Showing titles in World Literature

1941, Estonia. As Stalin’s brutal Red Army crushes everything in its path, Katarina battles to protect her grandmother’s precious legacy - the weaving of gossamer lace shawls stitched with intricate patterns that tell the stories passed down through generations. Meanwhile Lydia is suffocating in her prison of privilege in Moscow. Yearning for freedom and to discover her beloved mother’s Baltic heritage, she escapes to Estonia. Soon these two young women find themselves in a fight for life, liberty and love.

1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton—and a place where everyone knows everyone else's business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge.

Gundagai, 1852. The powerful Murrumbidgee River surges through town leaving death and destruction in its wake. It is a stark reminder that while the river can give life, it can just as easily take it away. Wagadhaany is one of the lucky ones. She survives. But is her life now better than the fate she escaped? Forced to move away from her miyagan, she walks through each day with no trace of dance in her step, her broken heart forever calling her back home to Gundagai.

Melbourne, 1927. The summer flowers smell like Christmas the night Zara Dickins meets Harry Holt. Zara is wearing a dress she has designed and made herself. White organdie over a short black slip, with black embroidery and a crimson taffeta sash. It is party season and the university crowd are celebrating end-of-year exams. Zara loves dancing with the boys and flirting with them, but it's a game to her. Nothing serious. Until Harry. He plans to be a politician once he finishes law. She, a fashion designer, if she can find a way to break out of the secretarial pool.

Laurence Sterne’s most famous novel is a biting satire of literary conventions and contemporary 18th-century values. Renowned for its parody of established narrative techniques, Tristram Shandyis commonly regarded as the forerunner of avant-garde fiction. Tristram’s characteristic digressions on a whole range of unlikely subjects (including battle strategy and noses!) are endlessly surprising and make this one of Britain’s greatest comic achievements.

When Blair McGowan, the mail person with the longest postal route in the country of over three hundred mile a day, goes missing the question becomes—where do you look for her? The Postal Inspector for the State of Wyoming elicits Sheriff Longmire to mount an investigation into her disappearance and Walt does everything but mail it in; posing as a letter-carrier himself, the good sheriff follows her trail and finds himself enveloped in the intrigue of an otherworldly cult.

After her terrifying experience at the hands of the Watchers, Mina has escaped to a cottage on the west coast of Ireland. She obsessively researches her former captors, desperate to find any way to prolong the safety of humankind. When Mina encounters a stranger near her home, she fears the worst – for she knows the figure is not what it seems. Soon, people she has encountered start to disappear.

"I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man", a nameless voice cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the painful self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn of a lonely individual who has become one of the greatest anti-heroes in all literature.

Lily has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother when she was four. She not only has her own memory of holding the gun, but her father's account of the event. Now 14, she yearns for her mother, and for forgiveness. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her father, she has only one friend: Rosaleen, a black servant whose sharp exterior hides a tender heart. South Carolina in the '60s is a place where segregation is still considered a cause worth fighting for.

Following the disappearance of his only son and the death of his beloved wife, Richard Morgan is falsely imprisoned and exiled to the penal colonies of 18th-century Australia. His life is shattered, but Morgan refuses to surrender, overcoming all obstacles to find unexpected contentment and happiness in the harsh early days of Australia's settlement. From England's shores to Botany Bay and the rugged frontier of a hostile new world, Morgan's Run is the epic tale of love lost and found, and the man whose strength and character helped settle a country and define its future.

Miinaa was a young girl when the white ghosts first arrived. She remembers the day they raised a piece of cloth and renamed her homeland 'Bathurst'. Now she lives at Cloverdale and works for a white family who have settled there. The Nugents are kind, but Miinaa misses her miyagan. His brother, Windradyne, is a Wiradyuri leader, and visits when he can, bringing news of unrest across their ngurambang. Miinaa hopes the violence will not come to Cloverdale.

“A faithful translation is rare; a translation which preserves intact the original text is very rare; a perfect translation of Montaigne appears impossible. Yet Donald Frame has realized this feat. One does not seem to be reading a translation, so smooth and easy is the style; at each moment, one seems to be listening to Montaigne himself - the freshness of his ideas, the unexpected choice of words. Frame has kept everything.” (Andre Maurois, The New York Times Book Review)

The starship Earthling, filled with thousands of hibernating colonists en route to a new world at Tau Ceti, is stranded beyond the solar system when the ship's three organic mental cores—disembodied human brains that control the vessel's functions—go insane. The emergency skeleton crew sees only one chance for survival: build an artificial consciousness in the Earthling's primary computer that can guide them to their destination—and hope it doesn't destroy the human race.

In Kabul, 2007, with a drug-addicted father and no brothers, Rahima and her sisters can only sporadically attend school, and can rarely leave the house. Their only hope lies in the ancient custom of bacha posh, which allows young Rahima to dress and be treated as a boy until she is of marriageable age. As a son, she can attend school, go to the market, and chaperone her older sisters. But Rahima is not the first in her family to adopt this unusual custom. A century earlier, her great-great grandmother, Shekiba, left orphaned by an epidemic, saved herself and built a new life the same way.

Helsingør, Denmark, 1943. In the midst of the German occupation during World War Two, Inger Bredhal joins the underground resistance and risks her life to save members of Denmark’s Jewish community and help them escape to Sweden. Copenhagen, 2018. Inger’s granddaughter Cecilie Lund is mourning her death when a mysterious discovery while cleaning out Inger’s flat leads past and present to intersect. As long-held secrets finally see the light of day, Cecilie learns the story of her grandmother’s courage and bravery.

From the author of the million-copy global best seller Lilac Girls, comes a captivating new historical novel, set during the American Civil War. It's a sweeping story of women caught in a country on the brink of collapse, in a society grappling with nationalism and unthinkable racial cruelty.

When Greer MacAlister's despised husband dies, she and her young daughter Fen find themselves in a remote whisky smuggling community in the heart of the Highlands. Here, illicit whisky making is a means of survival in a Scotland under occupation by the British, decades after the disastrous Battle of Culloden. The villagers are suspicious of the widow, but when Greer tricks excise officers away from their illegal stills with a courageous and daring act, they warm to her.

Max Skinner is a man at the heart of London's financial universe until his employers embark on a little asset-stripping of their own. Himself. Amid the grey London drizzle, there is one potential ray of sunshine: Max's Uncle Harry has left him his estate in his will, an eighteenth-century chateau and vineyard an hour's drive from Avignon.

Le comte de Monte-Cristo s'est installé à Paris. Par sa magnificence, sa spiritualité et ses étranges manières, il devient la personnalité la plus recherchée de la haute société. C'est justement ce qu'il voulait afin de pouvoir mettre en place son implacable vengeance. Ainsi, tous les protagonistes de cette affaire, tous ceux qui participèrent à l'horrible machination dont le jeune Edmond Dantès fut autrefois la victime, s'avancent en toute innocence dans les rets tendus par le comte. Et pour chacun un piège longuement, patiemment, diaboliquement construit se prépare. Le comte, tel un chat, va jouer avec ses victimes, savourant le moment où il les fera basculer dans la déchéance.

From the bestselling author of The Collaborator comes a compelling story of betrayal, collusion, revenge, and redemption set in German-occupied Jersey during World War II.