God's Bits of Wood

Les Misérables

Victor Hugo · 747 pages

In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck · 553 pages

Steinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression is as vivid now as ever. The story focuses on a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, farmers who work another man’s land for a share of the crops. Driven from their home by drought and poverty they take to the road in a battered old truck and make their way to California to look for work. When they arrive they find hundreds of others like them being f

Germinal

Emile Zola · 496 pages

The thirteenth novel in Emile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity's capacity for compassion and hope.Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he disco

Howards End

E.M. Forster · 320 pages

Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. A strong-willed and intelligent woman refuses to allow the pretensions of her husband's smug English family to ruin her life. Howards End is considered by some to be Forster's masterpiece

In the Castle of My Skin

George Lamming · 313 pages

George Lamming's "In the Castle of My Skin" skilfully depicts the Barbadian psyche. Set against the backdrop of the 1930s riots which helped to pave the way for Independence and the modern Barbados, through the eyes of a young boy, Lamming portrays the social, racial, political and urban struggles with which Barbados continues to grapple even with some thirty-three years of Political Independence

Fall of Giants

Ken Follett · 892 pages

It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. Their destiny is entangled with that of an ambitious young aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and to two orphaned Russian b

Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy · 440 pages

Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a liv

Strumpet City

James Plunkett · 577 pages

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

Cities of Salt

Abdul Rahman Munif, Abdelrahman Munif · 627 pages

The Slum

Aluisio Azevedo · 256 pages

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 448 pages

> With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor fu

The Nether World

George Gissing · 392 pages

Texaco

Patrick Chamoiseau · 401 pages

Of black Martinican provenance, Patrick Chamoiseau gives us Texaco (winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize), an international literary achievement, tracing one hundred and fifty years of post-slavery Caribbean history: a novel that is as much about self-affirmation engendered by memory as it is about a quest for the adequacy of its own form. In a narrative composed

Sister Carrie

Theodore Dreiser · 450 pages

Young Caroline Meeber leaves home for the first time and experiences work, love, and the pleasures and responsibilities of independence in late-nineteenth-century Chicago and New York.

The Good Earth

Pearl S. Buck · 316 pages

This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall. Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought

Lady Chatterley's Lover

D.H. Lawrence · 322 pages

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens · 742 pages

The Unquiet Earth

Denise Giardina · 359 pages

With the narrative sweep and power of an American epic, Giardina's new novel is the saga of an Appalachian mining community, Blackberry Creek, West Virginia, and its fight to survive disaster, oppression, and neglect. Spanning the period from the 1930s to the present, the novel builds to a shattering climax.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 422 pages

Tells the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of a small South American town.

Salka Valka

Halldor Laxness · 429 pages

This is a novel about fish. And love. And, surprisingly, gender and feminism. Salka is an unlikely heroine, homely, coarse and ignorant; but not stupid. She is in possession of a vitality which cannot be defeated. Salka's struggle to find her place in a hostile world- a fickle mother, faithless lovers and lack of any real friends- is the common thread woven throughout the work. The book has a comp

The Years of the Voiceless

Okky Madasari · 264 pages

The Joys of Motherhood

Buchi Emecheta · 224 pages

First published in 1979, The Joys of Motherhood is the story of Nnu Ego, a Nigerian woman struggling in a patriarchal society. Unable to conceive in her first marriage, Nnu is banished to Lagos where she succeeds in becoming a mother. Then, against the backdrop of World War II, Nnu must fiercely protect herself and her children when she is abandoned by her husband and her people.

My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante · 336 pages

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, "My Brilliant Friend" is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but