25 Great and Diverse Novels
Explore 25 great and diverse novels that span genres, cultures, and perspectives. Discover must-read books from acclaimed authors worldwide for every reader's taste.
Book
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote. "Though there have been many valuable English translations of Don Quixote, I would commend Edith Grossman's version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose. The Knight and Sancho are so eloquently rendered by Grossman that the vitality of their characterization is more clearly conveyed than ever before. There is also an astonishing contextualization of Don Quixote and Sancho in Grossman's translation that I believe has not been achieved before. The spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline can be felt throughout, thanks to her heightened quality of diction. Grossman might be called the Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note. Reading her amazing mode of finding equivalents in English for Cervantes's darkening vision is an entrance into a further understanding of why this great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake." From the Introduction by Harold Bloom Miguel de Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547, in Alcala de Henares, Spain. At twenty-three he enlisted in the Spanish militia and in 1571 fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto, where a gunshot wound permanently crippled his left hand. He spent four more years at sea and then another five as a slave after being captured by Barbary pirates. Ransomed by his family, he returned to Madrid but his disability hampered him; it was in debtor's prison that he began to write Don Quixote. Cervantes wrote many other works, including poems and plays, but he remains best known as the author of Don Quixote. He died on April 23, 1616.
Book
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
The biblical account of Cain and Abel is echoed in the history of two generations of the Trask family in California.
Item Not Found
ID: 8484036537
(Type: books)
Book
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
'The most perfect of all the Dickens novels' Virginia Woolf David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his brilliant, but ultimately unworthy school-friend James Steerforth; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; the eternally humble, yet treacherous Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora Spenlow; and the magnificently impecunious Wilkins Micawber, one of literature's great comic creations. In David Copperfield - the novel he described as his 'favourite child' - Dickens drew revealingly on his own experiences to create one of the most exuberant and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure. This edition uses the text of the first volume publication of 1850, and includes updated suggestions for further reading, original illustrations by 'Phiz', a revised chronology and expanded notes. In his new introduction, Jeremy Tambling discusses the novel's autobiographical elements, and its central themes of memory and identity. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Book
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The must-have Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of one of the greatest Russian novels ever written Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as âflawless,â Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and thereby exposes herself to the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness. While previous versions have softened the robust and sometimes shocking qualities of Tolstoy's writing, Pevear and Volokhonsky have produced a translation true to his powerful voice. This authoritative edition, which received the PEN Translation Prize and was an Oprah Book Clubâą selection, also includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable, this Anna Karenina will be the definitive text for fans of the film and generations to come. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition also features French flaps and deckle-edged paper. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Item Not Found
ID: 1593080654
(Type: books)
Book
My Ăntonia
by Willa Cather
The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Antonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation of immigrants.
Book
In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
NATIONAL BESTSELLER âą The most famous true crime novel of all time "chills the blood and exercises the intelligence" (The New York Review of Books)âand haunted its author long after he finished writing it. On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. In one of the first non-fiction novels ever written, Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, generating both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.
Book
Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER âą Family drama and the legacy of slavery haunt this epic tale of an enigmatic stranger in Jefferson, Mississippiâfrom one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century. âRead, read, read. Read everythingâtrash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! Youâll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, youâll find out. If itâs not, throw it out the window.â âWilliam Faulkner Absalom, Absalom! is Faulknerâs epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, a man who comes to the South in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, âwho wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.â
Item Not Found
ID: 9871138148
(Type: books)
Book
Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
In 1959, Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist, takes his four young daughters, his wife, and his mission to the Belgian Congo -- a place, he is sure, where he can save needy souls. But the seeds they plant bloom in tragic ways within this complex culture. Set against one of the most dramatic political events of the twentieth century -- the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium and its devastating consequences -- here is New York Times-bestselling author Barbara Kingslover's beautiful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable epic that chronicles the disintegration of family and a nation.
Book
For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
A book about love and courage and decency and glory. It is written with a wisdom that washes the mind and cools it. With an understanding that rips the heart with compassion.
Item Not Found
ID: 067977629X
(Type: books)
Book
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanizedâand sometimes outragedâmillions of readers. One of The Atlanticâs Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years First published in 1939, Steinbeckâs Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joadsâdriven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one manâs fierce reaction to injustice, and of one womanâs stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeckâs powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics. This Centennial edition, specially designed to commemorate one hundred years of Steinbeck, features french flaps and deckle-edged pages. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Book
To Kill a Mockingbird 40th
by Harper Lee
The explosion of racial hate and violence in a small Alabama town is viewed by a little girl whose father defends a Black man accused of rape
Book
La Casa de Los Espiritus
by Isabel Allende
Bestseller internacional y muy admirado clĂĄsico de la literatura latinoamericana, la trascendental novela de Isabel Allende cuenta la historia Ă©pica de la numerosa y turbulenta familia Trueba de Chile, con su patriarca angustiado y sus mujeres clarividentes, trazando sus vidas desde los fines del siglo pasado, hasta los dĂas violentos del golpe que derrocĂł al gobierno de Salvador Allende en 1973. En La casa de los espĂritus, Allende combina lo supernatural con lo real en una versiĂłn sumamente personal de realismo mĂĄgico. Es raro, el caso, en que una primera novela lanza a su autora tan repentinamente al foro internacionales.
Book
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sonsâtheir love, their sacrifices, their lies. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner tells a sweeping story of family, love, and friendship against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before, bringing to mind the large canvases of the Russian writers of the nineteenth century. But just as it is old-fashioned in its narration, it is contemporary in its subject-the devastating history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years. As emotionally gripping as it is tender, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful debut.
Book
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
by Allan Gurganus
Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the twentieth century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence," Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucyâs story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is a marvel of narrative showmanship and proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.
Book
The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D. H. Lawrence called "the real stuff of tragedy." The heath's changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin; her fiancé, Damon Wildeve; and the willful Eustacia Vye are the protagonists in a tale of doomed love, passion, alienation, and melancholy as Hardy brilliantly explores that theme so familiar throughout his fiction: the diabolical role of chance in determining the course of a life. As Alexander Theroux asserts in his Introduction, Hardy was "committed to the deep expression of [nature's] ironic chaos and strange apathy, even hostility, toward man."
Item Not Found
ID: 0140261931
(Type: books)
Book
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe. Proud and beautiful, she escaped from slavery but is haunted by its heritage - from the fires of the flesh to the heartbreaking challenges to the spirit.
Book
Crossing to Safety
by Wallace Stegner
ï»żIntroduction by Terry Tempest Williams Afterword by T. H. Watkins ï»żCalled a âmagnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdomâ by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.
Book
Suite Francaise
by Irene Nemirovsky
NATIONAL BESTSELLER âą The remarkable story of men and women thrown together in circumstances beyond their control during World War IIâa heartrending "portrait of a small French town under seige, and the people trying to survive, even to live, as Hitlerâs horrors march closer and closer to their doors" (New York). âStunning.... A tour de force.â âThe New York Times Book Review Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940, as Parisians flee the city, human folly surfaces in every imaginable way: a wealthy mother searches for sweets in a town without food; a couple is terrified at the thought of losing their jobs, even as their world begins to fall apart. Moving on to a provincial village now occupied by German soldiers, the locals must learn to coexist with the enemyâin their town, their homes, even in their hearts. When IrĂšne NĂ©mirovsky began working on Suite Française, she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she died. For sixty-four years, this novel remained hidden and unknown.
Book
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Bronte
Charlotte BrontĂ«'s moving masterpiece â the novel that has been "teaching true strength of character for generations" (The Guardian). Nominated as one of Americaâs best-loved novels by PBSâs The Great American Read A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre has dazzled generations of readers with its depiction of a woman's quest for freedom. Having grown up an orphan in the home of her cruel aunt and at a harsh charity school, Jane Eyre becomes an independent and spirited survivor-qualities that serve her well as governess at Thornfield Hall. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him whatever the consequences or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving her beloved? This updated Penguin Classics edition features a new introduction by BrontĂ« scholar and award-winning novelist Stevie Davies, as well as comprehensive notes, a chronology, further reading, and an appendix. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.