Showing titles in World Literature

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial even proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world. Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger.

Remembrance of Things Past is one of the monuments of 20th century literature. Within a Budding Grove is the second of seven volumes. The young narrator, experiencing his youthful sexuality, falls under the spell of a group of adolescent girls, succumbs to the charms of the enchanting Gilberte, and visits a brothel where he meets Rachel. His impressions of life are also stimulated by the painter, Elstir, and his encounter with another girl, Albertine.

At the end of World War II, American army officer Captain Sean O’Sullivan is commissioned with rebuilding Berlin. Reeling from the death of his brothers at German hands and faced with the direct horrors of the Holocaust, O’Sullivan struggles against his animosity towards the nation he is helping restore. Meanwhile, Soviet forces blockade Germany in a bid for power, and the Western Allies must unite to prevent a communist takeover. When the airlift begins, the Allies find their deepest convictions tested as they fight against a threat even more dangerous than Hitler.

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humor, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.

When Yui loses her mother and daughter in the tsunami, she wonders how she will ever carry on. Yet, in the face of this unthinkable loss, life must somehow continue. Then one day she hears about a man who has an old disused telephone box in his garden. There, those who have lost loved ones find the strength to speak to them and begin to come to terms with their grief. As news of the phone box spreads, people will travel to it from miles around. Soon, Yui will make her own pilgrimage to the phone box, too. But once there she cannot bring herself to speak into the receiver.

Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. Amid a violent student uprising, a young boy named Dong-ho is killed. As his friend searches for Dong-ho's corpse, we also meet an editor struggling against censorship, a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories, and Dong-ho's grief-stricken mother. Through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope comes a tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, 2008.
Balram Halwai is the White Tiger - the smartest boy in his village. Too poor to finish school, he has to work in a teashop until the day a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi. The city is a revelation. Balram becomes aware of immense wealth all around him, and realizes the only way he can become part of it is by murdering his master. The White Tiger presents a raw and unromanticized India, both thrilling and shocking.

This book aims to give in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention (in chapters 2 and 3) on a few essentials, the rules of usage, and principles of composition most commonly violated. In accordance with this plan it lays down three rules for the use of the comma, instead of a score or more, and one for the use of the semicolon, in the belief that these four rules provide for all the internal punctuation that is required by 19 sentences out of 20.

One of the great innovators in American letters, Walt Whitman created a daringly new kind of poetry that became a major force in world literature. Leaves of Grass is his masterpiece, written in a pure, uninhibited style, combining sensual and mystical sensibilities. Its bold, joyous voice, its expansive optimism, and its transcendental vision made it uniquely American.

Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. Her excellent photography skills have cracked many cases—she is almost supernaturally good at capturing details. In fact, Rita has been hiding a secret: she sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues that other investigators overlook. As a lone portal back to the living for traumatized spirits, Rita is terrorized by nagging ghosts who won’t let her sleep and who sabotage her personal life.

The Salpêtrière asylum, 1885. All of Paris is in thrall to Doctor Charcot and his displays of hypnotism on women who have been deemed mad or hysterical, outcasts from society. But the truth is much more complicated - for these women are often simply inconvenient, unwanted wives or strong-willed daughters. Once a year, a grand ball is held at the hospital. For the Parisian elite, the Mad Women's Ball is the highlight of the social season; for the women themselves, it is a rare moment of hope.

Montgomery, Alabama. 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend has big plans to make a difference in her community. She wants to help women make their own choices for their lives and bodies. But when her first week on the job takes her down a dusty country road to a tumbledown cabin and into the heart of the Williams family, Civil learns there is more to her new role than she bargained for.

The new novel in Bernard Cornwell's number one best-selling series The Warrior Chronicles, on the making of England and the fate of his great hero, Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Alfred the Great is dead and Edward his son reigns as king. Wessex survives but peace cannot hold. The Danes in the north, led by Viking Cnut Longsword, stand ready to invade and will never rest until the emerald crown is theirs.

This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the story's told. In this extraordinary audiobook, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Dominic Smith brilliantly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the Golden Age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated Australian art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth.

Alfie's mum, Emilia, has been lying to him forever. It's only ever been the two of them in Ireland, but when Emilia's appendix explodes, she drops a second bombshell: she has a family back in Australia and she and Alfie are going to meet them. When Penny Bains opens the door of her Tasmanian farmhouse to a boy with an Irish accent claiming to be the son of her missing daughter, Emilia, her life is turned upside down.

1940. Aiyi Shao is a young heiress and the owner of a formerly popular and glamorous Shanghai nightclub. Ernest Reismann is a penniless Jewish refugee driven out of Germany, an outsider searching for shelter in a city wary of strangers. He loses nearly all hope until he crosses paths with Aiyi. When she hires Ernest to play piano at her club, her defiance of custom causes a sensation. His instant fame makes Aiyi’s club once again the hottest spot in Shanghai. Soon they realize they share more than a passion for jazz - but their differences seem insurmountable....

El gran maestro de la narrativa de acción y suspense nos transporta con este audiolibro a la Edad Media, a un fascinante mundo de reyes, damas, caballeros, pugnas feudales, castillos y ciudades amuralladas. El amor y la muerte se entrecruzan vibrantemente en este magistral tapiz cuyo centro es la construcción de una catedral gótica.

Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-confessed recluse, she finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. Now in their nineties, Monica worries about them—especially her grandmother Yun whose memory has begun to fade. Monica has become intent on tracking down the long-lost cousin Meng that her grandmother was separated from back in China before it’s too late.

1814 Sydney When Mary Greenway, freshly arrived from the old country, steps into the maelstrom of Sydney Town with three children at her skirts, she has high hopes of a new beginning, despite having little money and a husband in irons. After all, the sudden death of her sadistic first husband has meant freedom from her gilded cage and Francis Greenway is an architect of some promise, under the protection of Admiral Phillip himself.

Richard has spent his life as a university professor, immersed in the world of books and ideas. Recently retired, he steps into the streets of his city, Berlin, and discovers a new community. A tent city has grown up on Oranienplatz, established by African asylum seekers. Hesitantly getting to know the people there, Richard finds his life changing, as he begins to question his own sense of belonging in a city that once divided its citizens into them and us.