Amys Honorable Mentions V
Discover Amy's Honorable Mentions V—a curated fiction list featuring standout reads like Sophie Kinsella's Can You Keep a Secret?, Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, plus gripping thrillers and literary classics.
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The First Deadly Sin
by Lawrence Sanders
Captain Delaney is out to stop a well-dressed man from depopulating Manhattan's priciest neighborhoods with an ice pick.
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The Wasp Factory
by Iain Banks
Powerful, perverse, and engrossing, this controversial novel offers a graphic portrait of a serial killer told in the first-person. "Read it if you dare!"--"The Daily Express".
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Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
"Great Expectations" is at once a superbly constructed novel of spellbinding mastery and a profound examination of moral values. Here, some of Dickens's most memorable characters come to play their part in a story whose title itself reflects the deep irony that shaped Dickens's searching reappraisal of the Victorian middle class.
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Nineteen Eighty-four
by George Orwell
Portrays life in a future time when a totalitarian government watches over all citizens and directs all activities
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Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck
A controversial tale of friendship and tragedy during the Great Depression They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him. "A thriller, a gripping tale . . . that you will not set down until it is finished. Steinbeck has touched the quick." —The New York Times
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Primal Fear
by William Diehl
A Chicago archbishop is savagely murdered, a knife-wielding young man swears that he is innocent, and a brilliant renegade defense lawyer battles to uncover the truth behind the murder.
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The Red Room
by Nicci French
At the request of London police, psychologist Kit Quinn agrees to evaluate Michael Doll, a sexual predator who slashes her face. As she recovers, Kit has horrible dreams of a red room. Months later, Doll is arrested for murder. As Doll's obsession with Kit escalates, Kit is gripped with a paralyzing fear that the killer isn't Doll--but someone close to her heart.
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The Passion of Artemisia
by Susan Vreeland
A novel set against the backdrops of Rome, Florence, and Genoa recreates the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, whose search for love, forgiveness, and wholeness through her art led to her fame as a painter.
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Darkness Bound
by Larry Brooks
In this thriller of erotic obsession and sexual betrayal, two strangers meet: a woman without inhibitions and a man without limits. These two consenting adults enter into a private game in which they indulge every secret fantasy. But one of them has a secret yet to be shared. Now the real games are about to begin.
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Prozac Nation
by Elizabeth Wurtzel
A memoir that gives voice to the high incidence of depression-- especially among America's youth ; it is also a collective cry for help, a generational status report on today's young people, come of age in a culture of divorce, economic instability, and AIDS.
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Can You Keep a Secret?
by Sophie Kinsella
After the worst day of her life, Emma Corrigan spills her darkest secrets to a stranger on an airplane, but when he re-emerges in her life, she will have to face the things she said to him, and her growing feelings for him.
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Loves Music, Loves to Dance
by Mary Higgins Clark
A killer draws his victims from the women who respond to his personal ads in trendy New York magazines.
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Blue Diary
by Alice Hoffman
Alice Hoffman, the bestselling author of The Rules of Magic, asks how we can find the courage to face the unthinkable in this compelling New York Times Notable Book. When Ethan Ford fails to show up for work on a brilliant summer morning, none of his neighbors would guess that for more than thirteen years, he has been running from his past. His true nature has been locked away, as hidden as his real identity. But sometimes locks spring open, and the devastating truths of Ethan Ford's history shatter the small-town peace of Monroe, affecting family and friends alike. Now, the police are at the door. Ethan Ford's life as an irreproachable family man and heroic volunteer fireman has come to an end—and Jorie Ford's life is coming apart. Some of the residents of Monroe are rallying behind Ethan. But others, including his wife and son, and wondering what remains true when so much is shown to be false—and how capable we really are of change.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in 1890. Wilde was attacked for his decadence and corrupting influence, and a few years later the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, trials that resulted in his imprisonment. Of the book's value as autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be--in other ages, perhaps." "From the Trade Paperback edition.