So you want to be well-read?
Discover essential books to become well-read with our curated list of must-read titles. Expand your literary knowledge and join the ranks of the well-read today!
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The Mystic Masseur
by V. S. Naipaul
The Nobel Prize winner's first novel traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic and the most beloved politician in 1940s Trinidad.
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Devil in a Blue Dress
by Walter Mosley
Devil in a Blue Dress, a defining novel in Walter Mosleyâs bestselling Easy Rawlins mystery series, was adapted into a TriStar Pictures film starring Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins and Don Cheadle as Mouse. Set in the late 1940s, in the African-American community of Watts, Los Angeles, Devil in a Blue Dress follows Easy Rawlins, a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Monet, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.
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Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
An orphan girl who accepts employment as a governess finds herself involved in a family secret and in love with her employer.
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Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
"A considerable tour de force by any standard." ?New York Times Book Review"
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Gorky Park
by Martin Cruz Smith
"Brilliant...One of the best books of the season." ASSOCIATED PRESS A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible--and tries to stay alive doing it.
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Blindness
by José Saramago
A stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. "This is a shattering work by a literary master."--The Boston Globe A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers--among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears--through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses--and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit.
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Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquez
Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years, on the day of her husband's funeral. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.
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White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
NATIONAL BESTSELLER âą The blockbuster debut novel from "a preternaturally gifted" writer (The New York Times) and author of On Beauty and Swing Timeâset against London's racial and cultural tapestry, reveling in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. Zadie Smithâs dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smithâs voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of Englandâs irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesnât quite match her name (Jamaican for âno problemâ). Samadâs late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbalâs every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. â[White Teeth] is, like the London it portrays, a restless hybrid of voices, tones, and texturesâŠwith a raucous energy and confidence.â âThe New York Times Book Review
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Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Three generations of a Greek American family find themselves plagued by a mutant gene which causes bizarre side effects in the family's teenage girls.
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Dreaming in Cuban
by Cristina GarcĂa
âImpressive . . . [Cristina GarcĂaâs] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the âsustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,â as rhythmic as the music of Beny MorĂ©.ââTime Cristina GarcĂaâs acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a countryâs revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is âa work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquezâ (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novelâs original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban âRemarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.ââSan Francisco Chronicle âCaptures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.ââThe Washington Post âBrilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, GarcĂa just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.ââThe Denver Post
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The Information
by Martin Amis
Fame, envy, lust, violence, intrigues literary and criminalâthey're all here in The Information, as one of the most gifted and innovative novelists of our time explores the question, How does one writer hurt another writer? "Satirical and tender, funny and disturbing...wonderful." âThe New York Times "A portrait of middle-age realignment with more verbal felicity and unbridled reach than [anything] since Tom Wolfe forged Bonfire of the Vanities." âHouston Chronicle Richard Tull, a frustrated, failed novelist, stews with envy and humiliation at the success of his oldest friend, Gwyn Barry, who is a darling of book buyers, award committees, and TV interviewers. He's a terrible writer, but that doesn't comfort Tull as he sinks deeper into the sub-basement of literary obscurity. The only way out of this predicament, Tull believes, is to plot the demise of Barryâto gather the information that will lead to his downfall. Meanwhile, both men are being watched by a psychopathic ex-con and a young thug, who have staked out their homes, watching their wives and Richard's small twin boys, waiting until the time is right... Amis is at his savage best in what has been hailed as one of his greatest books, full of wicked humor and exquisitely turned, cutthroat sentences, "never out of reach of a sparkly phrase, stiletto metaphor or drop-dead insight into the human condition," as the critic Christopher Buckley put it. This is a mesmerizing and entertaining novel of midlife crisis and male friendship, of our brutal culture of fame and fortune and too much information. "The Information contains some of the most pleasantly wicked passages Amis ever written." (San Franciso Chronicle)
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The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
"Powerful...Enthrallling...A ferociously well-paced entertainment." THE NEW YORK TIMES Richard Papen arrived at Hampden College in New England and was quickly seduced by an elite group of five students, all Greek scholars, all worldly, self-assured, and, at first glance, all highly unapproachable. As Richard is drawn into their inner circle, he learns a terrifying secret that binds them to one another...a secret about an incident in the woods in the dead of night where an ancient rite was brought to brutal life...and led to a gruesome death. And that was just the beginning.... "A smart, craftsman-like, viscerally compelling novel." TIME Selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
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