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The Bargain
Ellis Wren
Wayne Granger has built Haysville's biggest grain business out of nothing but a twenty-one-year oath: at the county fair in 2001, drunk and at the end of a bad year, he sold his wife Ellen to a passing trucker for fifty dollars, and he has spent the years since outrunning the shame of it. On the eve of his wedding to Lana Cutter, the sharp woman from Reno, the buried past walks back into town. Ellen returns; the town's oldest resident remembers the fair out loud; and Wayne's rival Reece Calder knows more about grain — and about Wayne — than either of them admits. When his own unsent letters finally tell the truth he never could, the harvest king of Wendell County loses the name, the office and the daughter he raised. The Bargain is a story about the price of pride, and the season that waits at the top of the hill for every man who thinks he can outgrow his worst day.
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. Constance Garnett
Dostoevsky's final and greatest novel, completed in 1880, a murder mystery that is also a war for the human soul. The sensualist Dmitri, the rationalist Ivan and the saintly novice Alyosha — three sons of the vile old Fyodor Karamazov — are caught in their father's murder when he is killed. 'The Grand Inquisitor', Ivan's poem of Christ returning to an unfree Church, is one of the most famous chapters in world literature. Dostoevsky died a year later; this was his testament. This edition uses Constance Garnett's translation.
The Call of the Wild
Jack London
Jack London's 1903 Klondike classic — the book that made him famous and the most-read American novel of its decade. Buck, a big stolen house dog, is shipped north to the gold rush and learns the law of club and fang: the sled dog world is primitive, brutal and honest. Step by step his domestication is stripped away, until he answers the call that has been growing in him all along. Fierce, economical and beautiful, it is the great American wilderness story.
The Compound
Ellis Wren
Boston attorney Walter Kessler has been friend and lawyer to Adrian Voss, a celebrated Cambridge research founder, for thirty years. On a Sunday walk his cousin Devon Parks describes a small man who ran down a child on a bicycle and paid the family with money fetched from behind a battered service door on Mercer Row and a check signed by Voss himself. Voss's new will is worse: it leaves everything to a 'friend and benefactor' named Mr. Marsh, and gives Marsh the estate if Voss disappears for three months. Kessler waylays Marsh at that door, exchanges one look of unaccountable loathing, and cannot move Voss from his claim that he can be rid of Marsh at any hour. Months later a small man beats Congressman Alan Whitfield to death with a walking stick Kessler once gave Voss; the sealed packet on the body, addressed in Voss's hand, is one Voss handed the congressman that afternoon. A farewell note, a burned checkbook and a document examiner's finding that the murderer's hand matches Voss's own leave Kessler suspecting his client of forging for a killer. Voss returns to philanthropy, then shuts himself inside the laboratory above the old mill. Their old friend Dr. Alma Reyes collapses after a midnight errand she will not explain, dies within weeks, and leaves an envelope to be opened only at Voss's death or disappearance. Kessler glimpses Voss at a barred window, smiling, then seized with terror. At last the building manager brings him to the annex: behind the locked cabinet door something paces and begs for reagents in Voss's voice. They break in and find Marsh dead of poison in clothes far too large, and no trace of Voss, only a broken key, a new will naming Kessler, and two sealed documents. One records what Reyes saw when a midnight visitor drank a powder and became Voss before her eyes. The other is Voss's own confession.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
Dumas's masterpiece of revenge, and one of the most popular novels ever written. On the eve of his wedding, young Marseilles sailor Edmond Dantes is betrayed by jealous rivals and imprisoned without trial in the Chateau d'If for fourteen years. There the Abbe Faria educates him and reveals the secret of the treasure of Monte Cristo. Escape, fortune and a new identity follow: as the mysterious Count, Dantes returns to Parisian high society to dismantle, one by one, the men who destroyed him. Winding, irresistible, and faithful to its final lesson — wait and hope.
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri's monumental poem, the foundation stone of Italian literature. Lost in a dark wood, the poet is guided by the Roman sage Virgil down through Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory, before his beloved Beatrice leads him into Paradise. Across one hundred cantos in three canticles, Dante builds a complete vision of the medieval cosmos — a journey through sin, redemption and glory that remains one of the great imaginative achievements of any age.
The Frame
Ellis Wren
Jace Marlowe is the most beautiful man in Los Angeles, and at twenty-two, the luckiest. When the painter Theo Brandt finishes his portrait in a studio on Traction Avenue, Jace makes a wish in front of the canvas: that the painting would grow old in his place, and that he would stay as he looks in that amber light. The wish takes. The portrait ages with every sin Jace commits, while Jace stays twenty-two — a fact the city turns into a legend. Seven years of it make Jace rich, famous, and empty. He collects things he cannot keep, and the trail has costs: Lena Cross, the actress who loved him more than her work and died the morning after he ended it; her brother Owen, who spends seven years hunting the man he blames; Theo, who painted the wish into being and is buried for knowing too much; and Colin Marsh, the anesthesiologist who kept the secret alive with a signature and a key. The portrait in the locked room, in the frame Pemberton built, records it all — a one-way account that only moves against Jace. Fleeing to a desert retreat, Jace finally does one good thing — he lets June, the only person who wants nothing from him, go unharmed — and comes home believing the account might close on a credit. It does not. Mercy is not a credit in this account. The portrait shows him what the good thing was: vanity, with a receipt. On the last night Jace stands before the finished picture, the knife that cut him out of the canvas long ago in his hand. He finally understands the terms. The account closes only when the last payment is made — and the last payment is him.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel — the book that gave the Jazz Age its voice and its epitaph. Nick Carraway rents next door to Jay Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire who throws legendary parties for one reason: to win back Daisy Buchanan, the girl he loved and lost five years before, now married to brutish old money. A short novel of perfect control — green light, ash heap, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg — it is about wanting what cannot be had again, and the American dream seen from the wrong side of the water.
The Harvest King
Ellis Wren
At a county fair, a hay worker drinks too much spiked chili, puts his own marriage up on the auction block as a joke, and watches a barge mate pay five hundred dollars for his wife and baby girl. Sober by morning, Roy Calloway swears off liquor for twenty-one years and walks away to build a grain empire. Two decades later his wife returns with a grown daughter and eleven weeks to live; a young consultant modernizes his elevators and outgrows him in a year; and the bet that made him is the bet that breaks him. Then a vendor from that fair stands up in open court and tells what she saw, and an old video surfaces.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle
The greatest of the Sherlock Holmes novels, serialized in 1901-02. On Dartmoor, Sir Charles Baskerville dies of apparent heart failure on the yew alley — with the prints of a gigantic hound nearby, and an old family legend of a spectral dog avenging a crime. Holmes and Watson, separated for much of the case on the fog-bound moor, face the brilliant Gothic atmosphere of the Grimpen Mire, the escaped convict, and a villain worthy of the master. Holmes had been dead three years; this book resurrected him.
The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. Eva Martin
Dostoyevsky's 1869 novel, written abroad in poverty and ill health, and the book he loved best of his own. Prince Myshkin returns to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, a man of such unguarded goodness that society can only call him an idiot. Within days he is entangled with the beautiful and proud Nastasya Filippovna, kept as a mistress since childhood and unable to believe herself forgivable, and with Rogozhin, the merchant's son who loves her with the same force and none of the restraint. Their triangle ends in a scene of murder and madness among the most harrowing in fiction. This edition uses Eva Martin's early twentieth-century translation.
The Iliad
Homer, trans. Samuel Butler
The first great work of Western literature: Homer's epic of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Trojan War. Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors, withdraws in fury when Agamemnon takes his prize — and the war tilts toward ruin as Hector drives the Greeks to their ships. Rage, grief, the death of Patroclus, the great duel with Hector and Priam's night visit to reclaim his son's body: a poem about mortality, honour and what war does to men on both sides. This edition uses Samuel Butler's classic prose translation.