Library
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's 1847-48 masterpiece, subtitled 'A Novel without a Hero'. Becky Sharp — poor, clever, amoral, and irresistibly alive — claws her way through Regency England from school friendship with the gentle Amelia Sedley, through the Battle of Waterloo, to the heights and depths of society, ruining most of what she touches and entertaining everyone else. The great English novel of social climbing, told with an ironist's relish and a moralist's despair: the world is the fair, and everyone is for sale.
Villette
Charlotte Bronte
Lucy Snowe, alone and unexplained, crosses the Channel to teach in the fictional town of Villette, in a girls' school under the gimlet eye of Madame Beck. What follows is Charlotte Bronte's most interior and most strange novel: the long courtship by thunderstorm of the theatrical professor M. Paul Emanuel, the ghostly nun who may or may not exist, and a narrator who systematically hides her own feelings from the reader. Bronte drew on her Brussels years and her hopeless attachment to Constantin Heger; the ending, deliberately ambiguous, let her keep the hope she could not honestly record.
Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau's account of the two years, two months and two days he spent in a cabin he built on Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts — published in 1854 and never since out of the American canon. Not a hermit's memoir but an experiment in living: he went to the woods, he says, 'to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life'. Pond, bean-field, seasons, visitors, and the famous argument — later sharpened by 'Civil Disobedience' — for simplicity over accumulation. The classic American case for opting out, and the book Transcendentalism is remembered by.
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy, trans. Constance Garnett
Tolstoy's epic of Russia in the Napoleonic wars, published 1865-69 and often called the greatest novel ever written. Three families — the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs and the Kuragins — live through 1805 to 1812: Napoleon's invasion, the Battle of Borodino, the burning of Moscow, and the fates of Pierre Bezukhov, Prince Andrei and Natasha Rostova. Thousands of pages of history, philosophy, love and death, written with a fidelity to life that no other novel matches. This edition uses Constance Garnett's translation.
What She Ordered
Ellis Wren
Maren Aubrey has been married to a country doctor for twenty-three years, and she has made their living room exactly right. That is the trouble. A wedding weekend at a Hudson Valley estate shows her a life she cannot unsee; a neighbor at the county fair offers her one; a Thursday-night class in the city gives her somewhere to put it. She buys, she borrows, she signs — the cards, the buy-now plans, the home equity line she never mentions to her husband — until the arithmetic of wanting more than a house can hold closes in. Her husband loves her through letters he finds too late. A novel about appetite, debt, and a life only slightly too small.
White Fang
Jack London
Jack London's 1906 companion to The Call of the Wild — the reverse journey. White Fang is three-quarters wolf, born in the Klondike wilds; the novel follows his life from the wild through the cruelty of Beauty Smith, who makes him a fighting dog, to the love and patience of Weedon Scott in California. A story about how kindness, extended with enough persistence, can civilize even the most damaged creature — 'A Concordance to the Wild', London called the theme. The great American novel of taming, as its twin was of un-taming.
Windrow
Ellis Wren
Eastern Montana. A travel writer rents a cabin at Fairhill Ranch and is drawn to the bare house on the northern ridge - Windrow, a home with no photographs on its walls. One September night he hears a hand at the window and a voice: 'Let me in. I've been out here twenty years.' From the housekeeper Pearl he hears the whole story: a starved foundling, Dane Corso, raised beside the rancher's wild daughter Cass; the choice that married her to gentle Alden Frost and drove Dane away; his return, rich and patient, to ruin both families; and young Wren, caged by a forced marriage, finding an ally in the silent ranch hand Colt.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë's only novel, 1847 — the strangest, darkest and in many judgments the greatest of the Brontë books. On the Yorkshire moors, foundling Heathcliff is adopted into the Earnshaw family and loved with absolute, annihilating passion by Catherine Earnshaw, who marries the polite Edgar Linton instead. Heathcliff's revenge on both families consumes two generations. A novel of love as elemental force rather than feeling, told through layers of unreliable narrators, it shocked its own time and has towered over English fiction ever since.
他今年二十二
旧书摊主
潮城的雨季来得很慢，坏消息也是。话剧团的新人杜屿二十二岁，眉目干净得像一张还没拆封的画布，画家白榕为他画了一幅等人大的肖像，笔笔都是真心。庆功夜的天台上，播客名嘴贺远用他惯常的漂亮腔调说：青春是全世界唯一值得囤积的东西。那句玩笑话，杜屿当真了——他对着画像许愿：愿意拿一切，换这张脸永远二十二岁。愿望应验了。此后十六年，杜屿的脸纤尘不染，上热搜、接代言、做基金会，全城宠爱；而他藏在旧宅阁楼里的画像，一年比一年丑陋，替他收着每一笔烂账：被辜负的爱人、被威胁的旧友、被抹掉的证词、被销毁的现场。他试过用行善赎买——匿名修屋顶、捐图书、建卫生院，画像冷冷地看着，纹丝不动：那不是善，是赎买；不是爱，是证明。他也试过用新生活盖住旧钉痕，可墙上画像挂过的疤，比什么都记得牢。港口来的水手辛野，妹妹六年前死在一间后台化妆间，他把死亡从头捋到尾，讣告、围巾、裂掉的镜子，线索一路指回那张不会老的脸；画家的旧画箱在多年后重新打开，白榕在他生日那夜看见了画像的真容，恳求他跪下来忏悔，换来的却是一把刀。账，终究是要平的——只是这一笔，记在了谁的名下？这是一个关于皮相、时间与代价的故事：当衰老被外包给一幅画，灵魂就成了一件被典当的东西。
另一张脸
旧书摊主
伦敦律师厄特森是个替朋友保守秘密的人，可这回让他不安的是一份遗嘱：人人敬重的亨利·杰基尔医生，把身后的一切都留给了一个叫爱德华·海德的陌生人——一个谁也说不清长相、见过的人却个个发怵的小个子。立遗嘱时，杰基尔还托付厄特森：万一他不在了，请替这个人争一份公道。遗嘱立下不到一年，海德踩伤一个孩子，赔钱了事；又一夜，他在街角把一位老绅士打得头骨碎裂，随后人间蒸发。线索条条指向杰基尔：赔偿金是他签的支票，凶手给他写去感谢信，而他从此闭门不出。烧剩的支票簿在凶手炉灰里，签名的笔迹却与医生一模一样。老管家浦尔听见柜房里日夜有陌生的脚步，主人八天不曾露面，只有字条讨药，跑遍全城的药房，一次次被认定不纯地退回。两人砸开门时，屋里只有一具穿着大号衣服的尸体、半瓶血红的药水，和一本突然中断的流水账。答案留在两份遗书里：名医兰宁到死不肯再提那个名字，只留下一封到死后才能拆开的信；杰基尔在自白里承认，他早知道人体内不止住着一个人，便配出一种药，把体面与欲望拆成两个身体——白天是杰基尔，入夜是海德。起初他以为两边互不相欠，直到剂量越吃越大，不用服药，梦醒也成了海德。他这才明白，被拆开的从来不是两个人，而是同一张脸的两面；而另一张脸，已经开始自己挑选出场的时间。
她总是猜错
旧书摊主
二十一岁的沈知微是枫林镇最受宠的姑娘，生得漂亮，家世殷实，父亲沈伯昭把她当掌上明珠，全镇的邻居也都让着她三分。她自认是镇上最懂人心的撮合天才——开春刚替家教老师程素云和客栈老板韦松龄牵线成功，便志得意满地收孤女林小棠做门生，一心要替这姑娘安排一门体面的好亲事。她压掉农场青年陆望田的求婚，又误判年轻牧师温让卿的心意；温让卿求亲被拒，转头另娶了暴发户之女高曼琳，还搬进新娘子陪嫁的大宅。镇上来了风趣的方叙白与清冷的江映澄，沈知微自作聪明地编排二人的关系，处处弄巧成拙：她撮合过的姻缘一一翻车，方叙白的神秘行程、江映澄讳莫如深的过往、一台匿名寄来的黑胶唱机，都在她眼皮底下留下疑团。直到翠屏山野餐，她当众刻薄了善良的马瑞芳，被挚友顾承安当场斥责，才第一次认真反省自己的自以为是。林小棠一句心里人是顾承安，令她惊觉自己早已深恋这位兄长式的邻居。方叙白与江映澄的秘密婚约终于曝光，江映澄跟着方叙白回了方府祖宅；顾承安顺势求婚，沈知微在父亲半推半就的默许下与他成婚。林小棠在纽约与陆望田重逢，两人终于复合。两对新人各得其所，沈知微也终于学会不再替别人猜心。
她的名字叫安澜
旧书摊主
故事从一场家变开场：文旅集团总裁安朗与妻子谢棠的婚姻炸了锅，全家鸡飞狗跳。澜城是权力与上流圈的心脏，临州住着根基深厚的商业旧族。安澜是澜城文化基金会秘书长，优雅明亮，人人羡慕她的婚姻——丈夫康慎是无懈可击的集团董事长，连家庭也打理得像一份年度报告，四平八稳，无人在家。可她在替兄长调解家变的雪夜里，于临州车站与年轻赛车手傅野相遇，扳道工的一场事故成了不祥的序言，一对眼神交换，平静的表面裂开第一道缝——那个晚上，两个人都没有睡好。从此她走上与体面决裂的路：社交圈的孤立、爱人的猜疑与自毁、赛车场上那声刺耳的爆响、产后在鬼门关走的一遭，以及那句比责难更冷的宽恕。上流社会可以原谅一切，唯独不原谅一个公开追求爱情的妻子；当宽恕变成门禁，她一步步走向城西货运小站的月台。与之平行的是另一条线：名校毕业返乡务农的李原，在乡间朴园里耕种、亏损、娶妻，也在暴雨抢收与兄长离世之间追问一个更朴素的问题——人到底该为什么而活。他与谢家小女儿澄澄的婚事，是他在遭遇拒绝与病痛之后，慢慢修回来的正果，直播镜头里的稻田成了这个家新的语言。一条线烧向毁灭，一条线长出答案，两条线在书末汇于同一句话：为灵魂活着。