My desert island books part 22
Discover the ultimate desert island books list in Part 22, featuring timeless classics like H.P. Lovecraft's Tales, Vanity Fair, and Brian Aldiss's epic Helliconia trilogy. Curated must-reads for book lovers.
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Independent People
by Halldor Laxness
From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author: a magnificent novel that recalls Iceland's medieval epics and classics, set in the early twentieth century starring an ordinary sheep farmer and his heroic determination to achieve independence. • "A strange story, vibrant and alive…. There is a rare beauty in its telling." —Atlantic Monthly If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to free himself is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.
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H.P. Lovecraft Tales
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
"This volume brings together 22 tales, the very best of [Lovecraft's] fiction"--Jacket.
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Helliconia Spring
by Brian Wilson Aldiss
In the first volume of this monumental trilogy, Brain Aldiss introduces readers to Helliconia, the chief planet in a binary system. Emerging from a centuries-long winter, the Helliconians ready themselves to fight the ferocious phagors who have taken over in their absence.
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Helliconia Summer
by Brian Wilson Aldiss
The second volume of the Helliconia Trilogy. It is the summer of the Great Year on Helliconia. The humans are involved with their own affairs. Their old enemies, the phagors, are comparatively docile at this time of year, yet they can afford to wait, to take advantage of human weakness--and of the king's weakness.
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Helliconia Winter
by Brian Wilson Aldiss
A planet orbiting binary suns, Helliconia has a Great Year spanning three millennia of Earth time: cultures are born in spring, flourish in summer, then die with the onset of the generations-long winter. The centuries-long winter of the Great Year on Helliconia is upon us, and the Oligarch is taking harsh measures to ensure the survival of the people of the bleak Northerncontinent of Sibornal. Behind the battle with which the novel opens lies an act of unparalleled treachery. But the plague is coming on the wings of winter and the Oligarch's will is set against it-and against the phagors, humanity's ancientenemies, who carry the plague with them. This is the concluding volume of the Helliconia Trilogy-a monumental saga that goes beyond anything yet created by this master among today's imaginative writers.
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray's classic tale of class, society, and corruption, soon to be an Amazon mini-series starring Olivia Cooke No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles—military and domestic—are fought, fortunes made and lost. The one steadfast and honourable figure in this corrupt world is Dobbin with his devotion to Amelia, bringing pathos and depth to Thackeray's gloriously satirical epic of love and social adventure.
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Dangerous Visions
by Harlan Ellison
The legendary collection that changed the literature of science fiction for all time features a new Introduction and annotations by Harlan Ellison and a Foreword by his friend and mentor, the late Isaac Asimov.
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Collected Novellas
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Renowned as a master of magical realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has long delighted readers around the world with his exquisitely crafted prose. Brimming with unforgettable characters and set in exotic locales, his fiction transports readers to a world that is at once fanciful, haunting, and real. Leaf Storm, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first novella, introduces the mythical village of Macondo, a desolate town beset by torrents of rain, where a man must fulfill a promise made years earlier. No One Writes to the Colonel is a novella of life in a decaying tropical town in Colombia with an unforgettable central character. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a dark and profound story of three people joined together in a fatal act of violence.
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City of Night
by John Rechy
"Bold and inventive in style, the author is unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling "youngman" and his search for self-knowledge within the neon-lit world of hustlers, drag queens, and the denizens of their world, as he moves from El Paso to Times Square, from Pershing Square to the French Quarter." --