World Fiction

"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents, this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.

A Discovery of Witches introduced Diana Bishop, Oxford scholar and reluctant witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont. Shadow of Night and The Book of Life carried Deborah Harkness's series to its spellbinding conclusion, and the trilogy has now sold more than two million copies in the United States and appeared in 38 editions around the world. All Souls fans have been captivated from the start by the many sources of inspiration Harkness draws on in her novels. Here, with her signature historian's touch, she offers an encyclopedic look at the series.

Six months ago, I gave my heart to a girl. Beautiful, kind, and sexy as sin, she's the only person who saw past my record or the color of my skin. Who ever saw me for me. She loved me enough to let me go, to let me leave this city to find my own path. But without her, I drift, lost without direction. Without me, she spirals, desperate for connection. I gave my heart to a girl, and she gave hers to me. But love shouldn't hurt this much.

After Tripoli declared war on the United States in 1801, Barbary pirates captured 300 U.S. sailors and marines. President Jefferson sent navy squadrons to the Mediterranean, but he also authorized a secret mission to overthrow the government of Tripoli. He chose an unlikely diplomat, William Eaton, to lead the mission, but before Eaton departed, Jefferson grew wary of the affair and withdrew his support.

From the author of the best-selling Contagion comes a new novel in the Living Dead series. When deadly earthquakes devastate the Caribbean, an ancient disease of almost unimaginable destructive force engulfs the globe. As the earth continues to convulse and the seas encroach, the dead rise with an appetite for human flesh. Survivors must learn to navigate a world in which they are now the hunted.

The Galactics arrived with their Battle fleet in 2052. Rather than being exterminated under a barrage of hell-burners, Earth joined a vast Empire that spans the Milky Way. Our only worthwhile trade goods are our infamous mercenary legions, elite troops we sell to the highest alien bidder. In 2122 a lost colony expedition contacts Earth, surprising our government. Colonization is against Galactic Law, and Legion Varus is dispatched to the system to handle the situation. Earth gave them sealed orders, but Earth is 35 lightyears away.

Boccace a trente-cinq ans en 1348 quand, "juste effet de la colère de Dieu", éclate la grande peste qui flagelle l'Italie. Composé dans les années qui suivent, le "Livre des dix journées" s'ouvrira sur ce tableau apocalyptique, à la force grandiose et terrible, qui n'a rien à envier à la description de la peste d'Athènes chez Thucydide. C'est en effet dans ce contexte que sept jeunes filles courtoises et trois jeunes hommes qui ont conservé leur noblesse d'âme se retirent sur les pentes enchanteresses de Fiesole.

Lanning “Lanny” Budd spends his first 13 years in Europe, living at the center of his mother’s glamourous circle of friends on the French Riviera. In 1913, he enters a prestigious Swiss boarding school and befriends Rick, an English boy, and Kurt, a German. The three schoolmates are privileged, happy, and precocious - but their world is about to come to an abrupt and violent end. When the gathering storm clouds of war finally burst, raining chaos and death over the continent, Lanny must put the innocence of youth behind him.

At the end of his life, William Blake (1757-1827) gave up hope of being widely understood, but the twentieth century brought to his work a new and intense interest and acclaim.

General Bradstreet and the American forces on Mars have defeated the incursion by the insectoid Seekers, but at a heavy cost. The Morrigan is nearly out of reaction mass and can’t make it back to Earth, both landers have been destroyed and they have greater than fifty percent casualties. They’re stranded on Mars, saved only by the shelter of the Visitor ship. Until, miraculously, help arrives in the form of a new alliance with the French Coalition government, which provides a resupply ship filled with food, fuel, and reinforcements… both US Marines and French Special Forces. They’re saved.

In 1944, American naval officer Lt. Wyatt Paxton arrives in London to prepare for the Allied invasion of France. He works closely with Dorothy Fairfax, a "Wren" in the Women's Royal Naval Service. Dorothy pieces together reconnaissance photographs with thousands of holiday snapshots of France - including those of her own family's summer home - in order to create accurate maps of Normandy. Maps that Wyatt will turn into naval bombardment plans. As the two spend concentrated time together in the pressure cooker of war, their deepening friendship threatens to turn to love.

Set in 2540 CE, Brave New World is a dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley that was published in 1932. The novel takes place in a futuristic society called The World State, where life revolves around science and efficiency. Emotions and individuality are conditioned out of children, and citizens are socially engineered into an intelligence-based hierarchy. People are kept in a passive state through their consumption of a soothing drug called soma, and trouble-makers are exiled to various islands.

In his great triptych The Millennium, Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of the California coast where he lived for 15 years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place - one of the most colorful in the United States - and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there.

The opening sentence of John Irving's breakout novel, The World According to Garp, signals the start of sexual violence, which becomes increasingly political. "Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater." Jenny is an unmarried nurse; she becomes a single mom and a feminist leader, beloved but polarizing. Her son, Garp, is less beloved, but no less polarizing.

Ava and Joseph Simon reluctantly put their nine-year-old son, Henry, and four-year-old daughter, Catherine, in the care of their son’s teacher, who will escort them on a boat to mainland England. Just as the ferry is about to leave, the teacher’s sister Lily appears. The two trade places: Helen doesn’t want to leave Guernsey, and Lily is desperate for a fresh start.

Texas? Toast. Battered by five cataclysmic hurricanes in three weeks, the Texas Gulf Coast and half of the Lone Star State is reeling from the worst devastation in history. Thousands are dead or dying - but the worst is only beginning. Amid the wreckage, something unimaginable is happening: a deadly virus has broken out, returning the dead to life - with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. The nightmare begins...

Whether romantic or platonic, changing relationships prove tricky for Rose, Tom, Clara, and Craig—never mind adapting to the new not-so-normal. Being surrounded by the undead is bad enough, but with a tyrant-in-training running their Safe Zone, it’s that much worse.

From playwright, author and Oscar-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg, When You Finish Saving the World tells the moving and evocative story of three individuals working to understand each other and themselves: Nathan, a father learning to connect with his newborn son; Rachel, a young college student seeking to find her place in a relationship and in life, before marriage to Nathan; and Ziggy, their son, a teenager hoping to figure out where he came from, and where he’s headed.

As England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call to mysterious country estate Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes. Vivacious debutante Osla is the girl who has everything - beauty, wealth, and the dashing Prince Philip of Greece sending her roses - but she burns to prove herself as more than a society girl, and puts her fluent German to use as a translator of decoded enemy secrets.

Eric has survived where people much stronger than him have found their deaths. And not just that: He's managed to activate his magic supply, tame one of the most dangerous dungeon monsters, find the ancient city of monster hunters, and rescue Jay, the girl abandoned by the scouts in Gulper's lair. He left the Dungeons of the Crooked Mountains behind him. Now his path leads him to Orchus, where our freshly-minted mage intends to finally free himself of his debt-repayment oath.