Transit

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.

Loitering with Intent

Muriel Spark · 217 pages

From *Publisher's Weekly*: "Art, reality and the strange ways the two imitate one another are at the core of Muriel Spark's delightful Loitering with Intent, first published in 1981. Would-be novelist Fleur Talbot works for the snooty, irascible Sir Quentin Oliver at the Autobiographical Association, whose members are all at work on their memoirs. When her employer gets his hands on Fleur's novel-

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

Funny Girl

Nick Hornby · 452 pages

"From the bestselling author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down comes a highly anticipated new novel. Set in 1960's London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingenue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby's latest d

Look at Me

Anita Brookner · 192 pages

A lonely art historian absorbed in her research seizes the opportunity to share in the joys and pleasures of the lives of a glittering couple, only to find her hopes of companionship and happiness shattered.

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

Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 588 pages

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented li

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.

The Dharma Bums

Jack Kerouac · 204 pages

The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s. The book co

Talking It Over

Julian Barnes · 275 pages

Few writers think and talk to beguilingly. This book is wonderfully funny. And intelligent. And moving' Independent on SundayShy, sensible banker Stuart has trouble with women; that is, until a fortuitous singles night, where he meets Gillian, a picture restorer recovering from a destructive affair. Stuart's best friend Oliver is his complete opposite – a language teacher who 'talks like a diction

This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz · 240 pages

This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

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.)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows · 278 pages

"I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers." January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she's never met, a native of the island of Guernsey,

The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Wallbanger

Alice Clayton · 320 pages

Thanks to paper-thin walls and the guy's athletic prowess, Caroline can hear not just her neighbor's bed banging against the wall but the ecstatic response of what seems like an endless parade of women. She finds her fantasies keep her awake even longer than the noise. So when the wallbanging threatens to literally bounce her out of bed, Caroline, clad in sexual frustration and a pink baby-doll ni

The Story of a New Name

Elena Ferrante · 480 pages

In 2012, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker’s James Wood described as “large, captivating, amiably peopled...a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal,” F

My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout · 200 pages

"Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her and a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all--the one between mother and daughter"--

The End of the Story

Lydia Davis · 235 pages

This engagingly human and candid novel takes us deep into a world of obsession in which a happily settled woman attempts to piece together the fragments of an unresolved episode from her past. She recalls a period when, as a writer in her thirties, she was living and working on the other coast and found herself involved in a powerful yet uncertain relationship with a much younger man. As she exam

The Help

Kathryn Stockett · 464 pages

Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women: Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will

Unless

Carol Shields · 320 pages

The Road to Los Angeles

John Fante · 171 pages

I had a lot of jobs in Los Angeles Harbor because our family was poor and my father was dead. My first job was ditchdigging a short time after I graduated from high school. Every night I couldn't sleep from the pain in my back. We were digging an excavation in an empty lot, there wasn't any shade, the sun came straight from a cloudless sky, and I was down in that hole digging with two huskies who

Our Tragic Universe

Scarlett Thomas · 384 pages

Justine

Lawrence Durrell · 253 pages

Story of the modern Egyptian city of Alexandria, in which an Irish schoolmaster, a passionate, tormented Jewess, a Greek cabaret dancer, and a Coptic financier play out their destinies amid decadent surroundings symbolic of an erotic world. *Justine,* published in 1957, is the first volume in Lawrence Durrell's literary tetralogy, *The Alexandria Quartet.* The tetralogy consists of four interlo

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Mark Haddon · 240 pages

This is Christopher's murder mystery story. There are no lies in this story because Christopher can't tell lies. Christopher does not like strangers or the colours yellow or brown or being touched. On the other hand, he knows all the countries in the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7507. When Christohper decides to find out who killed the neighbour's dog, his mystery st