Novels which romp thru AcademiaHistoryDystopiasDetecting& Disorders
Explore a curated list of novels romping through academia, history, dystopias, and detecting disorders. Discover gripping books blending intellect, intrigue, and imagination in one compelling collection.


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Spies
by Michael Frayn
When a long-forgotten scent forces Stephen Wheatley to confront his past, he starts to remember a troubling childhood summer in wartime London where an imaginative child's game of playing spies wreaked havoc upon innocent lives.

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Mara and Dann
by Doris Lessing
Thousands of years in the future, all the northern hemisphere is buried under the ice and snow of a new Ice Age. At the southern end of a large landmass called Ifrik, two children of the Mahondi people, seven-year old Mara and her younger brother, Dann, are abducted from their home in the middle of the night. Raised as outsiders in a poor rural village, Mara and Dann learn to survive the hardships and dangers of a life threatened as much by an unforgiving climate and menacing animals as by a hostile community of Rock People. Eventually they join the great human migration North, away from the drought that is turning the southern land to dust, and in search of a place with enough water and food to support human life. Traveling across the continent, the siblings enter cities rife with crime, power struggles, and corruption, learning as much about human nature as about how societies function. With a clear-eyed vision of the human condition, Mara and Dann is imaginative fiction at its best.

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Possession
by A. S. Byatt
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A tale of two young scholars researching the secret love affair of two Victorian poets that's an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. “Gorgeously written … A tour de force.” —The New York Times Book Review Winner of England’s Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets. As they unearth their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.

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The Quincunx
by Charles Palliser
An extraordinary modern novel in the Victorian tradition, Charles Palliser has created something extraordinary—a plot within a plot within a plot of family secrets, mysterious clues, low-born birth, high-reaching immorality, and, always, always the fog-enshrouded, enigmatic character of 19th century—London itself. “So compulsively absorbing that reality disappears . . . One is swept along by those enduring emotions that defy modern art and a random universe: hunger for revenge, longing for justice and the fantasy secretly entertained by most people that the bad will be punished and the good rewarded.”—The New York Times “A virtuoso achievement . . . It is an epic, a tour de force, a staggeringly complex and tantalizingly layered tale that will keep readers engrossed in days. . . . The Quincunx will not disappoint you. It is, quite simply, superb.”—Chicago Sun-Times “A bold and vivid tale that invites the reader to get lost in the intoxicating rhythms of another world. And the invitation is irresistible.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A remarkable book . . . In mood, color, atmosphere and characters, this is Charles Dickens reincarnated . . . It is an immersing experience.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “To read the first pages is to be trapped for seven-hundred odd more: you cannot stop turning them.”—The New Yorker “Few books, at most a dozen or two in a lifetime, affect us this way. . . . For sheer intricacy and ingenuity, for skill and clarity of storytelling, it is the kind of book readers wait for, a book to get lost in.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

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The Cornish Trilogy
by Robertson Davies
Woven around the pursuits of the energetic spirits and erudite scholars of the University of St. John and the Holy Ghost, this dazzling trilogy of novels lures the reader into a world of mysticism, historical allusion, and gothic fantasy that could only be the invention of Canada's grand man of letters.

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The Sunne in Splendour
by Sharon Kay Penman
A historical novel that re-creates the life of Richard III in fifteenth-century England, presenting the monarch as a gifted man and romantic hero who was betrayed in life and in death.

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When Christ and His Saints Slept
by Sharon Kay Penman
The acclaimed author of The Sunne in Splendor and Falls the Shadow now begins a new trilogy, set in medieval England, during a time of royal turmoil and intrigue, and following the lives and passions of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. 2 maps; genealogy. Gilded top stain cover; ribbon marker.

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The Transit of Venus
by Shirley Hazzard
"The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century." - The Paris Review Finalist for the National Book Award Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard's most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women--seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal--becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard's novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the eighties; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life.

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Gospel
by Wilton Barnhardt
The search is on for a lost first-century gospel of the Bible, a document that could shake the foundations of Christianity. The narrative races through dozens of locales as a theologian and an ex-priest pursue rumors and clues about the gospel. In the end, what they discover will challenge and forever change the nature of faith.

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Warchild
by Karin Lowachee
When Jos' parents are killed in an attack on their trading ship, the boy is kidnapped by the attackers and then escapes - only to fall into the alien hands of humanity's greatest enemies. He is soon coerced into becoming a spy against the human race.

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The Family Trade
by Charles Stross
Boston reporter Miriam Beckstein receives a locket left by the mother she never knew, which transports her to a parallel Earth--a world where her true family runs things.
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