Literary Lives

The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. The first edition credited the work's protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents. Crusoe set sail from Kingston upon Hull on a sea voyage in August 1651, against the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to pursue a career in law.

Young, ardent Dorothea Brooke defies her sister by wedding the much older Reverend Edward Casaubon, blindly hoping to assist in his scholarly pursuits. Tertius Lydgate, a progressive doctor, new and unwelcome in provincial Middlemarch, is charmed into marriage with the selfish and shallow Rosamond Vincy, a disastrous mismatch of his own. Soon blatant stubbornness, unruly jealousy, blind idealism, and calculated blackmail threaten to upend the Midlands village and lay waste to happy endings.

A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. In a sad and singular era, they are unique among women of their time. For radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy and brilliant daughter Margaret possess powerful charms to ward off...

In a North Carolina mountain town filled with moonshine and rotten husbands, Sadie Blue is only the latest girl to face a dead-end future at the mercy of a dangerous drunk. She's been married to Roy Tupkin for 15 days, and she knows now that she should have listened to the folks who said he was trouble. But when a stranger sweeps in and knocks the world off-kilter for everyone in town, Sadie begins to think there might be more to life than being Roy's wife.

Euridice is bright and ambitious. But this is Brazil in the 1940s, and society expects her to be a loving wife and mother. While Antenor is busy congratulating himself on his excellent catch, Euridice spends her spends her humdrum days ironing his shirts and removing the lumps of onion from his food, dreaming of the success she could have made of herself - as a writer, dressmaker or culinary whiz - in another life.

Grace has what one might call a 'full and interesting life', which is code for not married and has no kids. Her life is the envy of her straight friends, but all this time she has been waiting in secret for love to hit her so hard that she would run out of breath, like the way a wave in a rough sea bowls you over, slams you into the sand and nearly drowns you.

A poignant, uplifting, brilliantly insightful story of one woman's end-of-life reckoning with her past, her lost daughter and herself, for readers of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Still Alice and Elizabeth Is Missing. When her husband left her with a baby, a toddler and a fledgling...

Vir Sanghvi's has been an interesting life - one that took him to Oxford, movie and political journalism, television and magazines - and he depicts it with the silky polish his readers expect of him. In A Rude Life, he turns his dispassionate observer's gaze on himself, and in taut prose tells...

The classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef. She shares special points of her favorite preparations with listeners throughout the story.

Saeed is the comic hero, the luckless fool, whose tale tells of the aggression and resistance, terror and heroism, reason and loyalty, that typify the hardships and struggles of Arabs in Israel. An informer for the Zionist state, his stupidity, candor, and cowardice make him more of a victim than a villain; but in a series of tragicomic episodes, he is gradually transformed from a disaster-haunted, gullible collaborator into a Palestinian—no hero still, but a simple man intent on survival and, perhaps, happiness.

It was hell's season, and the air smelled of burning children.... With “one of the most arresting first sentences in contemporary writing” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Robert McCammon unfurls his visionary masterpiece of survival, redemption, and the astonishing transformations love...

“A beautifully crafted novel that sits at the intersection of race and class, that flags the frank truth of the life of migrant workers for whom a flight to freedom can become the most finely woven trap.”—JODI PICOULT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Two Ways From the...

A high school history teacher in a small Colorado town, Guthrie is raising his two young sons alone. Thoughtful and honest, he is guiding them through a world that is not always kind. Victoria, one of his students, is pregnant, homeless, and vulnerable to the scorn of the town. When Guthrie helps two elderly ranchers take the young woman into their home, an unlikely extended family is born.

Troubled by an inability to find any meaning in his life, the 25-year-old narrator of this deceptively simple novel quits university and eventually arrives at his brother's New York apartment. In a bid to discover what life is all about, he writes lists. He becomes obsessed by time and whether it actually matters. He faxes his meteorologist friend. He endlessly bounces a ball against the wall. He befriends a small boy who lives next door. He yearns to get to the bottom of life and how best to live it.

When a dispute over her parents’ will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled 20 years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favoritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different - a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured.

In this seminal story of naval life during the Napoleonic wars, Frederick Marryat's young hero embarks upon a life at sea and finds it to be a rough school indeed. Simple's trials and triumphs, with his faithful mentor, Terence O'Brien, at his side, mirror Marryat's personal experiences. Among the exciting events depicted are the hand-to-hand combat of "cutting-out" missions, the devastating hurricane off St. Pierre, and a mutiny aboard the Rattlesnake.

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When Quaker Pastor Sam Gardner is asked by the ill Unitarian minister to oversee a wedding in his place, Sam naturally agrees. It's not until the couple stands before him that he realizes they're two women.

With The Sportswriter, in 1986, Richard Ford commenced a cycle of novels that, 10 years later, after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, was hailed by The Times of London as "an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the 20th century itself." Now, a decade later, Frank Bascombe returns, with a new lease on life (and real estate), and more acutely in thrall to life's endless complexities than ever before.

In The Lonely Polygamist, Udall pens a tragicomic tale starring Golden Richards - who despite having four wives and 28 children, hasn’t quite found fulfillment in life. Like other men in the midst of a mid-life crisis, Golden feels as though he’s drowning. His wives squabble amongst themselves, and he hardly has time for all his children - least of all the 11-year-old who’s taken a keen interest in explosives.