Library
Deadfall
Ellis Wren
A structural engineer comes north to inspect a mill dam and finds Wade Kelleher standing in the road at the bottom of Barlow Hill: fifty-two, lame, hat in hand. Snowed in, he lodges up the Hollow road, and the house tells him the winter that finished the man - the schooling given up to sit three years with a silent mother, the mortgaged farm, the marriage to Verna that stopped the quiet, and Tessa Bright, Verna's nineteen-year-old cousin, who came up on the bus to keep house and sang. In March Verna sent her away; on the drive to the seven o'clock bus, Wade did not take the turn at the elm. Twenty-five years on, the three of them are still in that house.
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes, trans. John Ormsby
Cervantes's immortal comic novel, widely regarded as the first modern novel. A poor country gentleman reads himself mad on chivalric romances, renames himself Don Quixote, and sallies forth with his squire Sancho Panza to revive knight-errantry: he mistakes windmills for giants, flocks for armies and inns for castles, winning beatings and glory in equal measure. Behind the comedy lies a moving portrait of the idealist in a prosaic world — at once a satire of chivalric romance and an elegy for the dreaming spirit. This edition uses John Ormsby's translation.
Double Blind
Ellis Wren
Nora Bellamy, outside counsel to Cascade Therapeutics, is asked to look at a check signed in the hand of the company's founder — six hundred dollars paid to a nine-year-old girl he had just walked over. The signature leads her to a will with a ninety-day clause, a young man who calls himself the weather that gets in, and a white room where a cabinet counts its doses down. A congressman is beaten to death with a cane she has seen in Voss's hand. A neurologist stops answering her door. What Nora assembles is the record of a brilliant man who decided the body makes one mistake worth correcting, and is running out of the thing that corrects it.
Dracula
Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, the book that created the vampire as we know it. Told entirely in letters, diaries and news clippings, it follows young solicitor Jonathan Harker's journey to Count Dracula's castle in the Carpathians, the Count's arrival in England and pursuit of Lucy Westenra, and the desperate alliance — Harker, Mina, Van Helsing and their friends — that forms to hunt him back across Europe. Gothic atmosphere, genuine dread, and the source of everything from coffin-and-castle legend to a century of horror fiction. Vampires were never quite the same after this book, and neither was the dark.
Dubliners
James Joyce
James Joyce's first book, fifteen short stories about the ordinary lives of Dublin at the turn of the century — schoolboys, clerks, spinsters, failed musicians, dying priests. Written with scrupulous meanness, as Joyce said, and an obsession with 'paralysis': the moment when a character glimpses the truth of their own life and cannot, or does not, act on it. It builds story by story to 'The Dead', one of the greatest short stories ever written. Not a dazzling book so much as a devastatingly precise one — the beginnings of modernism are all here.
Emma
Jane Austen
Jane Austen's comic masterpiece of 1815 — 'a heroine whom no one but myself will much like', she predicted. Emma Woodhouse is rich, clever, bored, and convinced she is an excellent matchmaker. Her meddling in the love lives of Harriet Smith, Jane Fairfax and half the parish of Highbury produces a catalogue of disasters, while the one man who sees through her, Mr Knightley, waits for her to see through herself. Perhaps the most perfectly plotted novel in English: a comedy of self-deception in which the reader watches a clever woman become a better one.
Essays of Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton
Michel de Montaigne invented the essay — the word, and the thing — in his tower in southwest France, and this is the book that defined the form. Whether discussing friendship, death, cannibals, the education of children, or his own habits and contradictions, he writes with a candour and wandering intelligence that no one had put on the page before: 'I am myself the matter of my book.' Four centuries on, he remains the most companionable of philosophers — sceptical, humane, funny, and endlessly quotable. This edition uses the classic Cotton/Hazlitt translation.
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
A nameless engineer arrives in the decaying Massachusetts mill town of Starkfield and, stranded by a winter storm, lodges with Ethan Frome, a tall, lame, silent farmer whose ruined body and ruined farm are the talk of the village. What the narrator pieces together from neighbors' memories is the story this book tells. Twenty-five years earlier, Ethan was a young man with a knack for engineering and a hope of leaving the farm for a life in town. Instead he stayed to bury his parents, then married Zenobia, one of the nurses who helped tend them. Zeena turned out to be a hypochondriac, silent and sour, and the farm sank deeper into debt and snow. When her cousin Mattie Silver, an orphan with no money and no prospects, comes to help with the housework, her warmth and laugh bring the kitchen alive, and Ethan discovers in himself a capacity for feeling that his marriage had buried. Over a single winter, as Zeena's suspicions harden and a trip to town brings a decisive answer about Mattie's future, Ethan is caught between duty, poverty, and a love he cannot speak. The whole story moves toward one evening and one mad, desperate ride down the snowy hill past the old elm, with tragic consequences. First published in 1911, Ethan Frome is Wharton's spare New England tragedy, a compact study of conscience and circumstance in which the frame narrative returns at the end to show how completely a single choice can shape a life.
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy's 1874 novel, his first success, and the book that gave him his map of Wessex. Bathsheba Everdene inherits a farm, runs it capably, and finds herself the object of three men: the shepherd Gabriel Oak, steady and unasked; Boldwood, the neighbouring farmer roused out of his reserve into obsession; and Sergeant Troy, scarlet-coated, irresistible and worthless. Sheep, blight, a thunderstorm and a Valentine card do the rest. Hardy called it a pastoral; his people are ruined by weather, money and the vanity of choosing.
Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at nineteen, from a ghost-story competition on Lake Geneva in 1816, and invented science fiction in the process. Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss scientist, assembles a living creature from dead matter — and abandons it in horror at what he has made. The creature, educated and eloquent and rejected by every human he meets, turns to revenge. Part Gothic horror, part philosophical inquiry into creation, responsibility and what makes a monster, it has never stopped being relevant: we are still building things we do not fully understand.
Grand Central
Ellis Wren
Mara Callahan has spent fourteen years as the perfect wife of a United States senator - gracious, polished, slowly disappearing inside her own life. Then a racing driver named Cal Mercer looks at her as if she were the only real thing in the room, and the dam gives way. The affair costs her everything: her son, her name, her place in the world, and at last, on a platform at Grand Central, her life. Woven through her story runs Eli Donovan's - a Hudson Valley farmer who marries the woman who once refused him and fights his way back to a reason to live. A novel of love, ruin, and the stubborn, ordinary work of being good.
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
One of Dickens's greatest novels, first published in 1860-61. Pip, an orphan raised 'by hand' by his fierce sister on the Kent marshes, helps an escaped convict one terrifying afternoon — an act that will entangle his whole life. When a mysterious benefactor sends him to London to become a gentleman, he gets his 'great expectations' and learns, painfully, what they are worth. Comic, sinister, and deeply moving, it contains some of Dickens's most unforgettable characters — Miss Havisham in her rotted wedding dress above all — and one of his finest endings.