This novel is focusing on the complex relationship between Elena, a woman navigating personal and societal expectations, and the turbulent backdrop of Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The title, resonating with the legal plea "nolo contendere," highlights Elena's struggle for self-definition amidst societal pressures and her eventual acceptance of her own choice

Lady Constance Chatterley is trapped in a loveless marriage to a man who is impotent. Oppressed by her dreary life, she is drawn to Mellors the gamekeeper. Breaking out against the constraints of society she yields to her instinctive desire for him and discovers the transforming power of physical love which leads them towards fulfilment.

Meet the Stockton women of Brooklyn Heights- Darley, who was born with money; Sasha, who married into it; and Georgiana, who wants to give it all away. Among glittering parties, weekend homes and hungover brunches, the three will have to grapple with the burden of parental expectations, the hardships and bewilderment of growing up, and the miles between the haves and have-nots. Pineapple Street is a witty and wicked novel about New York's one percenters- their first loves, family feuds and the complexities of being human - even when you have everything.

Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer 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. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.

From the author of the New York Times Notable Book Tipping the Velvet and the award-winning Affinity: a spellbinding, twisting tale of a great swindle, of fortunes and hearts won and lost, set in Victorian London among a family of thieves.
Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby's household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves-fingersmiths-for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home.
One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives-Gentleman, a somewhat elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a na?ve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud's vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be left to live out her days in a mental hospital. With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways. . . . But no one and nothing is as it seems in this > Dickensian novel of thrills and surprises.
"The New York Times Book Review" has called Sarah Waters a writer of "consummate skill" and "The Seattle Times" has praised her work as "gripping, astute fiction that feeds the mind and the senses." Fingersmith marks a major leap forward in this young and brilliant career.

[zes rijmpjes met 6 tekeningetjes, in kleur]

Anthony Powell's brilliant twelve novel sequence chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, and is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England. It is unrivalled for its scope, its humour and the enormous pleasure it has given to generations.

Volume 1 contains the first three novels in the sequence: A Question of Upbringing - A Buyer's Market' The Acceptance World

Five of Saul Bellow’s most moving, richly textured, and exquisitely plotted short stories make up this volume, each providing a history of personality and self-awakening. The title story, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” follows a musicologist narrator who for years has scattered wounding witticisms “from the depths of my nature, that hoard of strange formulations.” As the story unfolds he tries to discover what led him into a “deep legal-financial hole,” while he awaits extradition from a refuge in British Columbia. “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” follows a divorced suburban woman and her lovers—would-be and actual—through a frantic day in their lives. Their needs and passions, as well as their comic conflicts, are matters of life and death. In “Zetland: By a Character Witness” and in “A Silver Dish,” Bellow returns, with his unequaled command of eloquent recollected detail, to a bygone Chicago, “Zetland” is a brilliant portrait of an artist as a young boy and a man, precocious and eccentric; “A Silver Dish” is a memorable story of a raffish, willful father and his affectionate son. “Cousins,” the final story in the volume, explores the mysteries of family feeling, mysteries that defy both logic and the worthiness of their objects, as Ijah Brodsky, successful in the larger world, is drawn into an encounter with criminal and naively idealistic forces. This collection represents a turning point in the bountiful career of Saul Bellow, a felicitous rendering of the human condition in all its absurd complexity.

In The Dean's December, the contrasts are between the decaying society of late communist Rumania and the problems of society in contemporary Chicago. The Dean is in Rumania to be with his dying mother-in-law, a formerly powerful party official who has been ostracised for allowing her daughter, an internationally famous astronomer, to emigrate to the west. The Dean, who is a respected journalist, has ruffled powerful feathers in Chicago with a series of pointed articles critical of certain aspects of Chicago society and has also been involved in seeking justice in a case where one of his students has been murdered. In this he is opposed by his radical nephew who thinks that the case is racist because the accused are African Americans of deprived social origins.

Moses Berger's magnificent obsession with the Gursky family leads him to Solomon Gursky, the disdained, disgraced, and dead Gursky brother who figures prominently, but mysteriously, in the annals of Gursky history and finance.

Is keeping a secret from a spouse always an act of infidelity? And what cost does such a secret exact on a family?

The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous lives. Struggling to regain a semblance of normalcy for themselves and for their two older children, they find themselves pretending not only that little has changed, but that their marriage, their family, have always been intact. Yet in the aftermath of the baby's death, long-suppressed uncertainties about their relationship come roiling to the surface. A dreadful secret emerges with reverberations that reach far into their past and threaten their future.

The couple's children, ten-year-old Biscuit and thirteen-year-old Paul, responding to the unnamed tensions around them, begin to act out in exquisitely- perhaps courageously-idiosyncratic ways. But as the four family members scatter into private, isolating grief, an unexpected visitor arrives, and they all find themselves growing more alert to the sadness and burdens of others-to the grief that is part of every human life but that also carries within it the power to draw us together.

Moving, psychologically acute, and gorgeously written, The Grief of Others asks how we balance personal autonomy with the intimacy of relationships, how we balance private decisions with the obligations of belonging to a family, and how we take measure of our own sorrows in a world rife with suffering. This novel shows how one family, by finally allowing itself to experience the shared quality of grief, is able to rekindle tenderness and hope.

Two decades later after Those who Save Us, Karena gets a call from a psychiatric ward in Wichita, Kansas, to come pick up her brother, whom she hasn't seen or spoken to for twenty years. She soon discovers that Charles has lied to the doctors, taken medication that could make him dangerously manic, and disappeared again. Having exhausted every resource to try and track him down, Karena realizes she has only one last chance of finding him: the storms. Wherever the tornadoes are, that's where he'll be. Karena joins a team of professional stormchasers-passionate adventurers who will transform her life and give her a chance at love and redemption--and embarks on an odyssey to find her brother before he reveals the violent secret from their past and does more damage to himself . . . or to someone else.

After a long and heartbreaking journey to Dimitri's birthplace in Siberia, Rose Hathaway has finally returned to St. Vladimir's - and to her best friend, Lissa. It is at long last graduation, and the girls can't wait for their real lives beyond the Academy's iron gates to begin. But Rose's heart still aches for Dimitri, and she knows he's out there, somewhere. She failed to kill him when she had the chance. And now her worst fears are about to come true. Dimitri has tasted her blood, and now he is hunting her. And this time he won't rest until Rose joins him . . .

At the heart of this panoramic, multidimensional narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. Faber leads readers back to 1870s London, where Sugar, a 19-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, yearns for escape to a better life.

Features anti-personnel mines, Africa, and the journey one woman makes to find the person responsible for the death of her son in Angola. This book is both an examination of what bereavement means to one character and an indictment of the arms trade.

Set in Northern Ireland, this thriller, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1990, is about a man who faces a dramatic moral choice just when he's looking for happiness. B. Moore won the W.H.Smith Literary Award for Catholics and the J.Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Great Victorian Collection.

The ruins of the Forum in Rome are one of the best known wonders of antiquity and a highpoint of the tourist route round the Eternal City; but the Forum remains for many visitors a baffling and unwelcoming place. In this book, David Watkins discusses this topic.

I was living in a fairy story - the kind with sinister overtones and not always a happy ending - in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing," So writes John Bayley about his wife, Iris Murdoch, considered by many to be one of the greatest living writers in the English-speaking world. In dreamlike passages, he recalls both his youthful love for an entrancing philosopher who stole his heart at Oxford's St. Antony's Dance in 1954, as well as their marriage, a union of two great minds, which resulted two years later.

'Away' is the story of young Lillian Leyb. Her family murdered in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way. In 1920s New York she is taken under the wing of Mr Reuben Burstein, the famous Impresario and his matinee-idol son. But then she finds out that her daughter, Sophie, may still be alive.

Everymans Library no. 25

A witty and entertaining guide to the use of Latin expressions for one's own advantage in the modern world.

See America with 50 of Our Finest, Funniest, and Foremost Writers Anthony Bourdain chases the fumigation truck in Bergen County, New Jersey. Dave Eggers tells it straight: Illinois is Number 1. Louise Erdrich loses her bikini top in North Dakota. Jonathan Franzen gets waylaid by New York's publicist...and personal attorney...and historian...and geologist. John Hodgman explains why there is no such thing as a "Massachusettsean". Edward P. Jones makes the case: D.C. should be a state! Jhumpa Lahiri declares her reckless love for the Rhode Island coast. Rick Moody explores the dark heart of Connecticut's Merritt Parkway, exit by exit. Ann Patchett makes a pilgrimage to the Civil War site at Shiloh, Tennessee. William T. Vollmann visits a San Francisco S&M club and Many More!

A new narrative history of the Viking Age, interwoven with exploration of the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked: their rune-stones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields.