Fiction Best Bets

Retired to the English countryside, an 89-year-old man, rumored to be a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years... more info...

Kaddish Poznan chips the names off gravestones for a living, remvoing traces of disreputable ancestors for their more respectable kin. His wife Lillian works in insurance, earning money whne people live... more info...

Published to international acclaim, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is bestselling author Stieg Larsson's captivating story of murder, love, and the complications of family. Forty years ago, Harriet... more info...

A missing piece of the remarkable posthumous legacy of Irene Nemirovsky, author of the internationally acclaimed Suite Francaise Written in 1941, the manuscript of Fire in the Blood was entrusted... more info...

On the first day of the new year, no one dies. Which is ominous, and causes much consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand,... more info...

Jose Saramago gives readers another astounding read with "Seeing". Rain is pouring down on the capital on election day and no one wants to brave the storm and vote. When the deluge subsides, the people... more info...

Election day in the capital and it rains so hard that no one bothers to come out to vote. When the rain finally stops, voters rush to the polling station as if ordered to appear.When the ballots are counted,... more info...

The novel vividly re-creates the antislavery movement of the 1840s, tracing it through the guerilla warfare of Bloody Kansas. Ingeniously narrated by the last surviving son of America's most famous and... more info...

The twenty-two stories published here encompass Ray Bradbury's illustrative six-decade career. These are tales that are variously strange and scary, nostalgic and bittersweet, and humorous and touching,... more info...

Now at age 87 and more than a half-century into his career, Ray Bradbury continues to write bold works that build from his classic Martian Chronicles. "Now and Forever" collects two novellas "Somewhere... more info...

For disgraced TV presenter Martin Sharp the answer's pretty simple: he has, in his own words, 'pissed his life away'. And on New Year's Eve he's going to end it all. But not, as it happens, alone, because,... more info...

Orphaned and anchorless, Silver is taken in by blind Mr. Pew, the mysterious and miraculously old keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. Pew explains the history of Cape Wrath and its founder, Babel Dark,... more info...

Earth is long since dead. On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rules their world as the god of the Hindu pantheon. Only one dares oppose... more info...

Inspiring story of the Biblical prophet Elijah's soul-shattering trial of faith. From the author of the internationally acclaimed "The Alchemist." 245p. more info...

This book recounts the spectacular trials of Paulo Coelho and his mysterious mentor, Petrus, as they journey across Spain in search of a miraculous sword. A tale of the keys to self-mastery. 226p. Pap... more info...

Novel about a distinguished & aging Australian novelist whose life is revealed through an ingenious series of eight formal addresses. more info...

A fascinating, lyrical tale about a young dreamer's search for love and meaning. 513p. more info...

Treading the wafer-thin line between evil and the everyday, the story of the novel centers on the correspondence of two paedophiles: one, the narrator, is a middle-aged child-killer serving his twenty-third... more info...

For Claire Roth, an established psychotherapist with an adoring husband and children, her new patient Jody Goodman - a witty & attractive young filmmaker - is a welcome diversion from her predictable life.... more info...

As A.M. Homes incendiary novel unfolds, the technicolor hues of the American good life become nearly hallucinogenic: from a strange and hilarious encounter on the floor of the pantry with a Stepford-wife... more info...

Winner of the 2007 nobel prize for literature. Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her... more info...

Set against the backdrop of the decade that changed the world forever, The Sweetest Dream is a riveting look at a group of people who dared to dream - and faced the inevitable cleanup afterward. Frances... more info...

Teena Maguire should not have tried to shortcut her way home that Fourth of July. Not after midnight, not through Rocky Point Park. Not the way she was dressed: tank top, denim cutoffs, high-heeled sandals.... more info...

Eighteen stories, five essays, plus notebook entries make up this volume of prose works by the celebrated American poet. 327p. Pap. more info...

The story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their... more info...

Set in the turbulent Meiji era, a chance encounter on a Kamakura breach irrevocably links a young student to a man he simply calls "Sensei." Intrigued by Sensei's aloofness and wantingto know more about... more info...

This classic collection of stories features some of the funniest episodes in the life of Bertie Wooster, gentleman, and Jeeves, his gentleman's gentleman - in which Bertie's terrifying Aunt Agatha stalks... more info...

They came by boat from a starving land - and by the Underground Railroad from Southern chains - seeking refuge in a crowded, filthy corner of hell at the bottom of a great metropolis. But in the terrible... more info...

In this modern-day fairy tale, Francesca Lia Block collaborates with Carmen Staton to bring readers the romantic quest of Ruby, a Midwestern girl who leaves her home in search of her soulmate. Ruby possesses... more info...

Where were the kisses? Weetzie Bat wondered. And so begins a magical journey of discovery. Weetzie finds herself at the enchanted pink hotel in sparkling Los Angeles, where she once shied away from a kiss... more info...

(Contemporary Classics). Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. Buck's... more info...

Unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front in WWI and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. 332p. more info...

First published in 1925, A collection of sixteen stories & vignettes containing several early Hemingway classics: the famous Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three... more info...

In this tour de force, author Claire Messud brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment. Her richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune fathoms the intersections... more info...

(Peter Owen Modern Classics series). This novella is Boris Pasternak's only complete work of fiction other than "Doctor Zhivago." Set in Russia during the winter of 1916, Serezha visits hismarried sister.... more info...

Merciless take on academic mores and a scathing tale that vividly depicts what can happen when academic politics collides with political correctness. The novel does for creative writing incubators what... more info...

Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh novel finds novelist Sidney Orr - several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness - entering a stationery shop in Brooklyn and buying a blue notebook. It is... more info...

(Vintage Classics). Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. A chance pools win enables him to capture the art student Miranda and keep her in the cellar... more info...

Louis Holland arrives in Boston on a spring of strange happenings - earthquakes strike the city, and the first one kills his grandmother. During a bitter feud over the inheritance Louis falls in love with... more info...

(Perennial Classics). First published in 1937. In this novel of high poetry, Hurston creates the character of a woman on a quest for her own identity, who, unlike so many other questing figures in black... more info...

A legend in book jacket graphics, Kidd makes the segue to fiction in this, his debut novel: all about art school in the 1950s. 275p. more info...

Physicist Alice Coombs has made a great discovery - a hole in the universe, a true nothingness she and her colleagues call 'Lack'. Professor Philip Engstrand has made his own breakthrough - he realizes... more info...

The acclaimed author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn turns a keen, affectionate eye on the pasradoxes of love and art in this romantic farce set among the members of an aspiring Los... more info...

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The five, interconnected novels of Cities of the Interior were published individually during the 1940s and 1950s: Ladders to Fire; Children of the Albatross; The four-Chambered Heart; A Spy in the House... more info...

First published in 1944, this collection of stories attracted the attention of Edmund Wilson who reviewed it in the New Yorker. It was in these stories that Nin's artistic and emotional vision took shape.... more info...

Pompous, vain, shallow, inconsiderate, untrustworthy, fickel...linguistics professor Thomas 'Tomcat' Chippering is a man much like any other. But when his serial flirting finally drives his wife into the... more info...

A novel set in heaven, written in the form of the memoir of a murdered 14-year-old girl: "I knew where my body was, but I could not tell them." Watching life on earth continue from a place that resembles... more info...

When Pat - on her second gap year and a source of some worry to her parents - is accpeted as a new tenant at number 44, she isn't quite sure how long she'll last. Her flatmate Bruce, a rugby-playing chartered... more info...

(The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series). This installment in the lives of McCall Smith's extended Botswana family teaches the importance of trust, love, and what really makes a good husband. 212p. more info...

(The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, Vol. 3). The irrepressible Precious Ramotswe faces supreme problems at home and at work. With her detective agency in financial turmoil, Mma Ramotswe takes the... more info...

It's going to take all her intuition and eminent sensibility for Precious Ramotswe - Botswana's only, and finest, female private detective - to crack her hardest case yet: the decade-old disappearance... more info...

A sexual liason during an October blizzard jeopardizes the lives and situations of more than just the two people who finally can no longer resist each other. A National Book Award Finalist. more info...

Thackeray's gloriously satirical epic of love & social adventure, at the heart of which is the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the social ladder... more info...

Flora Tristan, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and a French mother, grows up in poverty and journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. In 1891, Flora's grandson, the struggling painter... more info...

Virginia Woolf's haunting novel tells the story of the all-too-brief life of Jacob Flanders, from his childhood in Scarborough through his student years at Cambridge and his bachelor days in London to... more info...

Depicting Japanese youth has changed her country's literature and brought international acclaim. In "Hardboiled & Hard Luck," the best-selling author Banana Yoshimoto delivers two tales of resonant grace,... more info...