On her way home from school on a snowy December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") is lured into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her neighbor, Mr. Harvey. Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, The Lovely Bones,...more
Stephen King's idea for It came from a favorite childhood image: the entire cast of the Bugs Bunny Show coming on at the beginning. He thought of bringing on all the monsters, one last time: Dracula, Frankenstein's creature, the Werewolf, the Crawling Eye, Rodan, It Came from Outer Space. It is about a group of adults who were once troubled chil...more
When we first meet Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven. As she looks down from this strange new place, she tells us, in the fresh and spirited voice of a fourteen-year-old girl, a tale that is both haunting and full of hope. In the weeks following her death, Susie watches life on Earth continuing without her-her school friends trading rumors abo...more
In the tradition of Bright Lights, Big City and The Secret History comes a compelling, highly-acclaimed debut novel of youth and innocence. On the elm-lined streets of a middle-class American city, the lives of a group of teenaged boys are forever changed by their obsession with five mysteriously doomed sisters.
In 1970, one of Mississippi s more colorful weekly newspapers, The Ford County Times, went bankrupt. To the surprise and dismay of many, ownership was assumed by a 23-year-old college dropout, named Willie Traynor. The future of the paper looked grim until a young mother was brutally raped and murdered by a member of the notorious Padgitt family. W...more
20th ANNIVERSARY EDITIONwith a new Afterword from the authorThe New York Times bestsellerThis is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields--a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes--even of sexual assassinations. It ...more
Some stories can be told again in endlessly different ways. Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian combines a search for the historical Dracula with a profound sense that Stoker got some things right--that the late Mediaeval tyrant kills among us yet, undead and dangerous. From Stoker, she also takes a sense that the supernatural seems more real when em...more
With nothing left to lose, an Oxford don, an English lord, a society physician, and a chic French art dealer join forces to go after Harvey Metcalf, the expert in international stock fraud who took their money. Reprint.
Set in post-war London, this novel of the racial, political, and social upheaval of the last half-century follows two families--the Joneses and the Iqbals, both outsiders from within the former British empire--as they make their way in modern England. A first novel.
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow...more