Books With Beautiful Prose
Age of vice
Kapoor, Deepti, author
2023
"Binge-worthy reading at its best: an addictive, action-packed page-turner of epic proportions about the machinations of one dizzyingly wealthy family in contemporary India and the outsiders who are drawn into their treacherous web"-- Provided by publisher.
All the light we cannot see : a novel
Doerr, Anthony, 1973- author
2014
Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.
Anna Karenina
Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910, author
2013
A story woven around two relationships: the ultimately destructive triangle of the aristocratic Anna, her husband Karenin and her lover Vronsky, and the courtship marriage of the Princess Catherine (Kitty) and Levin, a well-intentioned country squire beset by doubts about the way Russian landowners should behave.
The covenant of water : a novel
Verghese, Abraham, 1955- author
2023
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, set in Kerala, on South India's Malabar Coast, this novel follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning. A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself, this is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today.
The guest : a novel
Cline, Emma, author
2023
"Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome. A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city. With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake. Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline's The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement"-- Provided by publisher.
I have some questions for you
Makkai, Rebecca, author
2023
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past - including the 1995 murder of a classmate, Thalia Keith. When The Granby School invites her back to teach a two-week course, Bodie finds herself inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought - if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.
A little life
Yanagihara, Hanya, author
2015
Moving to New York to pursue creative ambitions, four former classmates share decades marked by love, loss, addiction, and haunting elements from a brutal childhood.
The ocean at the end of the lane
Gaiman, Neil, author.
2019
It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed-- within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. His only defense is three women on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.
Pineapple Street : a novel
Jackson, Jenny (Editor), author
2023
Darley, the eldest daughter in the closely-tied, carefully-guarded, old money Stockton family, made the classic feminine mistake and gave up her job for her children. Sasha married into the Stocktons, and finds herself the outsider looking into the fishbowl. Georgianna, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can't (and really shouldn't) have. Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York's one percenters, this is a smart, escapist novel between the haves and have-nots and everything in between, and the insanity of first love.
Station eleven
Mandel, Emily St. John, 1979- author
2014
One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains-this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.
This is how you lose the time war
El-Mohtar, Amal, author
2019
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. That's how war works. Right?
Victory city : a novel
Rushdie, Salman, author
2023
In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history - Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, who begins to speak out of the girl's mouth. Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana's life becomes deeply interwoven with the great city of Bisnag. As years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, the very fabric of Bisnaga becomes an ever more complex tapestry - with Pampa Kampana at its centre.
The wind knows my name : a novel
Allende, Isabel, author
2023
Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler is five years old when his mother secures a spot for him on a Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria. He boards alone. Arizona, 2019. Anita Diaz and her mother board a train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador. But their arrival coincides with the new family separation policy, and seven-year-old Anita finds herself alone at a camp in Nogales. Intertwining past and present, this novel is both a testament to the sacrifices that parents make, and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers.