Seven loosely connected stories meditate on memory, forgetting, laughter, and totalitarianism — opening with a Communist official literally erased from a photograph by the regime that once celebrated him. Kundera's most formally experimental novel blurs fiction, essay, autobiography, and music theory into a structure that mirrors what it describes: the way history is rewritten, forgotten, laughed away.
New York City in the far future is a vast enclosed city of eight million people who rarely venture outside. Detective Elijah Baley is assigned to investigate a murder at a Spacer enclave — and is given a robot partner named R. Daneel Olivaw. Asimov's fusion of science fiction and classic detective fiction, set in one of his most vividly imagined futures.
Plath's debut poetry collection, published when she was twenty-seven, reveals a poet of extraordinary technical command working in the shadow of her influences — Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Roethke — and beginning to discover the voice that would produce Ariel.
Easter in Three Pines: a séance in the old Hadley house ends in death, and Chief Inspector Gamache must determine whether it was fright, murder, or something more sinister. The third Gamache novel deepens the series' psychological and spiritual preoccupations.
Roland Deschain reaches the Dark Tower at last. Every thread of the series converges: the Crimson King rages on the Tower's balcony, the Beams must be defended, Patrick Danville's strange gift is the key to everything, and the fates of every character in the ka-tet are decided. King includes a foreword warning readers that the destination may not be what they expect — a warning that has generated debate ever since.
Johnny Smith wakes from a four-year coma to discover he has psychic powers — a touch reveals things about people and events. When he shakes the hand of a rising politician and sees a future of nuclear catastrophe, Johnny faces the most impossible moral question: is it right to kill one person to prevent mass destruction?
1634. A merchant ship departs Batavia for Amsterdam carrying a disgraced detective, his bodyguard, a mysterious prisoner, and a demon that appears to be killing the passengers. Samuel Pipps must solve an impossible mystery from the ship's hold while his bodyguard Arent Hayes investigates on deck above. Turton's locked-room mystery at sea.
In a nanotechnology-driven future of neo-Victorian societies, a young girl from the underclass receives an illegal interactive primer that teaches her to think, adapt, and eventually to lead a revolution.
Rin survived the Burning of Speer, but the gods she channelled nearly destroyed her mind. Now she fights for the Nikara Republic against an Imperial loyalist faction — until she discovers the Republic has its own agenda, and her foreign allies have a plan for the south that looks disturbingly like colonialism. The Poppy War series darkens further.
Magic is draining out of Earthsea. Wizards are forgetting their spells. Ged and the young prince Arren must sail to the farthest reaches of the world to find the source of the wound in the world — and the entity responsible for it. The concluding volume of the original Earthsea trilogy is Le Guin's meditation on death, courage, and the limits of power.
A soldier fighting an interstellar war discovers that time dilation means each tour of duty lasts years, while centuries pass at home — making Earth progressively unrecognisable.
Nabokov's last Russian-language novel follows young émigré poet Fyodor in 1920s Berlin as he writes, falls in love, and constructs an audacious biography of Russian literary critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky — an account of what it means to be a Russian writer in exile.
A woman disappears from a container ship. Her half-brother tends bar at a remote hotel on Vancouver Island. A financier runs a Ponzi scheme that will destroy hundreds of lives. Mandel's companion novel to Station Eleven weaves together haunted characters across a story of fraud, ghosts, and the way money makes certain people invisible.
The third Housemaid novel follows Millie Calloway into a new domestic situation — a family with secrets that rival any she has encountered before. As Millie uncovers the truth about the Calloway household, she finds herself in danger of becoming the victim rather than the survivor, with a child's life tangled in the web.
Children with telekinetic and telepathic abilities are abducted from their homes and taken to a facility in rural Maine called The Institute, where their gifts are exploited for purposes they cannot initially understand. Twelve-year-old Luke Ellis, gifted beyond any previous subject, becomes the unlikely center of a resistance.
When a local antiques dealer is murdered and a consignment of heroin goes missing, the Thursday Murder Club has a new case. But this investigation is personal — one of their own is directly connected to the dead man — and the answers they find will test the friendship at the heart of the group.
Secret Service agent Scot Harvath's first mission begins when the President of the United States is kidnapped on a ski trip and all the agents protecting him are killed — except Harvath.
Jason wakes up on a school bus with no memory of who he is. Piper and Leo think he's their friend, but nothing about his past is real. Drawn into the world of Greek and Roman demigods, Jason must discover his true identity while leading a quest to free the goddess Hera and prevent an ancient enemy from waking.
Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who has taken a teaching position on a remote Greek island, becomes entangled in the elaborate psychological games of Maurice Conchis, a wealthy and enigmatic recluse who stages increasingly disturbing theatrical scenarios — blurring the line between performance and reality.
Lucrezia de' Medici, married at fifteen to Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, suspects her new husband intends to kill her. O'Farrell reimagines the brief life of the young Duchess of Ferrara — likely the subject of Browning's 'My Last Duchess' — through a portrait sitting that becomes a meditation on art, survival, and female agency.
Maggie Tulliver grows up on the River Floss, trapped between her fierce intelligence and her society's refusal of it, between loyalty to her beloved but conventional brother Tom and her own ungovernable desires — Eliot's most autobiographical and psychologically penetrating early novel.
Luna's penal colony population, assisted by a self-aware computer, organises a revolution against Earth's authority in this Hugo Award-winning political science fiction novel.
Moraes 'Moor' Zogoiby narrates his family's baroque history in Bombay across four generations — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu blood tangled in a story of art, crime, love, and political violence. Rushdie's return to the multigenerational family epic after The Satanic Verses is his warmest and most humorous novel, full of Bombay's culinary, linguistic, and cultural richness.
James Axton, a risk analyst working in Athens in the early 1980s, becomes entangled with a cult that commits murders based on alphabetical correspondences between victims' initials and the place-names where they are killed. DeLillo's most purely thriller-shaped novel is also his most explicit meditation on language: the cult's strange grammar of death is the extreme version of the novel's central question — what is the relationship between words and the world?
