The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower
10 best books like The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower (Penelope Fitzgerald): The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce and Selected Stories, The Talented Mr. Ripley / Ripley Under Ground / Ripley's Game, Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left, Naguib Mahfouz: Three Novels of Ancient Egypt, Sanditon and Other Stories, Typhoon and Other Tales, Shirley & The Professor, The Complete Henry Bech, Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie / The Girls of Slender Means / The Driver's Seat / The Only Problem
These three classics from the master of the noir novel, along with five otherwise unavailable short stories, are electric with the taut narrative voice, the suspense, and the explosive violence and eroticism that were James M. Cain’s indelible hallmarks.The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain’s...
| Author | Patricia Highsmith |
| ISBN | 0375407928 |
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Three classic crime novels by a master of the macabre appear here together in hardcover for the first time.Suave, agreeable, and completely amoral, Patricia Highsmith's hero, the inimitable Tom Ripley, stops at nothing--not even murder-- to accomplish his goals....
| Author | Robin Klein |
| ISBN | 0140361715 |
The hilarious account of a crazy alien family's stay on earth, as their extra-terrestrial powers and ignorance of earth customs get them into trouble, and adventures.
The planet Zyrgon is ruled by the galactic police called The Law-Enforcers, who are after Mortimer because has cheated the...
| Author | Naguib Mahfouz |
| ISBN | 1841593052 |
Mahfouz reaches back thousands of years to bring us tales from his homeland's majestic early history—tales of the Egyptian nobility and of war, star-crossed love, and the divine rule of the pharoahs. In Khufu's Wisdom, the legendary Fourth Dynasty monarch faces the prospect of the end of his rule...
| Author | Jane Austen |
| ISBN | 0679447199 |
Readers of Jane Austen’s six great novels are left hungering for more, and more there is: the marvelous unpublished manuscripts she left behind, collected here.
Sanditon might have been Austen’s greatest novel had she lived to finish it. Its subject matter astonishes: here is Austen...
| Author | Joseph Conrad |
| ISBN | 0192801732 |
This volume contains Typhoon, The Secret Sharer, Falk, and Amy Foster. Typhoon, a story of a steamship and her crew beset by a tempest, is a masterpiece of descriptive virtuosity and moral irony, while The Secret Sharer excels in symbolic ambiguity. Both stories vividly present Conrad's abiding preoccupation...
| Author | Charlotte Brontë |
| ISBN | 0307268217 |
Shirley is the story of a complicated friendship between two very different women: shy and socially constrained Caroline, the poor niece of a tyrannical clergyman; and the independent heiress Shirley, who has both the resources and the spirit to defy convention. The romantic entanglements of the...
| Author | John Updike |
| ISBN | 1857152646 |
From his birth in 1923 to his belated paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in 1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next. By turns cynical and naïve, wry and avuncular,...
| Author | Oscar Wilde |
| ISBN | 1857150422 |
Brilliant and tragic, decadent yet radical, a socialist dandy and a witty moralist, Oscar Wilde embodied all the contradictions of the 1890s. The scope of his genius is indicated in this volume by the inclusion of the period’s most scintillating comedy – The Importance of Being Earnest; its most...
| Author | Muriel Spark |
| ISBN | 1857152743 |
The brevity of Muriel Spark's novels is equaled only by their brilliance. These four novels, each a miniature masterpiece, illustrate her development over four decades. Despite the seriousness of their themes, all four are fantastic comedies of manners, bristling with wit.
Spark's most...
| Author | Anna Akhmatova |
| ISBN | 0307264246 |
A legend in her own time both for her brilliant poetry and for her resistance to oppression, Anna Akhmatova—denounced by the Soviet regime for her “eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference”—is one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century. Before the revolution, Akhmatova...
| Author | Raymond Chandler |
| ISBN | 0375415025 |
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Creator of the famous Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler elevated the American hard-boiled detective genre to an art form. Chandler’s last four novels, published here in one volume, offer ample opportunity to savor the unique and utterly compelling fictional...
| Author | Roald Dahl |
| ISBN | 0307264904 |
The only hardcover edition of Roald Dahl’s stories for adults, the Collected Stories amply showcases his singular gifts as a fabulist and a born storyteller.
Later known for his immortal children’s books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and The...
The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays
| Author | Albert Camus |
| ISBN | 1400042550 |
From one of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the twentieth century–two novels, six short stories, and a pair of essays in a single volume. In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (1913—1960) de-ployed his lyric eloquence in defense against despair, providing an affirmation...
| Author | Rudyard Kipling |
| ISBN | 0679435921 |
As a young writer living in Lahore during the time of the British Raj, Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was possessed by an enormous subject—India—and his genius for rendering its beauty and strangeness was even then so fully formed that we have to look to the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens to...
The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
| Author | Evelyn Waugh |
| ISBN | 0316926604 |
Evelyn Waugh's short fiction reveals in miniaturized perfection the elements that made him the greatest satirist of the twentieth century. The stories collected here range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust;...
| Author | R.K. Narayan |
| ISBN | 0226568393 |
"There are writers—Tolstoy and Henry James to name two—whom we hold in awe, writers—Turgenev and Chekhov—for whom we feel a personal affection, other writers whom we respect—Conrad for example—but who hold us at a long arm's length with their 'courtly foreign grace.' Narayan (whom...
Rights of Man and Common Sense
| Author | Thomas Paine |
| ISBN | 0679433147 |
The authorities in power in England during Thomas Paine’s lifetime saw him as an agent provocateur who used his seditious eloquence to support the emancipation of slaves and women, the demands of working people, and the rebels of the French and American Revolutions. History, on the other...
The Raj Quartet (1): The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion
| Author | Paul Scott |
| ISBN | 0307263967 |
The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott's epic study of British India in its final years, has no equal. Tolstoyan in scope and Proustian in detail but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals...
