Books Youll Read Far into the Night
Discover the best page-turners with our list of books you'll read far into the night. Find gripping novels and captivating stories that keep you hooked till dawn.
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The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
This limited edition volume includes art work painted by the author. This is the story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and falls in love with Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course.
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Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
Having moved from one academic outpost to another throughout her childhood at the side of her aphorism-prone father, Blue van Meer attends the elite St. Gallway School in her senior year, where she falls in with a charismatic group of friends before the deaths of a teacher and student awaken her analytical instincts. A first novel. 50,000 first printing.
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Burning Bright
by Tracy Chevalier
Presents a sweeping and romantic tale set against the historical backdrop of William Blake's London.
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Ordinary Wolves
by Seth Kantner
Cutuk Hawcly, a white boy living among the natives of the Alaskan Tundra is torn between the culture of the modern cities where his father comes from and the Alaskan wilderness where he was born and raised.
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Desperation Moon
by Ken Douglas
When racecar driver Sara Hackett arrives home from a desert road race, she finds her niece and another girl have been kidnapped and a dead man has turned up in her bed. The kidnappers want a million dollars she doesn't have or they say they'll kill the kids.
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Small Island
by Andrea Levy
Told in four distinct voices, the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2004 is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, encapsulating the most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.
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Fallen
by David Maine
The author of "The Preservationist" pens a provocative epic of temptation and murder, of exile and loss, in this convincing portrait of a family driven by passions and jealousies.
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Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and one of the world’s greatest storytellers comes “an insistently metaphysical mind-bender” (The New Yorker) about a teenager on the run and a deceptively simple old man. Now with a new introduction by the author. Here we meet fifteen-year-old runaway Kafka Tamura and the elderly Nakata, who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder, in what is a truly remarkable journey. “As powerful as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.... Reading Murakami ... is a striking experience in consciousness expansion.”—Chicago Tribune
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The Practice of Deceit
by Elizabeth Benedict
Benedict navigates the turbulent waters of love, law, psychology, and ethics with wit and penetrating insight in her gripping thriller about marriage and divorce gone awry.
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Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
In nineteenth-century England, all is going well for reclusive Mr Norell, who has regained some of the power of England's magicians from the past, until a rival magician, Jonathan Strange, appears and becomes Mr Norrell's pupil.
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The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd
The multi-million bestselling novel about a young girl's journey towards healing and the transforming power of love, from the award-winning author of The Invention of Wings and The Book of Longings Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted Black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.
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The Mermaid Chair
by Sue Monk Kidd
Jessie Sullivan is summoned home to tiny Egret Island, where she meets Brother Thomas, a monk who is about to take his final vows, and encounters the legend of a mysterious chair dedicated to a saint who had originally been a mermaid.
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Shantaram
by Gregory David Roberts
The story of a man who escapes from a maximum security facility in Australia and arrives in Bombay, crossroads of the underworld, where he works in an aid station and smuggles drugs and guns.
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
The most famous and controversial novel from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century tells the story of Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. “The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind.”—The New Yorker One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
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Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen
A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title, that may also include a folder with miscellaneous notes, discussion questions, biographical information, and reading lists to assist book group discussion leaders.
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Un Lugar Llamado Nada
by Amy Tan
Een groep Amerikaanse toeristen op kunstreis in Myanmar verdwijnt spoorloos. Hun kort voor de reis vermoorde reisleidster reist als geest met hen mee en vertelt wat hen overkomt.
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All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
Character study of a Southern demagogue whose career follows in some respects as that of Huey Long.
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Tooth and Claw
by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Since Descent of Manappeared in 1979, T. C. Boyle has transformed the nature of short fiction in our time; in a review of his most recent collection, After the Plague, The New York Timeshailed him as “a writer who can take you anywhere.” Which is exactly what Boyle does in Tooth and Claw.These fourteen stories, which have appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and Playboy, display Boyle’s imaginative muscle, emotional sensitivity, and astonishing range. Here you will find the whimsical tales for which Boyle is famous, including “The Kind Assassin,” about a radio shock jock who sets the world record for most continuous hours without sleep. Readers will love the comedic drama of the title story, about a man who must contend with a vicious cat from Africa that he has won in a bet. And who could resist the gripping power of “Dogology,” about a woman who becomes so obsessed with man’s best friend that she begins to lose her own identity to a pack of strays. Boyle here proves once again that he is “a writer who can take any topic and spin a yarn too good to put down” (Men’s Journal).
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On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
Struggling with a stale marriage and the misguided passions of his three adult children, long-suffering art professor Howard Belsey finds his family life thrown into turmoil by his son's engagement to the socially prominent daughter of a right-wing icon. By the author of White Teeth. 200,000 first printing.
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A Thread of Grace
by Mary Doria Russell
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A powerfully imagined novel . . . [a] profoundly moving book that engages the heights and depths of human experience.”—Los Angeles Times It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to find safety now that the Italians have broken from Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it quickly becomes an open battleground for the Nazis, the Allies, Resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive. Tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters—a charismatic Italian Resistance leader, a priest, an Italian rabbi’s family, a disillusioned German doctor—Mary Doria Russell tells the little-known story of the vast underground effort by Italian citizens who saved the lives of 43,000 Jews during the final phase of World War II. A Thread of Grace puts a human face on history. Praise for A Thread of Grace “An addictive page-turner . . . [Mary Doria] Russell has an astonishing story to tell—full of action, paced like a rapid-fire thriller, in tense, vivid scenes that move with cinematic verve.”—The Washington Post Book World “Hauntingly beautiful, utterly unforgettable.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Rich . . . Based on the heroism of ordinary people, [A Thread of Grace] packs an emotional punch.”—People “[A] deeply felt and compellingly written book . . . The progress of each character’s life is marked or measured by acts of grace. . . . Russell is a smart, passionate and imaginative writer.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “A feat of storytelling . . . an important book [that] needs to be widely read.”—Portland Oregonian “Mary Doria Russell’s fans (and aren’t we all?) will rejoice to see her new novel on the shelves. A Thread of Grace is as ambitious, beautiful, tense, and transforming as any of us could have hoped.”—Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club “A story of love and war, A Thread of Grace speaks to the resilience and beauty of the human spirit in the midst of unimaginable horror. It is, unquestionably, a literary triumph.”—David Morrell, author of The Brotherhood of the Rose and First Blood
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Light from Heaven
by Jan Karon
In the final volume in the phenomenally successful Mitford Years ties up all the loose ends of Father Timothy Kavanagh's deeply affecting life. The novel is filled with old and new characters and the answers to questions readers have asked since the series began nearly a decade ago.
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The Double Bind
by Chris Bohjalian
Working at a homeless shelter, student Laurel Estabrook encounters Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of secret photos, but when Bobbie dies suddenly, Laurel embarks on an obsessive search for the truth behind the photos.
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The Sea
by John Banville
Following the death of his wife, Max Morden retreats to the seaside town of his childhood summers, where his own life becomes inextricably entwined with the members of the vacationing Grace family.
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The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño
New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run. The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances. A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
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Then We Came to the End
by Joshua Ferris
This wickedly funny, big-hearted novel about life in the office signals the arrival of a gloriously talented new writer. The characters in Then We Came to the End cope with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, secret romance, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. By day they compete for the best office furniture left behind and try to make sense of the mysterious pro-bono ad campaign that is their only remaining "work."
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Killing Johnny Fry
by Walter Mosley
When Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the experience dissolves his calm, everyday existence into a thirst for revenge and a sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life.
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St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
by Karen Russell
These ten extraordinary stories introduce a new talent who opens a world to readers--the surreal marshes of the Florida Everglades where outlandish predicaments magically reveal the truth about one's life.
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The Sunday List of Dreams
by Kris Radish
In an effort to shake up her life, a woman impulsively hops on a plane to New York in order to track down her estranged daughter.
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The Teahouse Fire
by Ellis Avery
This sweeping debut novel drawn from a history shrouded in secrets follows two women--one American, one Japanese--whose fates become entwined in the rapidly changing world of late-19th-century Japan.