Great Worldwide 20th Century N
Explore the greatest 20th-century books from around the world! Discover timeless classics and influential works that shaped literature across continents and cultures.
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The Makioka Sisters
by Junichiro Tanizaki
Four daughters of an old merchant family unknowingly face the end of a gentler way of life in Osaka, Japan in 1938.
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Independent People
by Halldor Laxness
From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author: a magnificent novel that recalls Iceland's medieval epics and classics, set in the early twentieth century starring an ordinary sheep farmer and his heroic determination to achieve independence. • "A strange story, vibrant and alive…. There is a rare beauty in its telling." —Atlantic Monthly If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to free himself is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.
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The Diary of a Country Priest
by Georges Bernanos
A young priest in a rural French parish struggles with the indifference and hostility of the people, and his own self-doubts. He dies of cancer, but at peace.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez
The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the BuendÃa family.