It has been said often enough that baby boomers are a television generation, but High Fidelity reminds that in a way they are the record-album generation as well. This hilarious novel is obsessed with music; Hornby's narrator is an early thirtysomething bloke who runs a London record store. He sells albums recorded the old-fashioned way--on vinyl--...more
My Heart Is Afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky."Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams."Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its read...more
When Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist) was a young man, his parents had him committed to mental hospitals three times because he wanted to be an artist--an unacceptable profession in Brazil at the time. During his numerous forced incarcerations he vowed to write some day about his experiences and the injustices of involuntary commitment. In this fable-l...more
A respected international economic advisor and the director of The Earth Institute shares a wide-spectrum theory about how to enable economic success throughout the world, identifying the different categories into which various nations fall in today's economy while posing solutions to top political, environmental, and social problems that contribut...more
An audacious revision of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature. The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1...more
Osman is a young university student whose life is changed by a chance encounter with a mysterious book. Osman becomes obsessed with the book, which seems to contain all the magic and power of life and love. Romantic and elusive, The New Life is a rhapsody to love and an investigation into the shadowy nature of self.
This coming-of-age tale takes place in the 1960s in the farthest reaches of Sweden, a rural community near the Finnish border, where two Elvis-crazed adolescents, Matti and Niila, start a wildly successful rock band. But the reach of the novel goes beyond screaming fans and miniskirts as it shows the effects on an isolated and insular town--a place...more
Combining history and poetry, mythic events and sensual detail, Michael Ondaatje has created a luminous novel about the brutality and enchantment of life during the 1920s and 1930s in Toronto.