A Man of Parts

The Age of Desire

Jennie Fields · 352 pages

Reimagines the midlife world of Edith Wharton and the impact of her affair with a young journalist on her longtime friendship with disapproving literary secretary Anna Bahlmann, in a tale told against the backdrop of Gilded Age Paris.

The Garden of Eden

Ernest Hemingway · 247 pages

Youngblood Hawke

Herman Wouk · 783 pages

A roughhewn Kentucky egocentric wins international fame and fortune through his writing, though the other rewards of success seem to elude him.

Mrs. Hemingway

Naomi Wood · 347 pages

"The Paris Wife was only the beginning of the story. Paula McLain's New York Times-bestselling novel piqued readers' interest about Ernest Hemingway's romantic life. But Hadley was only one of four women married, in turn, to the legendary writer. Just as T.C. Boyle's bestseller The Women completed the picture begun by Nancy Horan's Loving Frank, Naomi Wood's Mrs. Hemingway tells the story of how i

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

All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

The Forty Rules of Love

Elif Shafak, lyf shfq · 354 pages

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"Both revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway's last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953."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

Love and Garbage

Ivan Klima · 240 pages

Possession

A.S. Byatt · 555 pages

Winner of England’s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, *Possession* is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist

Wonder Boys

Michael Chabon · 368 pages

Circling the Sun

Paula McLain · 366 pages

The World According to Garp

John Irving · 568 pages

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

Shanghai Baby

Zhou Weihui · 260 pages

"Publicly burned in China for its sensual nature and irreverent style, this novel is the semi-autobiographical story of Coco, a cafe waitress, who is full of enthusiasm and impatience for life. She meets a young man, Tian Tian, for whom she feels tenderness and love, but he is reclusive, impotent and an increasing user of drugs. Despite parental objections, Coco moves in with him, leaves her job a

My Secret History

Paul Theroux · 511 pages

Brilliantly written, erotically charged, My Secret History is Paul Theroux's tour de force. It is the story of Andre Parent, a writer, a world traveller, a lover of every kind of woman he chances to meet in a life as varied as a man can lead. It begins with his days as a Massachusetts altar boy, when his first furtive sexual encounter introduces him to the thrills of leading a double life. As a

Author, Author

David Lodge · 400 pages

The Zahir

Paulo Coelho · 320 pages

Set in Paris and in the enchanting landscape of central Asia, this new novel by the author of the international bestsellers The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes follows the journey of a man obsessed with finding the wife who left him without an explanation.The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges that money and celebrity bring. His wife of te

Invisible

Paul Auster · 320 pages

Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster's fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and a student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girlfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker is caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of v

Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff · 400 pages

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath

Kate Moses · 288 pages

"Wintering is the story of a woman forging a new life for herself after her marriage has foundered. She shuts up her beloved Devonshire house and makes a home for her two young children in London, elated at completing the collection of poems she foresees will make her name. It is also the story of a woman struggling to maintain her mental equilibrium, to absorb the pain of her husband's betrayal,

The Lodger: A Novel

Louisa Treger · 311 pages

"Dorothy Richardson is existing just above the poverty line, doing secretarial work at a dentist's office and living in a seedy boarding house in Bloomsbury, when she is invited to spend the weekend with a childhood friend. Jane has recently married a writer who is hovering on the brink of fame. His name is H.G. Wells, or Bertie, as they call him. Bertie appears unremarkable at first. But then Dor

Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner · 569 pages

Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit.

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