Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino, a young man with a gift for languages and a talent for lying, narrates the story of his life, from his meeting with and adoption by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, his education in Paris, his and his companions' search for the legendary priest-king Prester John, and his arrival in Constantinople dur...more

Published in its entirety, Frida Kahlo's amazing illustrated journal documents the last ten years of her turbulent life. These passionate, often surprising, intimate records, kept under lock and key for some 40 years in Mexico, reveal many new dimensions in the complex personal life of this remarkable Mexican artist. The 170-page journal contains t...more

Like the one-time bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Alchemist presents a simple fable, based on simple truths and places it in a highly unique situation. And though we may sniff a bestselling formula, it is certainly not a new one: even the ancient tribal storytellers knew that this is the most successful method of entertaining an audienc...more

This is the story of Brida, a young Irish girl, and her quest for knowledge. She has long been interested in various aspects of magic but is searching for something more. Her search leads her to people of great wisdom, who begin to teach Brida about the spiritual world. She meets a wise man who dwells in a forest, who teaches her about overcoming h...more

A protagonist, known only as K., strives to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle that governs the village where K. has arrived to work as a land surveyor. Dark and at times surreal, "The Castle" is about alienation, bureaucracy, and the seemingly endless frustrations of man's attempts to stand against the system. "Metamorphosis" wa...more

The Metamorphosis, first published in 1915, is the most famous of Kafka's works, along with The Trial and The Castle. The story begins when a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Curiously, his condition does not arouse surprise in his family, who merely despise it as an impending burden. As wi...more

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Sophie’s World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print.One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each:...more

This Hugo and Nebula Award winner tells the sweeping tale of a desert planet called Arrakis, the focus of an intricate power struggle in a byzantine interstellar empire. Arrakis is the sole source of Melange, the "spice of spices". Melange is necessary for interstellar travel and also grants psychic powers and longevity, so whoever controls it w...more