Black Water

Hotel World

Ali Smith · 244 pages

The Pilot's Wife

Anita Shreve · 304 pages

Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time. As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to

The Appointment

Herta Muller, Philip Boehm · 214 pages

""I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She is riding a tram on her way to answer a summons from the secret police. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. She has brought along a towel and her toothbrush in case she's not allowed to return home. Her crime?

Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs · 304 pages

Lie Down in Darkness

William Styron · 400 pages

The story is set out in the south. The Loftis family members are waiting for the coffin of their daughter Peyton. The novel goes back in time through flashbacks and recollections uncovering truths and events leading to Peyton's suicide. Lie Down In Darkness is a post-modernist novel, a post-war account of the human state, an age of alienation, decay and meaninglessness. Neither society nor family

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

Jon McGregor · 281 pages

On a street in an unnamed town in the north of England, perfectly ordinary people are doing totally ordinary things - but then a terrible event shatters the quiet of the early summer evening and no one who witnesses it will be quite the same again.

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner · 250 pages

Written in stream-of-consciousness style with multiple narrators, the story follows a journey wherein the family of a dead woman try to transport her body to her birthplace in Mississippi in accordance with her wishes. When a ford across a river is flooded they are forced to take a roundabout route and it becomes a desperate race to complete their mission before the body begins to decompose.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys · 189 pages

Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R

The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam

Bao Ninh · 228 pages

The Sorrow of War - by turns bleak and poetic, pellucid and cunning - opens with Kien, an infantry cadre from Hanoi, engaged in the grim business of retrieving and burying the dead at the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. From here, the novel ranges back to Kien's youth and the pains of adolescent love, and moves forward to his attempts, as a struggling writer in postwar Hanoi, to

Amulet

Roberto Bolano · 192 pages

Pincher Martin

William Golding · 208 pages

One of Golding’s bleakest novels, this existentialist story is about the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the North Atlantic. Having been washed up on a rocky outcrop with no other land in sight and having no form of sustenance the man soon becomes deranged and the ending quickly becomes more and more inevitable.

The Lime Works

Thomas Bernhard · 256 pages

For five years, Konrad imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork, The sense of hearing. As the story begins, he's just blown his wife's head off with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair. No one seems to know why, but the town is steeped in speculation. An unnamed insura

The Thief and the Dogs

Naguib Mahfouz · 158 pages

Trainspotting

Irvine Welsh · 352 pages

Scottish writer Irvine Welsh's first novel, Trainspotting, is a collection of short-stories revolving around a group of friends, their drug use, and struggles in the city of Edinburgh.

In the Unlikely Event

Judy Blume · 512 pages

In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and

The Autumn of the Patriarch

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 265 pages

The Heart

Maylis de Kerangal · 256 pages

"Just before dawn on a Sunday morning, three teenage boys go surfing. Returning home, exhausted, the driver lets the car drift off the road into a tree. Two of the boys are wearing seat belts; one is sent through the windshield. He is declared brain-dead shortly after arriving at the hospital. His heart is still beating. The Heart takes place over the twenty-four hours surrounding a fatal accident

Only Revolutions

Mark Z. Danielewski · 384 pages

Moving back and forth in American history, a kaleidoscopic novel follows Hailey and Sam, two wayward teenagers, as they crash New Orleans parties, barrel up the Mississippi, head through the Badlands, and take on other adventures.

Nobody Is Ever Missing

Catherine Lacey · 244 pages

Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable life in Manhattan, her home, her career and her loving husband. As the people she has left behind scramble to figure out what has happened to her, Elyria embarks on a hitchhiker's odyssey, testing fate by travelling in the cars of overly kind women and deeply strange men, tacitly being swept into

The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf · 219 pages

Virginia Woolf’s novel chronicles a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a politician’s wife in 1920s London, as she prepares to host a party that evening. The narrative follows Clarissa’s thoughts (and sometimes those of people she meets) as she goes about her errands, and events in the day remind her of her youth and friendships from the past. As the book progresses characters from the past eme

The Dive From Clausen's Pier

Ann Packer · 413 pages

Twenty-three-year-old Carrie Bell feels suffocated and wants to leave her life in Wisconsin, but when her fiancé is paralyzed in a diving accident, she must ask, how much do we owe the people we love? How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or weakness to walk away from someone in need? These questions lie at the heart of Ann Packer's intimate and emotionally thrilling new

Blindness

Jose Saramago · 327 pages

A city is struck by an epidemic of "white blindness." The first man to succumb sits in his car, waiting for the light to change. He is taken to an eye doctor, who does not know what to make of the phenomenon - and soon goes blind himself. The blindness spreads, sparing no one. Authorities confine the blind to a vacant mental hospital secured by armed guards under instructions to shoot anyone tryi

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

Eimear McBride · 228 pages

Eimear McBride's novel tells the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother who is living with the after effects of a brain tunour. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and sensual urges of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist, to read A Girl is a Half-Fo