GEMS: Books you must own!

Discover must-own book gems! Explore our curated list of timeless reads, hidden treasures, and essential titles for every book lover's collection.

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ID: 0435905406
(Type: books)
Waiting for the Barbarians Cover
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Waiting for the Barbarians

by J. M. Coetzee

Allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed.
The Book of Daniel Cover
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The Book of Daniel

by E. L. Doctorow

Doctorow's stunning novel about the children of famous "spies" now repackagedwas first published in mass market paper by Bantam.
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ID: 0395977894
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coming plague Cover
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coming plague

 

No summary available.
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ID: 0786865229
(Type: books)
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ID: 0140092331
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Hopscotch Cover
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Hopscotch

by Julio Cortazar

"Cortazar's masterpiece ... The first great novel of Spanish America" (The Times Literary Supplement) • Winner of the National Book Award for Translation in 1967, translated by Gregory Rabassa Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.
Madame Bovary Cover
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Madame Bovary

 

No summary available.
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ID: 0670894788
(Type: books)
Stalingrad Cover
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Stalingrad

by Antony Beevor

The Battle of Stalingrad was not only the psychological turning point of World War II: it also changed the face of modern warfare. From Antony Beevor, the internationally bestselling author of D-Day and The Battle of Arnhem. In August 1942, Hitler's huge Sixth Army reached the city that bore Stalin's name. In the five-month siege that followed, the Russians fought to hold Stalingrad at any cost; then, in an astonishing reversal, encircled and trapped their Nazi enemy. This battle for the ruins of a city cost more than a million lives. Stalingrad conveys the experience of soldiers on both sides, fighting in inhuman conditions, and of civilians trapped on an urban battlefield. Antony Beevor has itnerviewed survivors and discovered completely new material in a wide range of German and Soviet archives, including prisoner interrogations and reports of desertions and executions. As a story of cruelty, courage, and human suffering, Stalingrad is unprecedented and unforgettable. Historians and reviewers worldwide have hailed Antony Beevor's magisterial Stalingrad as the definitive account of World War II's most harrowing battle.
The First World War Cover
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The First World War

by John Keegan

The definitive account of the Great War and national bestseller from one of our most eminent military historians, John Keegan. The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. The First World War probes the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict and takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. Keegan reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent. But the heart of Keegan's superb narrative is, of course, his analysis of the military conflict. With unequalled authority and insight, he recreates the nightmarish engagements whose names have become legend--Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli among them--and sheds new light on the strategies and tactics employed, particularly the contributions of geography and technology. No less central to Keegan's account is the human aspect. He acquaints us with the thoughts of the intriguing personalities who oversaw the tragically unnecessary catastrophe--from heads of state like Russia's hapless tsar, Nicholas II, to renowned warmakers such as Haig, Hindenburg and Joffre. But Keegan reserves his most affecting personal sympathy for those whose individual efforts history has not recorded--"the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable." By the end of the war, three great empires--the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman--had collapsed. But as Keegan shows, the devastation ex-tended over the entirety of Europe, and still profoundly informs the politics and culture of the continent today. His brilliant, panoramic account of this vast and terrible conflict is destined to take its place among the classics of world history.
Silence Cover
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Silence

by Shūsaku Endō

Translation, from the Japanese, of Chinmoku.
One Hundred Years of Solitude Cover
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One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel García Márquez

The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family.
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ID: 6305041156
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ID: B000000HP1
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War and Peace Cover
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War and Peace

by graf Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men.
The Black book of communism Cover
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The Black book of communism

 

No summary available.
The Brothers Karamazov Cover
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The Brothers Karamazov

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevskys masterpiece introduces a world filled with greed, passion, depravity, and complex moral issues, as three brothers become involved in the brutal murder of their own father. This edition features an Afterword by bestselling author Sara Peretsky. Revised reissue.
A Wizard of Earthsea Cover
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A Wizard of Earthsea

by Ursula K. Le Guin

A boy grows to manhood while attempting to subdue the evil he unleashed on the world as an apprentice to a Master Wizard.
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ID: 0316082597
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The Ax Cover
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The Ax

 

No summary available.
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ID: 0394722558
(Type: books)
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ID: 0393966461
(Type: books)
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ID: 0140107649
(Type: books)