Ashleys Must-Read Modern Fiction #2
Explore Ashley's Must-Read Modern Fiction #2 for a curated list of captivating contemporary books. Discover top modern fiction picks Ashley loves—perfect for your next read!
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The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
by Lawrence Durrell
No summary available.
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The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • A spectacular best seller and now a classic, The Name of the Rose catapulted Umberto Eco, an Italian professor of semiotics turned novelist, to international prominence. An erudite murder mystery set in a fourteenth-century monastery, it is not only a gripping story but also a brilliant exploration of medieval philosophy, history, theology, and logic. In 1327, Brother William of Baskerville is sent to investigate a wealthy Italian abbey whose monks are suspected of heresy. When his mission is overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths patterned on the book of Revelation, Brother William turns detective, following the trail of a conspiracy that brings him face-to-face with the abbey’s labyrinthine secrets, the subversive effects of laughter, and the medieval Inquisition. Caught in a power struggle between the emperor he serves and the pope who rules the Church, Brother William comes to see that what is at stake is larger than any mere political dispute–that his investigation is being blocked by those who fear imagination, curiosity, and the power of ideas. The Name of the Rose offers the reader not only an ingeniously constructed mystery—complete with secret symbols and coded manuscripts—but also an unparalleled portrait of the medieval world on the brink of profound transformation.
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The Neverending Story
by Michael Ende
Read the book that inspired the classic coming-of-age film before it's back onscreen in select theaters this September! From award-winning German author Michael Ende, The Neverending Story is a classic tale of one boy and the book that magically comes to life. When Bastian happens upon an old book called The Neverending Story, he's swept into the magical world of Fantastica--so much that he finds he has actually become a character in the story! And when he realizes that this mysteriously enchanted world is in great danger, he also discovers that he is the one chosen to save it. Can Bastian overcome the barrier between reality and his imagination in order to save Fantastica? "An instantaneous leap into the magical . . . Energetic, innovative, and perceptive"—The Washington Post "A trumpet blast for the imagination."—Sunday Times
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The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century is the story of a family of Southern aristocrats on the brink of personal and financial ruin. • The definitive corrected text, including Faulkner's Appendix One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire.... I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” —from The Sound and the Fury
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The Wars
by Timothy Findley
Robert Ross, a sensitive nineteen-year-old Canadian officer, went to war--The War to End All Wars. He found himself in the nightmare world of trench warfare, of mud and smoke, of chlorine gas and rotting corpses. In this world gone mad, Robert Ross performed a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death.
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Wildlife
by Richard Ford
The setting is Great Falls, Montana, where the Rockies end and where, in 1960, the promise of good times seems as limitless as the sweep of the prairies beyond. This is where the Brinson family hopes to find a better life. Instead, sixteen-year-old Joe Brinson watches his parents discover the limits of their marriage and, at the same time, the unexpected depths of dignity and courage that remain even when love dies.
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Penguin Classics Passage To India
by E M Forster
'His great book ... masterly in its prescience and its lucidity' ANITA DESAI A compelling portrait of a society in the grip of imperialism, A Passage to India depicts the fate of individuals caught in the great political and cultural conflicts of their age. It begins when Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, and feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced British community. Determined to explore the 'real India', they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz. But a mysterious incident occurs while they are exploring the Marabar caves, and the well-respected doctor soon finds himself at the centre of a scandal. Edited by OLIVER STALLYBRASS with an Introduction by PANKAJ MISHRA
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The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title, that may also include a folder with miscellaneous notes, discussion questions, biographical information, and reading lists to assist book group discussion leaders.
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Birdsong
by Sebastian Faulks
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A mesmerising story of love and war spanning three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the 1990s In this "overpowering and beautiful novel" (The New Yorker), the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land. Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient, crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love.
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The Blue Flower
by Penelope Fitzgerald
Romance between the poet Novalis and his fiancée Sophie, newly introduced by Candia McWilliam. The year is 1794 and Fritz, passionate, idealistic and brilliant, is seeking his fathers permission to announce his engagement to his hearts desire: twelve-year-old Sophie. His astounded family and friends are amused and disturbed by his betrothal. What can he be thinking?
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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 Buendía 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.
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Our Lady of the Flowers
by Jean Genet
Jean Genet's masterpiece, composed entirely in the solitude of his prison cell. With an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre. Jean Genet's first, and arguably greatest, novel was written while he was in prison. As Sartre recounts in his introduction, Genet penned this work on the brown paper which inmates were supposed to use to fold bags as a form of occupational therapy. The masterpiece he managed to produce under those difficult conditions is a lyrical portrait of the criminal underground of Paris and the thieves, murderers and pimps who occupied it. Genet approached this world through his protagonist, Divine, a male transvestite prostitute. In the world of Our Lady of the Flowers, moral conventions are turned on their head. Sinners are portrayed as saints and when evil is not celebrated outright, it is at least viewed with a benign indifference. Whether one finds Genet's work shocking or thrilling, the novel remains almost as revolutionary today as when it was first published in 1943 in a limited edition, thanks to the help of one its earliest admirers, Jean Cocteau.
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Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
First published 1954.; This title is also available as a film.
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July's People
by Nadine Gordimer
“So flawlessly written that every one of its events seems chillingly, ominously possible.”—Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review A startling, imaginative novel from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature A violent war for equality has come to the white suburbs, driving out the ruling minority For years, it had been what is called a “deteriorating situation.” Now all over South Africa the cities are battlegrounds. The members of the Smales family—liberal whites—are rescued from the terror by their servant, July, who leads them to refuge in his village. What happens to the Smaleses and to July—the shifts in character and relationships—gives us an unforgettable look into the terrifying, tacit understandings and misunderstandings between blacks and whites.
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The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
A dwarf drummer found guilty of a crime he did not commit writes his memoirs from a mental hospital in postwar Germany
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Hunger
by Knut Hamsun
A modern classic about a penniless, unemployed young writer, this powerful, autobiographical novel paints an unforgettable portrait of a man driven to the edge of self-destruction by forces beyond his control.
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The Blind Owl
by Ṣādiq Hidāyat
"A haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation. Replete with potent symbolism and terrifying surrealistic imagery, Sadegh Hedayat's masterpiece details a young man's despair after losing a mysterious lover ... [as he] gradually drifts into frenzy and madness."--Back cover
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The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
Story of an old fisherman's struggle against natural obstacles that hinder the catch of a huge marlin
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The Glass Bead Game
by Hermann Hesse
Setting his story in the distant, post-Holocaust future, Hesse tells of an elite cult of intellectuals occupying themselves with an elaborate game that employs all the cultural and scientific knowledge of the ages. The most imaginative and prophetic of Hesse's works.
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Lost Horizon
by James Hilton
Following a plane crash in the Himalayan mountains, a lost group of Englishmen and Americans stumble upon the dream-like, utopian world of Shangri-La, where life is eternal and civilization refined.
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A High Wind in Jamaica
by Richard Hughes
Richard Hughes's celebrated short novel is a masterpiece of concentrated narrative. Its dreamlike action begins among the decayed plantation houses and overwhelming natural abundance of late nineteenth-century Jamaica, before moving out onto the high seas, as Hughes tells the story of a group of children thrown upon the mercy of a crew of down-at-the-heel pirates. A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.
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The World According to Garp
by John Irving
Originally published in 1978 and made into a major motion picture, a new hardcover edition of the author's best-known novel is accompanied by a new introduction by him and presented to coincide with his latest book, A Widow for One Year.
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The Berlin Stories
by Christopher Isherwood
A classic of 20th-century fiction, "Berlin Stories" inspired the Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film "Cabaret." This newly released paperback edition features an Introduction by the acclaimed novelist Maupin.
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The File on H.
by Ismail Kadare
A political comedy on two American academics who are recording story-singers in Albania. The two are on a project to show that story-singers were the source of Homer's epics, but this is much too highbrow for the district governor, convinced the pair are spies. By an Albanian writer, author of The Concert.
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The Trial
by Franz Kafka
A brilliant translation of one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, revealing a tale that is as full of energy and power as it was when it was first written. From the author of The Metamorphosis. Written in 1914, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. This new edition is based upon the work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create a version that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.
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It
by Stephen King
A group of teenagers stumbles upon an evil force that will eventually draw them all back to Derry, Maine, for a final showdown. Reissue.
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover—these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
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The Leopard
by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
SOON TO BE A NETFLIX SERIES • Set in the 1860s, The Leopard tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution. "A majestic, melancholy, and beautiful novel."—The New Yorker The dramatic sweep and richness of observation, the seamless intertwining of public and private worlds, and the grasp of human frailty imbue The Leopard with its particular melancholy beauty and power, and place it among the greatest historical novels of our time. Although Giuseppe di Lampedusa had long had the book in mind, he began writing it only in his late fifties; he died at age sixty, soon after the manuscript was rejected as unpublishable. In his introduction, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, Lampedusa's nephew, gives us a detailed history of the initial publication and the various editions that followed. And he includes passages Lampedusa wrote for the book that were omitted by the original Italian editors. Here, finally, is the definitive edition of this brilliant and timeless novel. (Translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun.)
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The Diviners
by Margaret Laurence
The life of a woman novelist living in a small town in Canada.
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Women in Love
by D. H. Lawrence
Women in Love is widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence's greatest novel. The novel continues where The Rainbow left off with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships, Ursula's with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, though he gives that up, and Gudrun's with Gerald Crich, an industrialist, and later with a sculptor, Loerke.
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The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.
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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.
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Changing Places
by David Lodge
Euphoric State University with its whitestone, sun-drenched campus and England's damp red-brick University of Rummidge have an annual professorial exchange scheme, and as the first day of the last year of the tumultuous sixties dawns, Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp are the designated exchangees. They know they'll be swapping class rosters, but what they don't know is that in a wildly spiraling transatlantic involvement they'll soon be swapping students, colleagues, and even wives. Changing Places is a hilarious send-up of academic life, intellectual fashion, sex, and marriage by a writer Anthony Burgess has called "one of the best novelists of his generation."
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The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
by Machado de Assis
"Famous in his lifetime and still revered throughout Latin America, Machado de Assis has remained little known in the English-speaking world. By turns flippant and profound, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is the story of an unheroic man with half-hearted political ambitions, a harebrained idea for curing the world of melancholy, and a thousand quixotic theories unleashed from beyond the grave. It is a novel that has influenced generations of Latin American writers but remains refreshingly and unforgettably unlike anything written before or after it."--BOOK JACKET.
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The Cairo Trilogy
by Najīb Maḥfūẓ
A series of historical fiction based on the life of a family living in Cairo during the British Colonial period and afterward.