The Kindly Ones (1962) is a novel by Anthony Powell that forms the sixth in his twelve-volume sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time. Nonetheless the story stands up on its own and may be enjoyed without having read the preceding books. The novel captures the dying fall of the period between the wars, relating the run up to the Second World War to the circumstances prevailing just before the Great War. Hints abound that the vulnerable are to suffer, just as those driven by force of will begin their advance. Widmerpool is portrayed as one such, and a harbinger of war. As ever Nick is carried upon the tide of events, whilst seeking to do the honourable thing.
Donald E. Westlake's great comic suspense novel, won MWA's Edgar Award in 1967. Con men descend upon its gullible hero when he comes into a $317,000 inheritance but Fred Fitch, as lovable as he is naïve, stumbles to victory. Westlake's earlier novel THE FUGITIVE PIGEON virtually originated the modern comic-suspense genre so brilliantly refined in this later work.
Paradise is a 1997 novel by Toni Morrison, and her first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. According to the author, it completes a "trilogy" that begins with Beloved and includes Jazz.
Long-listed for the Orange Prize and winner of the Costa Award (formerly Britain's Whitbread Award), Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney's first novel, has garnered acclaim in Europe and the United States. A screenwriter, Penney casts the harsh Canadian landscape in vivid, cinematic hues while portraying a small society born of isolation, corporate greed, and an unforgiving environment. Although a murder mystery with many plot twists, the novel most successfully reveals complex human desires, motivations, and relationships.
Added by: JustGoodNews | Karma: 4306.26 | Fiction literature | 23 May 2011
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The War of the End of the World
The War of the End of the World is an impossibly ambitious book which nevertheless succeeds completely, and in the process confirms that Vargas Llosa deserves to be considered among the great authors of all time. Unlike his other books, which are either frankly autobiographical or significantly based on the author's personal experience, this is a straightforward historical novel, taking place in 1890s northeastern Brazil. It is also a real novel of ideas, confronting very seriously such timeless topics as the relationship of individual to society and of faith and personal belief to law and social order
