PROVOCATIVE OR CHALLENGING FICTION!
Explore a curated list of provocative and challenging fiction books that push boundaries and ignite thought. Discover bold narratives and daring authors in this compelling collection.
Book
The Eight
by Katherine Neville
Computer expert Cat Velis is heading for a job to Algeria. Before she goes, a mysterious fortune teller warns her of danger, and an antique dealer asks her to search for pieces to a valuable chess set that has been missing for years...In the South of France in 1790 two convent girls hide valuable pieces of a chess set all over the world, because the game that can be played with them is too powerful....
Book
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the BuendĂa family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
Book
Angels & Demons
by Dan Brown
The explosive Robert Langdon thriller from Dan Brown, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code and Inferno—now a major film directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones. Angels & Demons careens from enlightening epiphanies to dark truths as the battle between science and religion turns to war. This is the book that started it all: we meet Robert Langdon for the first time, caught up in a race against time to find an apocalyptic time-bomb, planted by an ancient secret society that has surfaced to carry out its ultimate threat: to destroy the Vatican.
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.
Book
Clive Barker's Books of Blood 1-3
by Clive Barker
Rediscover the true meaning of fear in this collection of horror stories from New York Times bestselling author Clive Barker. “The most provocative tales of terror ever published.”—The Washington Post Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red... With the publication of Books of Blood, Clive Barker became an overnight literary sensation. His tour de force collection of brilliantly disturbing tales demonstrated a genius for dark invention that rivaled Poe and Sade. He was hailed by Stephen King as “the future of horror,” and won both the British and World Fantasy Awards. Now, with his numerous bestsellers, graphic novels, and hit movies like the Hellraiser films, Clive Barker has become an industry unto himself. It is his powerful writing style and arresting imagery that have made Books of Blood a classic—and Clive Barker a cult phenomenon.
Book
The Stand
by Stephen King
Horrific disaster as a plague virus sweeps the U.S., leaving only a handful of survivors.
Book
Falling Angel
by William Hjortsberg
A spellbinding novel of murder, mystery, and the occult, "Falling Angel" pits a private eye against the most fearsome adversary a detective ever faced. A routine missing-persons case soon turns into a nightmare of voodoo and black magic. Each book is signed by William Hjortsberg.
Book
Fight Club: A Novel
by Chuck Palahniuk
"Fight Club's estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basement of bars."--P. [3] of cover.
Book
The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand
The revolutionary literary vision that sowed the seeds of Objectivism, Ayn Rand's groundbreaking philosophy, and brought her immediate worldwide acclaim. This modern classic is the story of intransigent young architect Howard Roark, whose integrity was as unyielding as granite...of Dominique Francon, the exquisitely beautiful woman who loved Roark passionately, but married his worst enemy...and of the fanatic denunciation unleashed by an enraged society against a great creator. As fresh today as it was then, Rand’s provocative novel presents one of the most challenging ideas in all of fiction—that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress... “A writer of great power. She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly...This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.”—The New York Times
Book
Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
Peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, charged with towering questions of good and evil, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s magnum opus: a philosophical revolution told in the form of an action thriller—nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. Who is John Galt? When he says that he will stop the motor of the world, is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battles not against his enemies but against those who need him most? Why does he fight his hardest battle against the woman he loves? You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the amazing men and women in this book. You will discover why a productive genius becomes a worthless playboy...why a great steel industrialist is working for his own destruction...why a composer gives up his career on the night of his triumph...why a beautiful woman who runs a transcontinental railroad falls in love with the man she has sworn to kill. Atlas Shrugged, a modern classic and Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism—her groundbreaking philosophy—offers the reader the spectacle of human greatness, depicted with all the poetry and power of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists.
Book
The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
Discovering a medieval book and a cache of letters, a motherless American girl becomes the latest in a series of historians, including her late father, who investigates the possible surviving legacy of Vlad the Impaler, a quest that takes her across Europe and into the pasts of her father and his mentor. A first novel. Reprint. 500,000 first printing.
Book
Narn i Chîn Húrin
by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
A fantasy adventure saga set in the early days of Middle-Earth features humans and elves, dwarves and dragons, orcs and dark sorcerers clashing in an epic battle between good and evil.
Book
A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, the #1 New York Times bestseller A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love. “Just as good, if not better, than Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling first book, The Kite Runner.”—Newsweek Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival. A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.
Book
The Overlook
by Michael Connelly
Near Mulholland Drive, Dr. Stanley Kent is found shot twice in the back of the head. It's the case LAPD detective Harry Bosch has been waiting for, his first since being recruited to the Homicide Special Squad. When he discovers that Kent had access to dangerous radioactive substances, what begins as a routine investigation becomes something darker, more deadly, and frighteningly urgent. Bosch is soon in conflict with not only his superiors but the FBI, which thinks the case is too important for just a cop. Complicating his job even more is the presence of Agent Rachel Walling, his onetime lover. Now guarding one slim advantage, Bosch relentlessly follows his own instincts, hoping they are still sharp enough to find the truth--and a killer who can annihilate an entire city.
Book
Heart of Texas : Volume 1
by Debbie Macomber
Collects the novels in the "Heart of Texas" series, which are based in Promise, Texas, and star regular people with extraordinary love lives.
Book
Invisible Prey
by John Sandford
Lucas Davenport returns in one of the most startling Prey novels yet from the number-one-bestselling author.
Book
The Quest
by Wilbur Smith
When ancient Egypt is threatened by a series of terrifying plagues, including the failure of the Nile River, the pharaoh sends the warlock Taita on a perilous quest to the source of the Nile to uncover the cause of the catastrophe.
Book
Requiem for an Assassin
by Barry Eisler
Blackmailed by a rogue CIA operative to carry out three assassinations or see his best friend murdered, reluctant killer-for-hire John Rain struggles with numerous moral dilemmas as well as his growing certainty that the operative is hiding a more sinister agenda. 125,000 first printing.
Book
The Woods
by Harlan Coben
Grieving over the murder of his sister twenty years earlier and raising his six-year-old daughter alone after losing his wife to cancer, county prosecutor Paul Copeland is inadvertently tied to a murder investigation that he believes may be related to his sister's case, a discovery that threatens to reveal long-buried family secrets. 400,000 first printing.