Super Settings
Explore 'Super Settings'—a curated list of books with extraordinary settings. Discover immersive worlds and captivating backdrops in top literary works.
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Caravans
by James Albert Michener
In this romantic adventure of wild Afghanistan, master storyteller James Michener mixes the allure of the past with the dangers of today. After an impetuous American girl, Ellen Jasper, marries a young Afghan engineer, her parents hear no word from her. Although she wants freedom to do as she wishes, not even she is sure what that means. In the meantime, she is as good as lost in that wild land, perhaps forever.... "An extraordinary novel....Brilliant." THE NEW YORK TIMES
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The Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
Explores a cracked-up American family after their return to the ancestral home in Newfoundland.
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Marlow sails down the Congo in search of Kurtz, a company agent who has, according to rumors, become insane in the jungle isolation.
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Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
An epic novel of Russia before and during the Revolution.
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ID: 0684825554
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The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck
A Chinese peasant overcomes the forces of nature and the frailties of human nature to become a wealthy landowner.
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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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Snow Falling on Cedars
by David Guterson
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PEN/Faulkner Award Winner • A gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric masterpiece of courtroom suspense—one that leaves us shaken and changed. "Haunting .... A whodunit complete with courtroom maneuvering and surprising turns of evidence and at the same time a mystery, something altogether richer and deeper." —Los Angeles Times San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries—memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.
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ID: 0517529858
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ID: 0451403703
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To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic. Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.
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Ship of Fools
by Katherine Anne Porter
The story takes place in the summer of 1931, on board a cruise ship bound for Bremerhaven, Germany. The passenger list is long and portentous, and includes a Spanish noblewoman, a drunken German lawyer, an American divorcee, a pair of Mexican Catholic priests, and a host of others. This "ship of fools" is a crucible of intense experience, out of which everyone emerges forever changed.
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ID: 0945084811
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All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The first volume in the Border Trilogy, from the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
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ID: 0887410995
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The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
A group of expatriates travel from Paris to the Pamplona bullfights.
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ID: 068481000X
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Staggerford
by Jon Hassler
Portrays the closely-intertwined and often troubled lives of residents in the small town as seen through the eyes of Miles Pruitt, a much respected high school teacher
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ID: 0892967471
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