Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portraitof a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in aworld shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling orhope.Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern colle...more
VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, first published in 1966, skyrocketed to the top of The New York Times hardcover best-seller list and later went on to sell an unprecedented eight million copies in paperback. Jacqueline Susann's sensational story of three pill-popping show-biz women (whom she modeled, rumor has it, after Judy Garland, Grace Kelly, and Marilyn M...more
Marie Antoinette, Antonia Fraser's first book in five years, heralds the welcome return of her wonderfully lucid, engaging style as she disentangles myth from fact regarding the life of the still controversial, and misunderstood, wife of Louis XVI of France. It is also perhaps her most assured work to date. The daughter of Empress Maria Teresa of A...more
Young, beautiful and wealthy, Gloria and Anthony want their marriage to be "a live, glamorous performance". Seemingly perfectly matched, their love begins to deteriorate as each discovers imperfections in the other. In a desperate search for happiness they live riotously - until the final crack-up.
In the evocative tradition of Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, comes this accomplished debut of youthful innocence drowned by dark sins. Twenty years ago, Jane Hudson left the Heart Lake School for Girls in the Adirondacks after a terrible tragedy. Now she has returned to the placid, isolated shores of the lakeside school as a Latin...more
THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 novel, is heavily based on his own troubled marriage as he describes the moral, physical, and financial decline of a beautiful and gifted couple. Anthony and Gloria Patch seem made for each other, and their idyllic relationship is enhanced by their expectations of inheriting Anthony's grandfather...more
Sparkling might not be the first adjective that springs to mind to describe a novel packed with the concentrated disgust which Dead Babies contains. Nevertheless, Martin Amiss version of the bleak and wrecky future that awaits a sex-and-drug-addicted society is so fizzing with style, so busy with verbal inventiveness, that the adjective is impelled...more
“A GOTHIC AND ELEGANT PAGE-TURNER.”–The Boston GlobeTwenty years ago, Jane Hudson fled the Heart Lake School for Girls in the Adirondacks after a terrible tragedy. The week before her graduation, in that sheltered wonderland, three lives were taken, all victims of suicide. Only Jane was left to carry the burden of a mystery that has stayed hi...more
"Balzac [was] the master unequalled in the art of painting humanity as it exists in modern society," wrote George Sand. "He searched and dared everything."Written between 1837 and 1843, Lost Illusions reveals, perhaps better than any other of Balzac's ninety-two novels, the nature and scope of his genius. The story of Lucien Chardon, a young poet f...more
Couples is the book that has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage and adultery in America. But be it damned or hailed Couples drew back the curtain forever on sex in suburbia in the late 20th century. A classic, it is one of those books that will be read--and remem...more
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