Beneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women’s college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits. Randall J
The Monkey and the Tiger includes two detective stories, "The Morning of the Monkey" and "The Night of the Tiger." In the first, a gibbon drops an emerald in the open gallery of Dee's official reside
Aboard the Alecto, prolific romance author Valentine Beals ruminates on the ship's most seemingly incongruous couple: a graceful, ethereal, virginal dancer named Barberina Rookwood and her lover, Saul
Moving from Massachusetts to Kansas in 1855 with his new wife and a group of German carpenters, Gordon McKay is dead set on making his fortune raising bees - undaunted by Missouri border ruffians, ne
When Charles Quinlan, an academic obsessed with jazz, starts exploring the life and death of Jackson Payne, a fictional tenor-sax player, he can't imagine where his research will lead. Told in a serie
An East German writer, awaiting a call from the hospital where her brother is undergoing brain surgery, instead receives news of a massive nuclear accident at Chernobyl, one thousand miles away. In th
The Young Lions is a classic novel that vividly portrays the experiences of ordinary soldiers fighting in World War II. Using the points of view of a perceptive young Nazi, a jaded American film prod
Eduard Hoffman is a microbiologist with an interest in relationships. He believes he's found "a strain of separation virus" raging in West Berlin in 1983, which terminates every rela
In this sequel to The Raj Quartet, Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley cling to their bungalow in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Lucy, fed up with a
Jean Dutourd's A Dog's Head is a wonderful piece of magical realism, reminiscent of Voltaire, Borges and Kafka. With biting wit, Dutourd presents the story of Edmund Du Chaillu, a boy born, to his bou
No set of novels so richly recreates the last days of India under British rule—"two nations locked in an imperial embrace"—as Paul Scott's historical tour de force, The Raj Quartet. The J
India, 1943: In a regimental hill station, the ladies of Pankot struggle to preserve the genteel fa?ade of British society amid the debris of a vanishing empire and World War II. A retired missionary
Fragments is a story about how war can make everything explosive—even love—and how two friends try to put the pieces of their lives together again."[Fragments] makes the usual semi-autobiographic
Set in Rembrandt's Amsterdam, "An Obscure Man" is the story of Nathanael—innocent, open to experience—born like Everyman upon the stream of life. In "A Lovely Morning," Nathanael's young son joins a t
In this exuberantly satirical novel, the tutor Atzbacher has beensummoned by his friend Reger to meet him in a Viennese museum. WhileReger gazes at a Tintoretto portrait, Atzbacher—who fears Reger'spl
Set in nineteenth-century rural Africa, Fiela's Child tells the gripping story of Fiela Komoetie and a white, three-year old child, Benjamin, whom she finds crying on her doorstep. For nine years Fie
The narrator, a scientist working on antibodies and suffering from emotional and mental illness, meets a Persian woman, the companion of a Swiss engineer, at an office in rural Austria. For the scien
The Conquerors describes the struggle between the Kuomintang and the Communists in the Cantonese revolution of the 1920s. It is both an exciting war story and a gallery of intellectual portraits: a ru
"A brilliant achievement. . . .Like the best work of Greene and Le Carré, it is more than genre fiction; it is literature. . . .[Convergence] is the most plausible, and perhaps the best spy novel
Cy Riemer—fifty-ish, divorced, and father of four—surveys the dispersal of his family with a mixture of anxiety, humor, sadness, and pride. In this wry, moving, and wise novel, Richard Stern offers hi
Nathan, a blind Jewish scribe, tells the story of the coming of the Messiah in the person of one Simon Stern—from his birth on the Lower East Side, through his career as a millionaire dealer in real e
