Intelligent Thrilling & Original Books

Discover intelligent, thrilling, and original books that captivate your mind. Explore a curated list of thought-provoking reads designed to intrigue and excite.

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Cloud Atlas Cover
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Cloud Atlas

by David Stephen Mitchell

Recounts the connected stories of people from the past and the distant future, from a nineteenth-century notary and an investigative journalist in the 1970s to a young man who searches for meaning in a post-apocalyptic world.
The Descent Cover
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The Descent

by Jeff Long

We are not alone…In a cave in the Himalayas, a guide discovers a self-mutilated body with the warning--Satan exists. In the Kalahari Desert, a nun unearths evidence of a proto-human species and a deity called Older-than-Old. In Bosnia, something has been feeding upon the dead in a mass grave. So begins mankind’s most shocking realization: that the underworld is a vast geological labyrinth populated by another race of beings. Some call them devils or demons. But they are real. They are down there. And they are waiting for us to find them…
House of Leaves Cover
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House of Leaves

 

No summary available.
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We Cover
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We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

“[Zamyatin’s] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism— human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself—makes [We] superior to Huxley’s [Brave New World].”—George Orwell Translated by Natasha Randall • Foreword by Bruce Sterling Written in 1921, We is set in the One State, where all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist. The novel takes the form of the diary of mathematician D-503, who, to his shock, experiences the most disruptive emotion imaginable: love. At once satirical and sobering—and now available in a powerful new translation—We is both a rediscovered classic and a work of tremendous relevance to our own times.
People of the Book Cover
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People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

The bestselling novel that follows a rare manuscript through centuries of exile and war, from the author of The Secret Chord and of March, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author. Called “a tour de force” by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock its deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultranationalist fanatics.
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Book Cover
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[No Title]

 

No summary available.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Cover
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being.” A major achievement from one of the world’s truly great writers, Milan Kundera’s magnificent novel of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.
Hunger Cover
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Hunger

by Knut Hamsun

From the Back Cover: A true classic of modern literature-and a forerunner of the psychologically driven fiction of Kafka, Camus, and Saramago. Hunger is the story of a Norwegian artist who wanders the streets of Christiana (now Oslo), struggling on the edge of starvation while trying to sell his articles to the local newspaper. As the hunger overtakes his body and his mind, the writer slides inexorably into paranoia and despair. The descent into madness is recounted by the unnamed narrator in increasingly urgent and disjointed prose as he loses his grip on his body and on reality itself. At the end-for reasons that remain unclear-he suddenly decides to sign on as a crewman aboard a ship and leave the city behind, saving himself from his otherwise certain death. Arising from Hamsun's belief that literature ought to be about the mysterious workings of the human mind-an attempt, as he wrote, to describe "the whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow"--Hunger is a landmark work that pointed the way toward a new kind of novel.