A disfigured musical genius who lives beneath the Paris Opera House falls in love with a beautiful soprano and, in his desperation to have his love returned, embarks on some terrifying means towards that end.
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are m...more
In nineteenth-century Starkfield, Massachusetts, a poor young farmer falls in love with the vivacious Mattie, cousin of his sickly, demanding wife, and starts a devastating chain of events. Includes explanatory notes throughout the text, an introduction discussing the author and the background of the story, and a study guide.
"The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels."So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad str...more
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Nineteen Eighty-Four revealed George Orwell as one of the twentieth century’s greatest mythmakers. While the totalitarian system that provoked him into writing it has since passed into oblivion, his harrowing cautionary tale of a man trapped in a political nightmare has had the opposite fate: its relevance and power ...more
At the novels center is Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island. There he befriends a local millionaire, but the friendship soon evolves into a deadly game and Nicholas finds that he must fight not only for his sanity but for his very survival.
The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman. "At once a love story and a philosophical meditation."--New York Times Book Review.
This saga of the Berry family, set in a series of venerable old hotels that house various eccentrics, including an old vaudevillian, incestuous family members, and bears.