Arcade: 311 books

George Sand is one the most celebrated writers and controversial personalities of nineteenth-century France; she is as famous for her bohemian lifestyle as for her written work. The Last Love of George Sand portrays the writer, political activist, and cultural figure as she starts a new chapter in...

February 29th is a date that comes into existence just once every four years. It is also the birthday of Thaïs-author Anne-Dauphine Julliand’s darling daughter-who died of a genetic disease. Thaïs lived just shy of her fourth birthday. She had a short life but good one. As this special...

The second volume of a trilogy that began with The Soldier's Return.After the upheavals of the Second World War, the Richardson family -- Sam, Ellen and their young son Joe -- settle back to working-class life in the Cumbrian town of Wigton. Yet for them, as for so many, life will never be the same...

Ring of Flowers, a 46-page novella, is a bittersweet love story and a companion piece to the full length novel The Calypso Directive, written by the same author... In 1665, in the Derbyshire village of Eyam, the tailor George Vicars orders a bolt of fabric from London to make a wedding dress for his...

The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon, by prize-winning Chinese novelist Liu Zhenyun is a novel of Beijing that paints a microcosm of contemporary China, dealing with classes at the two extremes: the super rich and the migrant workers who make them rich through deceit and corruption. The...

“With Secrets, Nuruddin Farah solidifies his reputation as one of the world’s great writers.”-Ishmael Reed Set against the backdrop of the civil war in Somalia, this stunningly ambitious novel was a Los Angeles Times Book Review Best Fiction of the Year Selection. In Mogadiscio, the dictator...

These nine novels are the best of the best-great writing by some of the most brilliant literary minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Samuel Johnson’s biography of Richard Savage raises the life of a scoundrel to the level of great art; George Eliot profoundly influenced Henry...

Friday Night Lights meets Ordinary People when Beth Maller returns to her job as a guidance counselor at Meadow Brook High School shortly after an unspeakable family tragedy. Railing against the everyday injustices she had overlooked until her world cracked apart, Beth stirs up the moral battles being...

Alone with their authoritarian father on a vast estate where time has stopped, two siblings speak a language and inhabit a surreal universe of their own making, shaped by their reading of philosophy and tales of chivalry. When their father dies and the children set out to bury him, they encounter...

Li Xuelian, married to Qin Yuhe, is pregnant with their second child. Happy news? Not in China, with its one-child policy. It is a crime. What is she to do? Her only option is divorcing before the second child is born. “Once the baby has entered into the household registry, we’ll marry again....

From a writer whose international acclaim can now spread to US shores comes a wise, craftily spun, and spine-tinglingly erotic tale of love, courage, and the forging of conscience-'a novel of startling integrity and beauty' (Independent on Sunday). In the beginning there is death, says one narrator...

Reading Abilio Estevez's Thine Is the Kingdom is a little like attending a cocktail party blindfolded: a million conversations are all happening at the same time and you have to work to figure out just who's talking. But this remarkable novel out of Cuba is worth the extra effort. Set in a run-down...

Our guide to the life of the Bard is an actor called Pickleherring, who asserts that as a boy he was an original member of Shakespeare's acting troupe. In an attic above a brothel in Restoration London-a half century after Shakespeare has departed the stage-Pickleherring, now an old man, sits down...

A riveting white-water ride down a raging river in the Italian Alps, pitting people against Nature, in "the novel Tim Parks was born to write" (Sunday Telegraph, London). When 15 vacationers-six adults and nine adolescents-arrive in the Italian Alps to try their kayaking skills against the wild waters...