Literary Fiction

When the life you've built crumbles and the past refuses to release its grip, sometimes, all you need is a fresh start—a new beginning that promises hope and redemption. Once a successful author, Raine's life unraveled, sending her fleeing to the picturesque streets of Paris to escape the tormenting heartache that threatened to consume her. Yet, no matter how far she traveled, the pain remained her unwelcome companion.

Wisdom walks through the halls as a most unusual janitor in New York's wealthiest building.

Internationally acclaimed author William Siems has done it again. Some are saying this is his best work yet. It surely breaks the mold from his Biblical Adventures. Set in the contemporary city of Franklin, Nick is a ten year veteran teacher at Grover Cleveland High School. The driving force behind Cleveland’s Psychology and Life Skills classes, he is revered among his peers, beloved of his students, and has been changing lives and providing direction to the youth of Franklin that entire time. Suddenly, tragedy strikes!

When his doctor mistakenly types the wrong code into his electronic medical record, Myron Moskowitz—Mike, to the entire world except his mother Celia—finds life, or at least the one he's grown used to, suddenly turned tush-over-teakettle. With that single dodgy digital diagnosis, a chain reaction is set in motion leading Mike to lose his job, accidentally get all trace of himself wiped off of every computer in the known universe, and seriously contemplate buying a Harley. And Mike isn't exactly what you'd call a motorcycle kind of Moskowitz.

Emma, by Jane Austen, is a novel about youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance. The story takes place in the fictional village of Highbury and the surrounding estates of Hartfield, Randalls, and Donwell Abbey and involves the relationships among individuals in those locations consisting of "3 or 4 families in a country village". The novel was first published in December 1815 while the author was alive, with its title page listing a publication date of 1816.

Retired teachers Pat, Liz and Thelma are happiest whiling away their hours over coffee, cake and chat at the Thirsk Garden Centre café. But when their good friend tells them about unsettling experience she had in a sinister-feeling charity shop, they simply can’t resist investigating. Because the entire shop has vanished into thin air. Before long, our trio of unlikely sleuths find themselves embroiled in a race against the clock to get to the bottom of this mystery – but who has a secret to hide and how far will they go to keep it concealed?

The plot centers on Anthony Beavis, a dilettante social theorist, a man inclined to recoil from life. The pleasures of the physical world disgust him and the universe of ideas is but a poor refuge. Having long lost the art of intimacy, he betrays friendships and toys with the affections of women. But as Beavis approaches middle age, his world of perfect detachment begins to lose its appeal. Finally realizing that his withdrawal from life has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Beavis, devastated and at crisis point, meets the remarkable and redoubtable Dr Miller.

Student Marcus Fyer is at odds with both family and campus life, and is about to quit university and just take off. His father arranges a course of therapy to see him through his crisis, though Marcus finds himself at odds with that arrangement too. His therapist can get very little out of him, so suggests he keep a diary recording his reactions to his therapy group. This Marcus does, but what can his diary tell us about his state of mind?

Oscar Wilde claimed that The Humiliated and Insulted is "not at all inferior to the other great masterpieces," and Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel, and the reader is plunged into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma, and unrequited love. Found at the center of the story are a young struggling author, an orphaned teenager, and a depraved aristocrat who not only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later fiction, but is a powerful and original presence in his own right.

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Eddie and Alan is a novel that follows two men who reflect on the end of their three-year relationship. They come from different walks of life; Eddie is a black queer man, and Alan is a cis white, mostly straight man. They were introduced to each other at work and quickly connected. Eddie and Alan’s friendship morphed into something more intimate, coming to a head during their four-day beach vacation. At its heart, this story seeks to shed light on the complexities of relationships between men, the fluidity of sexuality, and what happens when the lines are blurred.

The narrator and central character of The Adolescent is Arkady Dolgoruky, a naive 19-year-old boy full of ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father’s wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely knows, inspired by an inchoate dream of communion and armed with a mysterious document that he believes gives him power over others.

Sara has lost her zest for life. Trapped sharing a house with her soon-to-be-ex-husband, with grown-up children who still need her but take her for granted, working in a job where her boss bullies her, the final straw is the heartbreak of losing her beloved best friend Lainey. But Lainey’s death could be the beginning of Sara’s new life … as the last gift Lainey gives to her friend is a sum of money and a request – that Sara travels to Italy, the scene of the pair’s youthful adventures, and scatters Lainey’s ashes on the beach at Portofino. For once, Sara decides to be brave.

God Sees the Truth, But Waits is a short story by Russian author Leo Tolstoy first published in 1872. The story, about a man sent to prison for a murder he did not commit, takes the form of a parable of forgiveness. English translations were also published under titles "The Confessed Crime", "Exiled to Siberia", and "The Long Exile". The concept of the story of a man wrongfully accused of murder and banished to Siberia also appears in one of Tolstoy's previous works, War and Peace, during a philosophical discussion between two characters who relate the story and argue how the protagonist of their story deals with injustice and fate.

Psalm is a short touching story, written in 1923. Part of the "Travel Notes" series. I will buy a dog on Saturday ; I will sing a psalm at night ; I will order shoes for tailcoat... ; But it's okay. Somehow... we will live.