Favorite Poorly-Rated Books

Author	Geoffrey Chaucer
ISBN	0140424385

The procession that crosses Chaucer's pages is as full of life and as richly textured as a medieval tapestry. The Knight, the Miller, the Friar, the Squire, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and others who make up the cast of characters -- including Chaucer himself -- are real people, with human emotions...

Author	Arthur Miller
ISBN	0142437336

"I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history," Arthur Miller wrote of his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Based on historical people and real events,...

Author	Gregory Maguire
ISBN	0060987103

When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?

Gregory Maguire creates...

Author	J.K. Rowling
ISBN	0316228532

A BIG NOVEL ABOUT A SMALL TOWN ...

When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the town of Pagford is left in shock.

Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war.

Rich...

Author	Nathaniel Hawthorne
ISBN	0393924769

The sins of one generation are visited upon another in a haunted New England mansion until the arrival of a young woman from the country breathes new air into mouldering lives and rooms. Written shortly after The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables re-addresses the theme of human guilt in a style...

Author	John Knowles
ISBN	0743253973

An American classic and great bestseller for over thirty years, A Separate Peace is timeless in its description of adolescence during a period when the entire country was losing its innocence to the second world war.

Set at a boys boarding school in New England during the early years of World...

Author

Matthew Pearl

A magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dante's continued grip on our imagination, and a captivating thriller that will surprise readers from beginning to end.

Words can bleed.

In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and...

Author	Elfriede Jelinek
ISBN	0802118062

The Piano Teacher, the most famous novel of Elfriede Jelinek, who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a shocking, searing, aching portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires.
Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory,...

Author

Stephen King

Librarian's Note: This is alternate cover edition #2
ISBN 10: 0451156609
ISBN13: 9780451156600
See: Original Record Here

Late Last Night and the Night Before ...
... Tommyknockers, tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

Something was happening in Bobbi Anderson's...

Author	Mervyn Peake
ISBN	0345730097

Titus Alone has the charms and eccentricities, the verbal and visual beauties of its two formidable predecessors, but it is only about half as long as they are, with extremely short chapters, and it lacks their concentrated richness, their depth and perspective.

Is it a radical departure,...

Author	Donna Tartt
ISBN	1400031699

Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil.

The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve...

Author	Gregory Maguire
ISBN	0060747226

Liir hid in the shadows of the castle after Dorothy did in the Witch. Left for dead in a gully, the teen is shattered in spirit and body. But silent novice Candle tends him at the Cloister of Saint Glinda, and wills him back to life with her music.

What dark force left Liir in this condition? Is he really...

Author	Meg Wolitzer
ISBN	1594488398

The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable....

Author	Mary Roach
ISBN	0393329127

"What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my lap-top?" In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity...

Author	Edmund Spenser
ISBN	0140422072

The Faerie Queene was the first epic in English and one of the most influential poems in the language for later poets from Milton to Tennyson. Dedicating his work to Elizabeth I, Spenser brilliantly united medieval romance and renaissance epic to expound the glory of the Virgin Queen. The poem recounts...

Author	Richard K. Morgan
ISBN	0345457749

A coup in Cambodia. Guns to Guatemala. For the men and women of Shorn Associates, opportunity is calling. In the superheated global village of the near future, big money is made by finding the right little war and supporting one side against the other–in exchange for a share of the spoils. To succeed,...

Author	Téa Obreht
ISBN	0385343833

Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker’s twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.

In a Balkan...

Author	William Dietrich
ISBN	0060848324

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author William Dietrich introduces readers to the globe-trotting American adventurer Ethan Gage in Napoleon’s Pyramids—an ingenious, swashbuckling yarn whose action-packed pages nearly turn themselves. The first book in Dietrich’s fabulously...

Author	Kit Whitfield
ISBN	0345491637

It is a world much like our own, with one deadly difference: ninety-nine percent of the population is lycanthropic. When the full moon rises, humans transform into lunes, bloodthirsty beasts who cannot be reasoned with or tamed. Those few born unable to change are disparagingly known as barebacks,...

Author	Aimee Bender
ISBN	0385501129

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s...

Author	John Grisham
ISBN	0099481685

Imagine a year without Christmas. No crowded shops, no corny office parties, no fruitcakes, no unwanted presents. That's just what Luther and Nora Krank have in mind when they decide that, just this once, they'll skip the holiday altogether. Theirs will be the only house on the street without a rooftop...

Author	Jane Smiley
ISBN	0449910830

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres

"Rousing . . . Action-packed . . . A gripping story about love, fortitude, and convictions that are worth fighting for."--Los Angeles Times

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

"POWERFUL...

Author	Alexandra Ripley
ISBN	0446363251

The timeless tale continues... The most popular and beloved American historical novel ever written, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind is unparalleled in its portrayal of men and women at once larger than life but as real as ourselves. Now bestselling writer Alexandra Ripley brings us back to...

Author	Kiran Desai
ISBN	0802142818

In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju,...

Author	Friedrich Schiller
ISBN	3150000386

Friedrich Schillers "dramatisches Gedicht" Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien hat eine ungewöhnliche lange Entstehungszeit und eine komplizierte Entstehungsgeschichte. Die ersten Entwürfe stammen aus dem Jahr 1783, die letzten Änderungen reichen bis ins Jahr 1805. Erstmals publiziert und...

Author	Kazuo Ishiguro
ISBN	0571225403

An English boy born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when his mother and father both vanish under suspicious circumstances. Sent to live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective and, 20 years later, returns to Shanghai, where the Sino-Japanese War is raging.

The...

Author

Jonathan Lethem

In Jonathan Lethem's wryly funny novel, we meet a young man named Chaos, who's living in a movie theater in post-apocalyptic Wyoming, drinking alcohol, and eating food out of cans.

It's an unusual and at times unbearable existence, but Chaos soon discovers that his post-nuclear reality may...

Author	Sam Selvon
ISBN	0582642647

From the brilliant, sharp, witty pen of Sam Selvon, his classic award-winning novel of immigrant life in London in the 1950s.

'His Lonely Londoners has acquired a classic status since it appeared in 1956 as the definitive novel about London's West Indians.' — Financial Times

'The...

Author	J.M. Coetzee
ISBN	0099490625

Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends.

He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common:...

Author	Emma Jane Unsworth
ISBN	1443433055

Laura and Tyler are two young women who have been tearing up the city streets for ten years, leaving a trail of angry drug dealers and spent men in their wake. Now Laura is engaged to be married and her teetotal classical pianist fiancé, Jim, is away overseas. Tyler wants to keep the party going but Laura...