The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon

Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He can't stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.

This improbable story of ( Read more... )

The Serial Killers Club - Jeff Povey

When our unlikely hero stumbles into the path of a serial killer, he has no choice but to defend himself - and ends up killing the killer. Shocked by his own strength, he then goes through the dead man's wallet and finds the damndest thing: a personal ad inviting the killer to join a party hosted by Errol Flynn. ( Read more... )

Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

Richard Mayhew is a young man with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk. His small act of kindness propels him into a world he never dreamed existed. There are people who fall through the cracks, and Richard has become one of them. And ( Read more... )

Blindness - Jose Saramago, trans. Giovanni Pontiero

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers ( Read more... )

Operation Storm City - Joshua Mowll

Sinkiang Desert, China: Deep in the Desert of Death, forces converge in the race to find Ur-Can - the fabled Storm City. Becca and Doug are desperate to reach the lost city and discover their parents' fate, but enemies, old and new, threaten to arrive first and take control of the ancient machine located there. ( Read more... )

Life of Pi

After the sinking of a cargo ship, a single solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the surface of the wild, blue Pacific. The crew of the surviving vessel consists of a hyena, an orang-utan, a zebra with a broken leg, a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger and Pi Patel, a 16-year-old Indian boy. The stage is set for one of the most extraordinary ( Read more... )

The Time Traveler's Wife

When Henry meets Clare, he is twenty-eight and she is twenty. Henry has never met Clare before; Clare has known Henry since she was six. Impossible but true, because Henry finds himself periodically displaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. Henry and Clare's attempts to live ( Read more... )

At the Mountains of Madness

Long acknowledged as a master of nightmarish visions, HP Lovecraft established the genuineness and dignity of his own pioneering fiction in 1931 with his quintessential work of supernatural horror, At the Mountains of Madness. The deliberately told and increasingly chilling recollection of an Antarctic expedition's ( Read more... )

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott shares the innocence of girlhood and the warmth of sisterhood in this charming tale of four sisters. Responding to the need for a "girls' book," the little known writer was met with unexpected fame and fortune for this novel inspired by her own childhood.

In picturesque nineteenth-century New England, tomboyish Jo, ( Read more... )

Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

Moby-Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic.

But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at ( Read more... )