905. Their tempestuous relationships are played out again…
At once grotesquely comic and unflinchingly violent, Blind Man With a Pistol is the final entry in Chester Himes's trailblazing Harlem Detectives series.
