Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
AAPI Heritage Month
Aliens
May Books on Tap: Sci-fi
Thomas Ford Library's Science Fiction Book Club Selections
Aliens
May Books on Tap: Sci-fi
Thomas Ford Library's Science Fiction Book Club Selections
Description
"When massive, intelligent aliens from Mars touch down in Victorian England and threaten to destroy the civilized world, humanity's vaunted knowledge proves to be of little use. First published in 1898, H.G. Wells's masterpiece of speculative fiction has thrilled and delighted generations of readers, spawned countless imitations, and inspired dramatizations by such masters as Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg. The War of the Worlds is a fantasy that...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
One of The Guardian’s “1,000 Books to Read Before You Die”
This underrated classic of contemporary Irish literature tells the “utterly transfixing” story of a lonely, poverty-stricken spinster in 1950s Belfast (The Boston Globe)
Judith Hearne is an unmarried woman of a certain age who has come down in society. She has few skills and is full of the prejudices...
This underrated classic of contemporary Irish literature tells the “utterly transfixing” story of a lonely, poverty-stricken spinster in 1950s Belfast (The Boston Globe)
Judith Hearne is an unmarried woman of a certain age who has come down in society. She has few skills and is full of the prejudices...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Though written at the end of the first half of the twentieth century this is essentially a nineteenth century novel written with a twentieth century sensibility. A few things give it away as a twentieth century novel - regular trains, even to remote rural areas, and a gramophone as well as the fact that, unlike most nineteenth century novels, none of the main characters survives unscarred. Indeed, most of them die, usually relatively unpleasant deaths....
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"On a rainy Sunday afternoon in January the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey moves to the Claremont Hotel in South Kensington. "If it's not nice, I needn't stay," she promises herself, as she settles into this haven for the genteel and the decayed. "Three elderly widows and one old man who seemed to dislike female company and seldom got any other kind" serve for her fellow residents, and there is the staff, too, and they are one and all lonely. What...
5) My phantoms
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Helen Grant, known to her acquaintances as Hen, is a mystery to her daughter. An extrovert with few friends who has sought intimacy in the wrong places; a twice-divorced mother of two now living alone surrounded by her memories, Helen has always haunted Bridget. Now Bridget sees Helen once a year, and considers the problem to be contained. As she looks back on their tumultuous relationship- the performances and small deceptions- she tries to reckon...
6) The fawn
Author
Language
English
Description
"In The Door, in Iza's Ballad, and in Abigail, Magda Szabó describes the complex relationships between women of different ages and backgrounds with an astute and unsparing eye. Eszter, the narrator and protagonist of The Fawn, may well be Szabó's most fascinating creation. Eszter, an only child, her father an eccentric aristocrat and steeply downwardly mobile flower breeder, her mother a harried music teacher failing to make ends meet, grows up...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a casual affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge but also an instrument for her long-wished-for independence. Takiko's first year as a...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Children is a masterpiece not only of the nineteenth century but of the whole of Russian literature, a book full to bursting with life. It is a novel about the relations between the young and the old, about love, families, politics, religion, about strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death. It is about the clash between liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries. At the time of its publication...
9) Fatale
Author
Language
English
Description
A New York Review Books Original
Whether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, there’s no question that Aimée is a killer and a more than professional one. Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different...
Whether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, there’s no question that Aimée is a killer and a more than professional one. Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different...
10) Fair play
Author
Language
English
Description
Fair Play is the type of love story that is rarely told, a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating.
Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they’ve never really stopped taking each other by surprise. Fair Play shows...
Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they’ve never really stopped taking each other by surprise. Fair Play shows...
Author
Language
English
Description
"In England half a century ago, well-brought-up young women are meant to aspire to the respectable life. Some things are not to be spoken of; some are most certainly not to be done. There are rules, conventions. Meg Bailey obeys them. She progresses from Home Counties school to un-Bohemian art college with few outward signs of passion or frustration. Her personality is submerged in polite routines; even with her best friend, Roxane, what can't be...
12) The hive
Author
Language
English
Description
"The translator Anthony Kerrigan has compared the work of Camilo José Cela, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to that of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Curzio Malaparte. These are, Kerrigan writes, "ferocious writers, truculent, badly spoken, foul mouthed." However provocative and disturbing, they are also flat-out dazzling as writers, whose sentences, as rigorous as riotous, lodge like knives in the reader's mind. Cela called himself...
Author
Language
English
Description
Coming of age in pre-World War II California and Colorado brings tragedy to Molly and Ralph Fawcett in Jean Stafford's classic semi-autobiographical novel, The Mountain Lion, first published in 1947. Torn between their mother's world of genteel respectability and their grandfather's and uncle's world of cowboy masculinity, neither Molly nor Ralph can find an acceptable adult role to aspire to. As events move to their swift and inevitable conclusion,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A vivid coming-of-age tale set in a big Nigerian city about a young man trying to make his way as a journalist and band leader in the big city. When People of the City was published in 1954 it was immediately acclaimed as the first major novel in English by a West African to be widely read throughout the English-speaking world. People of the City tells the story of a young crime reporter and dance-band leader in a great West African city who comes...
Author
Language
English
Description
In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They were supposed to be an advance guard, followed by other French ships with the leader of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone. Briefly they triumphed, raising hopes among the impoverished local peasantry and gathering a group of supporters. But before long the insurgency collapsed in the face of a brutal...
16) Young once
Author
Language
English
Description
"Odile and Louis are leading a happy, bucolic life with their two children in the French countryside near the Swiss mountains. It is Odile's thirty-fifth birthday, and Louis's thirty-fifth birthday is a few weeks away. Then the story shifts back to their early years: Louis, just freed from his military service and at loose ends, taken up by a shady character who brings him to Paris to do some work for a friend who manages a garage; Odile, an aspiring...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding. Dorothy Baker's entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine...
18) Pedigree
Author
Language
English
Description
Pedigree is Georges Simenon’s longest, most unlikely, and most adventurous novel, the book that is increasingly seen to lie at the heart of his outsize achievement as a chronicler of modern self and society. In the early 1940s, Simenon began work on a memoir of his Belgian childhood. He showed the initial pages to André Gide, who urged him to turn them into a novel. The result was, Simenon later quipped, a book in which everything...
Author
Language
English
Description
The Hearing Trumpet is the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that what her family is saying is that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is open. It is also the scene of a mysterious murder. Occult twin...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Suppressed by the KGB and years later smuggled out of the Soviet Union to be published, Vasily Grossman's novel is an unsparing story of ordinary Russians tragically caught between the fascism of the invading Nazis and the oppression of their own Soviet government. The sprawling plot follows the travails of the extended family of Viktor Shtrum along the vast eastern front of the war. Shtrum is a brilliant nuclear physicist who faces rising anti-Semitism...