Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps

Author

Alan Lightman

A modern classic, Einstein’s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In...

Author	Michelle Paver
ISBN	1788549562

1906: A large manor house, Wake's End, sits on the edge of a bleak Fen, just outside the town of Wakenhyrst. It is the home of Edmund Stearn and his family – a historian, scholar and land-owner, he's an upstanding member of the local community. But all is not well at Wake's End. Edmund dominates his family...

Author	Joseph Conrad
ISBN	1551111721

Jim, a young British seaman, becomes first mate on the Patna, a ship full of pilgrims travelling to Mecca for the hajj. When the ship starts rapidly taking on water and disaster seems imminent, Jim joins his captain and other crew members in abandoning the ship and its passengers. A few days later, they...

Author	Bill Bryson
ISBN	0060920084

'I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to'

And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England, he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the...

Author	Joris-Karl Huysmans
ISBN	0140447636

With a title translated either as Against Nature or as Against The Grain, this wildly original fin-de-siècle novel follows its sole character, Des Esseintes, a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous...

Author

Alan Warner

Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern's reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What...

Author	Alexander Trocchi
ISBN	0802139779

Joe is a drifter who works as a hired hand on a barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As the story opens, he finds the corpse of a young woman drifting downstream. Was it an accident? Suicide? Murder? As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, it becomes apparent that Joe knew...

Author

William Monahan

Quite possibly the funniest book I've ever read. Monahan breaks all the literary rules and I love him for it. He seems to make mockery of writing rules across the board. He ends almost every dialogue with an adverb -- one that doesn't even match the tone of the speaker. He goes out of his way to use the most...

Author	J.G. Ballard
ISBN	0312306091

Eden-Olympia is more than just a multinational business park, it is a virtual city-state in itself, built for the most elite high-tech industries. Isolated and secure, the residents lack nothing, yet one day, a doctor at the clinic goes on a suicidal shooting spree. Dr. Jane Sinclair is hired as his...

Author

Caimh McDonnell

LOVED IT!!!

Do you know which famous person you look like?
I've been told that I have an uncanny resemblance to Brad Pitt...in the sense that we both have a body with two legs, two feet, two arms, two hands, and a head with two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth and hair. It's only the shape of everything...