Voices in the Evening

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway · 251 pages

Hemingway's profile of the Lost Generation captures life among the expatriates on Paris' Left Bank during the 1920s, the brutality of bullfighting in Spain, and the moral and spiritual dissolution of a generation.

Women

Charles Bukowski · 297 pages

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that woul

True At First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway · 319 pages

"Both revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway's last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953." (From the 1999 hardback edition dustjacket.)

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Truman Capote · 160 pages

Published with three short stories this novella cemented Capote’s position at the forefront of American literature. It is the story of a friendship between New York neighbours, good time girl Holly Golightly and the unnamed male narrator.

Ghachar Ghochar

Vivek Shanbhag

Franny and Zooey

J.D. Salinger · 202 pages

Franny came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed in 1957 by Zooey. Both stories are early entries in a narrative series about the Glasses, a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York. In the first story, Franny, a young college girl, arrives in New Haven (Yale) to be with her boyfriend for a football weekend, where they go to a café. The story is essentially an account of

Conversations with Friends

Sally Rooney · 315 pages

Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home a

The Woman from Tantoura

Radwa Ashour · 376 pages

Corregidora

Gayl Jones · 185 pages

A terse, chilling novel about how the memory of slavery plagues black women and men long after emancipation. Blues singer Ursa is consumed by her hatred of Corregidora, the 19th-century slave master who fathered both her grandmother and mother. Charged with “making generations” to bear witness to the abuse embodied in the family name, Ursa Corregidora finds herself unable to keep alive this legacy

Nothing Holds Back the Night

Delphine de Vigan · 346 pages

Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Lucile's occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic and in control of the Paris me

Eva Luna

Isabel Allende · 307 pages

"An intoxicating collection of short fiction by one of the most beloved writers of our time. Eva Luna is a young woman whose powers as a storyteller bring her friendship and love. Lying in bed with her European lover, refugee and journalist Rolf Carle;, Eva answers his request for a story "you have never told anyone before" with these twenty-three samples of her vibrant artistry. Interweaving the

After Dark

Haruki Murakami · 208 pages

A sleek, gripping novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the spooky hours between midnight and dawn, by an internationally renowned literary phenomenon.Murakami's trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery. Combining the pyrotechnical genius that made Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle intern

The Excellent Lombards

Jane Hamilton · 273 pages

"From the internationally bestselling author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World, a heartfelt coming-of-age story that Karen Joy Fowler calls "a timeless classic book you will read and reread." Mary Frances "Frankie" Lombard is fiercely in love with her family's sprawling apple orchard and the tangled web of family members who inhabit it. Content to spend her days planning capers with her b

The Last Life

Claire Messud · 376 pages

A novel about French colonists in Algeria and their difficult adjustment to France after Algerian independence. It is narrated by a girl whose grandfather buys a hotel on the Riviera and forgetting he is no longer in the colonies goes to jail for shooting at rowdy teenagers by a pool.

Transit

Rachel Cusk · 260 pages

"The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with Outline, one of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of 2015 In the wake of family collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions--personal, moral, artistic, practical--as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city

Dalva

Jim Harrison · 336 pages

Someone

Alice McDermott · 232 pages

"The story of a Brooklyn-born woman's life - her family, her neighborhood, her daily trials and triumphs - from childhood to old age"--Provided by the publisher.

Moment In Peking 京华烟云

Lin Yutang

Crow Lake

Mary Lawson · 298 pages

In the rural farm country of northern Ontario, the lives of two families--the farming Pye family, and zoologist Kate Morrison and her three brothers--are brought together and torn apart by misunderstanding, resentment, family love, and tragedy.

The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · 332 pages

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have neve

The Kreutzer Sonata

Leo Tolstoy · 150 pages

"When Marshal of the Nobility Pozdnyshev suspects his wife of having an affair with her music partner, his jealousy consumes him and drives him to murder. Controversial upon publication in 1890, The Kreutzer Sonata illuminates Tolstoy's then-feverish Christian ideals, his conflicts with lust and the hypocrisies of nineteenth-century marriage, and his thinking on the role of art and music in societ

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace · 273 pages

David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN, he combined hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson · 256 pages

**WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION** In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civi

Bless Me, Ultima

Rudolfo Anaya · 252 pages

Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.