| Kahawa | Donald E Westlake | Each ant emerged from the skull bearing an infinitesimal portion of brain. | Buy | |
| White Teeth | Zadie Smith | Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.
At 0627 hours on January 1, 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was
dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer
Estate facedown on the steering wheel, hoping the judgment would
not be too heavy upon him. He lay in a prostrate cross, jaw
slack, arms splayed on either side like some fallen angel;
scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left)
and his marriage license (right), for he had decided to take his
mistakes with him. | Buy | |
| Roots | Alex Haley | Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte. | Buy | |
| High Sierra | W R Burnett | Early in the twentieth century, when Roy Earle was a happy boy on an Indiana farm, he had no idea that at thirty-seven he'd be a pardoned ex-convict driving alone through the Nevada-California desert toward an ambiguous destiny in the Far West. | Buy | |
| Novel With Cocaine | M Ageyev | Early one morning I, Vadim Maslennikov, set off for school (I was going on seventeen at the time) having forgotten the envelope with the first-semester fees Mother had left me in the dining room the day before. | Buy | |
| The Steppe | Anton Pavlovich Chekhov | Early one morning in July a shabby covered chaise, one of those
antediluvian chaises without springs in which no one travels in
Russia nowadays, except merchants' clerks, dealers and the less
well-to-do among priests, drove out of N., the principal town of
the province of Z., and rumbled noisily along the posting-track. | Buy | |
| The Hounds of Spring | Sylvia Thompson | Edgar Renner dozed and ruminated through the July afternoon. | Buy | |
| Ten North Frederick | John O'Hara | Edith Chapin was alone in her sewing room on the third floor of
the house at Number 10 Frederick Street. | Buy | |
| The Tie That Binds | Kent Haruf | Edith Goodnough isn't in the country anymore. | Buy | |
| A Gentleman Adventurer: The Arctic Diaries of Richard Bonnycastle | Heather Robertson | Edmonton; June 19: Mr. Conn and I paid a courtesy call at the Fur Trade office, and left what clothing we would not need on the trip to go into cold storage. | Buy | |
| Clayhanger | Arnold Bennett | Edwin Clayhanger stood on the steep-sloping, red-bricked canal bridge, in the valley between Bursley and its suburb Hillport. | Buy | |
| The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse | Louise Erdrich | Eighty-some years previous, through a town that was to flourish
and past a farm that would disappear, the river slid--all that
happened began with that flow of water. The town on its banks
was very new and its main street was a long curved road that
followed the will of a muddy river full of brush, silt, and
oxbows that threw the whole town off the strict clean grid laid
out by railroad plat. | Buy | |
| Sabbath's Theater | Philip Roth | Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over. | Buy | |
| The Everlasting Story of Nory | Nicholson Baker | Eleanor Winslow was a nine-year-old girl from America with straight brown bangs and brown eyes. | Buy | |
| Lincoln | Gore Vidal | Elihu B. Washburne opened his gold watch. | Buy | |
| The Winthrop Woman | Anya Seton | Elizabeth saw the hedge shadows lengthening across the dusty lane
as the Fones family jogged north towards Groton. And yet, only a
few minutes ago the church at Boxford had been full of light. | Buy | |
| Elmer Gantry | Sinclair Lewis | Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk. | Buy | |
| Airframe | Michael Crichton | Emily Jansen sighed in relief. The long flight was nearing an
end. Morning sunlight streamed through the windows of the
airplane. | Buy | |
| Joy Street | Frances Parkinson Keyes | Emily Thayer stood beside the Christmas tree in the drawing room
of the old Forbes house on Louisburg Square, looking out at the
candle-lighted windows across the park and listening to the
carolers who came stamping through the snow. At least, this was
what she appeared to be doing. | Buy | |
| Emma | Jane Austen | Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. | Buy | Read |
| Honour This Day | Alexander Kent | English Harbour, in fact the whole island of Antigua, seemed to crouch motionless as if pinned down by the noon sun. | Buy | |
| Silent Thunder | Loren D Estleman | Ernest Krell loathed windows. | Buy | |
| Measure for Measure | William Shakespeare | Escalus. | Buy | |
| Till We Meet Again | Judith Krantz | Eve Coudert held out her five-franc note to the ticket-seller.
She gave him a nonchalant smile as she paid for a ride in the
hot-air balloon that lay tethered on the huge field of La
Maladiere, outside of Dijon, where the great Air Show of 1910 was
in its last day. | Buy | |
| The Recognitions | William Gaddis | Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the
mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as
reality. | Buy | |
| Maisie Dobbs | Jacqueline Winspear | Even if she hadn't been the last person to walk through the
turnstile at Watten Street tube station, Jack Barker would have
noticed the tall, slender woman in the navy blue, thigh-length
jacket with a matching pleated skirt short enough to reveal a
well-turned ankle. | Buy | |
| Mists of Avalon | Marion Zimmer Bradley | Even in high summer, Tintagel was a haunted place; Igraine, Lady of Duke Gorlois, looked out over the sea from the headland. | Buy | |
| 2010: Odyssey Two | Arthur C Clarke | Even in this metric age, it was still the thousand-foot
telescope, not the three-hundred-meter one. | Buy | |
| The Rocksburg Railroad Murders | KC Constantine | Even with the hand-talkies, it took Chief Mario Balzic a half hour after the game to get the auxiliary police coordinated. | Buy | |
| Hearts of Three | Jack London | Events happened very rapidly with Francis Morgan that late spring
morning. | Buy | |
| H.M. Pulham, Esquire | John Phillips Marquand | Ever since Bo-jo Brown and I had gone to one of those country day
schools for little boys, Bo-jo had possessed what are known as
"qualities of leadership"; that is to say, he had what it takes
to be the Head Boy of the School. | Buy | |
| The Temple of the Golden Pavilion | Yukio Mishima | Ever since my childhood, Father had often spoken to me about the
Golden Temple. | Buy | |
| Mary | Sholem Asch | Every dawn renews the Beginning, and to behold the earth struggling out of the formless void, out of the night, is to witness the act of creation. | Buy | |
| Waiting | Ha Jin (pseudonym of Xuefei Jin) | Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his
wife, Shuyu. | Buy | |
| Ice Palace | Edna Ferber | Every third woman you passed on Gold Street in Baranof was young,
pretty, and pregnant. The men, too, were young, virile, and
pregnant with purpose. | Buy | |
| The Haunted Man | Charles Dickens | Everybody said so. | Buy | |
| The Pretenders | Gwen Davis | Everyone assumed the funeral would be held at Frank E.
Campbell's. During his lifetime, Harry had worked too hard to
get to the upper East Side for his memorial service to be held
anywhere other than Madison Avenue and Eighty-second Street. | Buy | |
| Go Tell It to the Mountain | James Baldwin | Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. | Buy | |
| The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz | Joan Rivers | Everyone in Larchmont knew that Heidi was a tramp the day she
came home from the hospital. | Buy | |
| Lovey Mary | Alice Caldwell Rice | Everything about Lovey Mary was a contradiction, from her hands
and feet, which seemed to have been meant for a big girl, to her
high ideals and aspirations, that ought to have belonged to an
amiable one. The only ingredient which might have reconciled all
the conflicting elements in her chaotic little bosom was one
which no one had ever taken the trouble to supply. | Buy | |
| Wanderlust | Danielle Steel | Everything in the house shone as the sun streamed in through the
long French windows. The carved mahogany mantelpiece in one of
the two front parlors had been polished until it sparkled, its
carved rosettes and female busts oiled to perfection. The long
marquetry table in the center of the room was equally handsome
and had been equally well tended, although it was almost
impossible to see it beneath the stacks of treasures that had
been gathering there for weeks. | Buy | |
| Emile | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of
things, degenerates in the hands of man. | Buy | |
| Hogfather: A Novel of Discworld | Terry Pratchett | Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree. | Buy | |
| The Marathon Man | William Goldman | Everytime he drove through Yorkville, Rosenbaum got angry, just on general principles. | Buy | |
| Late Call | Angus Wilson | Everywhere the clayey soil was baked as hard as rock, even in the
farmyard and the pigsties where normally the least shower of rain
kept the usual thick seas of mud churning. | Buy | |
| The Matilda Hunter Murder | Harry Stephen Keeler | Evidently four of the five patients in the emergency ward of the Nurse Cavell Memorial Hospital on West Superior Street, Chicago, considered that the excitement was over for the evening, for they all settled back resignedly on their beds and commenced staring at the shaded electric light bulbs that had just been lighted. | Buy | |
| A Passage to India | E M Forster | Except for the Marabar Caves - and they are twenty miles off - the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. | Buy | |
| The Demolished Man | Alfred Bester | Explosion! Concussion! The vault doors burst open. And deep inside, the money is racked ready for pillage, rapine, loot. | Buy | |
| Trout Fishing in America | Richard Brautigan | Expressing a human need, I've always wanted to write a book that
ended with the word Mayonnaise. | Buy | |
