never judge a cover by its book

Explore a fascinating list of books that prove you should never judge a book by its cover. Discover hidden gems and surprising reads beyond their exteriors.

Item Not Found
ID: 080060430X
(Type: books)
G. Cover
Book

G.

by John Berger

In this luminous novel -- winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize -- John Berger relates the story of "G.," a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of this century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the Don Juan's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their moments with him. All of this Berger sets against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War, and the first flight across the Alps, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history's private moments.
Item Not Found
ID: 0747545219
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0747553815
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: B0006DF8TO
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0195197542
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0679733485
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0415937132
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0375402098
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0575401540
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 1564781887
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0684839342
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0872863689
(Type: books)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Cover
Book

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

 

No summary available.
Perfume Cover
Book

Perfume

by Patrick Suskind

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in eighteenth-century France, the classic novel that provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man’s indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille’s genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the “ultimate perfume”—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity. Translated from the German by John E. Woods.
The Periodic Table Cover
Book

The Periodic Table

by Primo Levi

The Periodic Table is largely a memoir of the years before and after Primo Levi’s transportation from his native Italy to Auschwitz as an anti-Facist partisan and a Jew. It recounts, in clear, precise, unfailingly beautiful prose, the story of the Piedmontese Jewish community from which Levi came, of his years as a student and young chemist at the inception of the Second World War, and of his investigations into the nature of the material world. As such, it provides crucial links and backgrounds, both personal and intellectual, in the tremendous project of remembrance that is Levi’s gift to posterity. But far from being a prologue to his experience of the Holocaust, Levi’s masterpiece represents his most impassioned response to the events that engulfed him. The Periodic Table celebrates the pleasures of love and friendship and the search for meaning, and stands as a monument to those things in us that are capable of resisting and enduring in the face of tyranny.
The French Lieutenant's Woman Cover
Book

The French Lieutenant's Woman

by John Fowles

The scene is the village of Lyme Regis on Dorset's Lyme Bay ... "the largest bite from the underside of England's out-stretched southwestern leg." The major characters in the love-intrigue triangle are Charles Smithson, 32, a gentleman of independent means and vaguely scientific bent; his fiancée, Ernestina Freeman, a pretty heiress daughter of a wealthy and pompous dry goods merchant; and Sarah Woodruff, mysterious and fascinating ... deserted after a brief affair with a French naval officer a short time before the story begins. Obsessed with an irresistible fascination for the enigmatic Sarah, Charles is hurtled by a moment of consummated lust to the brink of the existential void. Duty dictates that his engagement to Tina must be broken as he goes forth once again to seek the woman who has captured his Victorian soul and gentleman's heart.
The Da Vinci Code Cover
Book

The Da Vinci Code

by Dan Brown

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and French cryptologist Sophie Neveu work to solve the murder of an elderly curator of the Louvre, a case which leads to clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci and a centuries-old secret society.
Item Not Found
ID: 0679752471
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0140447946
(Type: books)
History of Beauty Cover
Book

History of Beauty

by Umberto Eco

Explores the nature, the meaning, and the very history of the idea of beauty in Western culture; illustrated with abundant examples of painting and sculpture and lengthy quotations from writers and philosophers. Demonstrates how every historical era has had its own ideas about eye-appeal.
Item Not Found
ID: 0964561182
(Type: books)
The Colossus of Maroussi Cover
Book

The Colossus of Maroussi

by Henry Miller

The author's quest for spiritual renewal is illuminated in descriptions of his impressions of Greece and its people.
Item Not Found
ID: 055338032X
(Type: books)
The Little Prince Cover
Book

The Little Prince

 

A man has an accident in the Sahara Desert, and encounters the Little Prince.