Great reads for people who like stories not gimmicks
Discover a curated list of great reads for those who love authentic stories over gimmicks. Find your next favorite book that prioritizes storytelling and substance.
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The cunning man
by Robertson Davies
"A delight, a novel that travels 70 years of history on its own swift feet, a book of love and wisdom, loss and irony"--The Boston Sunday Globe When Father Hobbes mysteriously dies at the high alter on Good Friday, Dr. Jonathan Hullah - whose holistic work has earned him the label "Cunning Man" (for the wizard of folk tradition) - wants to know why. The physician-cum-diagnostician's search for answers compels him to look back over his own long life. He conjures vivid memories of the dazzling, intellectual high jinks and compassionate philosophies of himself and his circle, including flamboyant, mystical curate Charlie Ireda≤ cynical, quixotic professor Brocky Gilmartin; outrageous banker Darcy Dwyer; and jocular, muscular artist Pansy Todhunter. In compelling and hilarious scenes from the divine comedy of life, The Cunning Man reveals profound truth about being human. The crowning achievement of "one of the most learned, amusing... accomplished novelists of our time and... of our century." - The New York Times Book Review
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ID: 0140430091
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Mama Day
by Gloria Naylor
A powerful generational saga at once tender and suspenseful, overflowing with magic and common sense, this book "resonates with genuine excitement … a big, strong, admirable novel” (New York Times Book Review). On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces.
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The Nine Tailors
by Dorothy Leigh Sayers
Bell strokes toll out the death of an unknown man, and summon Lord Wimsey to East Anglia to solve the mystery.
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Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detatchment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces. Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails grandaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi sumarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn. A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, CRYPTONOMICON is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring; the product of a truly icon
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The Flanders Panel
by Arturo PĂ©rez-Reverte
A fifteenth-century painting by a Flemish master is about to be auctioned off. Hired to clean the painting, a young art expert in Madrid discovers in an X-ray an inscription hidden in the corner, setting off a sophisticated whodunit around the European art world.
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The Day of the Jackal
by Frederick Forsyth
The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man. One man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose mission is so secretive not even his employers know his name. And as the minutes count down to the final act of execution, it seems that there is no power on earth that can stop the Jackal.
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ID: 067975928X
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The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
by John Steinbeck
Attempts to recreate for the modern reader a rhythm and tone that matches Malory's in these six tales from Morte d'Arthur
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ID: 0802150888
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The Physician
by Noah Gordon
"Populated by engaging characters, rich in incicdent, and vivid in historical detail." THE NEW YORKTIMES BOOK REVIEW In the eleventh-century London, Rob Cole left poor, disease-ridden London to make his way across the land, hustling, juggling, peddling cures to the sick--and discovering the mystical ways of healing. It was on his travels that he found his own very real gift for healing--a gift that urged him on to become a doctor. So all consuming was his dream, that he made the perilous, unheard-of journey to Persia, to its Arab universities where he would undertake a transformation that would shape his destiny forever....
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ID: 0205308090
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ID: 0460872885
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