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| Books in database: 3164 | ||||||||
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| P is for Peril | Sue Grafton | The house on Old Reservoir Road appeared to be in the final phrases of construction. I spotted the site as I rounded the curve, recognizing the unfinished structure from Fiona Purcell's description. To my right, I could see a portion of the reservoir for which the road was named. Brunswick Lake fills the bottom of a geographical bowl, a spring-fed body that supplied the town with drinking water for many years. | Buy | |
| Paco's Story | Larry Heinemann | Let's begin with the first clean fact, James: This ain't no war story. | Buy | |
| Pagan Babies | Elmore Leonard | The church had become a tomb where forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains had been lying on the concrete floor the past five years, though not lying where they had been shot with Kalashnikovs or hacked to death with machetes. The benches had been removed and the bodies reassembled: men, women and small children laid in rows of skulls and spines, femurs, fragments of cloth stuck to mummified remains, many of the adults missing feet, all missing bones had been carried off by scavenging dogs. | Buy | |
| Palace of Desire | Naguib Mahfouz | Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad closed the door behind him and crossed the courtyard of his house by the pale light of the stars. His step was lethargic, and his walking stick sank into the dusty earth whenever he leaned on it wearily. He felt on fire and craved cold water so he could wash his face, head, and neck and escape, if only briefly, from the July heat and from the inferno in his belly and head. | Buy | |
| Palace Walk | Naguib Mahfouz | She woke at midnight. She always woke up then without having to rely on an alarm clock. A wish that had taken root in her awoke her with great accuracy. For a few moments she was not sure she was awake. Images from her dreams and perceptions mixed together in her mind. She was troubled by anxiety before opening her eyes, afraid sleep had deceived here. Shaking her head gently, she gazed at the total darkness of the room. There was no clue by which to judge the time. | Buy | |
| Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov | Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A. | Buy | |
| Pale Gray for Guilt | John D MacDonald | The next to last time I saw Tush Bannon alive was the very same day I had that new little boat running the way I wanted it to run, after about six weeks of futzing around with it. | Buy | |
| Pale Horse, Pale Rider | Katherine Anne Porter | She was a spirited-looking young woman, with dark curly hair cropped and parted on the side, a short oval face with straight eyebrows, and a large curved mouth. A round white collar rose from the neck of her tightly buttoned black basque, and round white cuffs set off lazy hands with dimples in them, lying at ease in the folds of her flounced skirt which gathered around to a bustle. | Buy | |
| Papillon | Henri Charriere | The blow was such a stunner that it was thirteen years before I could get back on my feet again. | Buy | |
| Parade's End | Ford Madox Ford | The two young men--they were of the English public official class--sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage. The leather straps to the windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne. The compartment smelt faintly, hygienically of admirable varnish; the train ran as smoothly--Tietjens remember thinking--as British gilt-edged securities. It travelled fast; yet had it swayed or jolted over the rail joints, except at the curve before Tonbridge or over the points at Ashford where these eccentricities are expected and allowed for, Macmaster, Tietjens felt certain, would have written to the company. Perhaps he would even have written to the Times. | Buy | |
| Paradise | Toni Morrison | They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun. | Buy | |
| Paradise Lost | John Milton | Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden. | Buy | |
| Paris Trout | Pete Dexter | In the spring of that year an epidemic of rabies broke out in Ether County, Georgia. | Buy | |
| Party Going | Henry Green | Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet. | Buy | |
| Pat the Bunny | Dorothy Kunhardt | Here are Paul and Judy, They can do lots of things. You can do lots of things. Judy can pat the bunny. Now you can pat the bunny. | Buy | |
| Patricia Plays a Part | Mabel Barnes-Grundy | "Are you listening, or have you both suddenly become deaf?" | Buy | |
| Patriot Games | Tom Clancy | Ryan was nearly killed twice in half an hour. | Buy | |
| Paul Clifford | Edward George Bulwer-Lytton | It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps the struggled against the darkness. | Buy | |
| Pavane | Keith John Kingston Roberts | Durnovaria, England, 1968. The appointed morning came, and they buried Eli Strange. The coffin, black and purple drapes twitched aside, eased down into the grave; the white webbings slid through the hands of the bearers in nomine Patris, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancti . . . The earth took back her own. And miles away Iron Margaret cried cold and wreathed with steam, drove her great sea-voice across the hills. | Buy | |
| Payment Deferred | C S Forester | "Be quiet, children," said Mrs. Marble. | Buy | |
| Peachtree Road | Anne Rivers Siddons | The South killed Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable on the day she was born. It just took her until now to die. It was a textbook murder, classical in concept, faultless is execution; a work of art, really, as such things go. And no wonder. It's what we do best, kill our women. Or maim them. Or make monsters of them, which may be the worst of all. | Buy | |
| Peder Victorious | Ole Edvart Rolvaag | The moment the sun lifted his red face above the horizon, Peder was up; and in summer, just after the face had dropped out of sight, Peder was in bed again. . . . Strange old sun . . . He often wondered what could make that face so red morning and evening. Perhaps weariness with shining so hard all the time. Since he himself often felt drowsy and full when evening came, Peder could very well understand this. . . . | Buy | |
| Peg Woffington | Charles Reade | About the middle of the last century, at eight o'clock in the evening, in a large but poor apartment, a man was slumbering on a rough couch. His rusty and worn suit of black was of a piece with his uncarpeted room, the deal table of home manufacture, and its slim unsnuffed candle. | Buy | |
| Penrod | Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) | Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog. | Buy | |
| Pere Goriot | Honore de Balzac | Mme. Vauquer (nee de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in the neighborhood as the Maison Vauquer) receives men and women, old and young, and no word has ever been breathed against her respectable establishment; but, at the same time, it must be said that as a matter of fact no young woman has been under her roof for thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for any length of time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be allowance must be of the slenderest. In 1819, however, the time when this drama opens, there was an almost penniless young girl among Mme. Vauquer's boarders. | Buy | |
| Pere Goriot | Honore de Balzac | Mme. Vauquer (nee de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in the neighborhood as the Maison Vauquer) receives men and women, old and young, and no word has ever been breathed against her respectable establishment; but, at the same time, it must be said that as a matter of fact no young woman has been under her roof for thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for any length of time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be allowance must be of the slenderest. In 1819, however, the time when this drama opens, there was an almost penniless young girl among Mme. Vauquer's boarders. | Buy | |
| Peregrine Pickle | Tobias George Smollett | In a certain county of England, bounded on one side by the sea, and at the distance of one hundred miles from the metropolis, lived Gamaliel Pickle Esq; the father of that hero whose adventures we propose to record. | Buy | |
| Perelandra | C S Lewis | As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit. | Buy | |
| Pericles Prince of Tyre | William Shakespeare | To sing a song that old was sung, From ashes ancient Gower is come, Assuming man's infirmities To glad your ear and please your eyes. | Buy | |
| Personal History | Katharine Graham | My parents' paths first crossed in a museum on 23rd Street in New York. It was Lincoln's Birthday, 1908. Eugene Meyer, who was thirty-two years old, had been in business for himself for only a few years, but had already made several million dollars. Agnes Ernst, just twenty-one and a recent graduate of Barnard, was strikingly beautiful. She was earning her own living and helping to support her family as well by her free-lance work for a newspaper. | Buy | |
| Personal Injuries | Scott Turow | He knew it was wrong. And that he was going to get caught. He
said he knew this day was coming. He knew they had been stupid, he told me--worse, greedy. He said he knew he should have stopped. But somehow, each time he thought they'd quit, he'd ask himself how once more could make it any worse. Now he knew he was in trouble. | Buy | |
| Personal Memoirs | Ulysses Simpson Grant | My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral. | Buy | |
| Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by The Sieur Louis de Conte | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth. | Buy | |
| Persuader | Lee Child | The cop climbed out of his car exactly four minutes before he got shot. | Buy | |
| Persuasion | Jane Austen | Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. | Buy | |
| Pet Sematary | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly what happened . . . although he called this man a friend, as a grown man must do when he finds the man who should have been his father relatively late in life. | Buy | |
| Peter | Francis Hopkinson Smith | Peter was still poring over his ledger one dark afternoon in December, his bald head glistening like a huge ostrich egg under the flare of the overhead gas jets, when Patrick, the night watchman, catching sight of my face peering through the outer grating, opened the door of the Bank. | Buy | |
| Peter Pan | Sir James Matthew Barrie | All children, except one, grow up. | Buy | |
| Peter Simple | Captain Maryatt | If I cannot narrate a life of adventurous and daring exploits, fortunately I have no heavy crimes to confess; and, if I do not rise in the estimation of the reader for acts of gallantry and devotion in my country's cause, at least I may claim the merit of zealous and perservering continuance in my vocation. | Buy | |
| Peter Simple | Captain Frederick Marryat | If I cannot narrate a life of adventurous and daring exploits, fortunately I have no heavy crimes to confess: and, if I do not rise in the estimation of the reader for acts of gallantry and devotion in my country's cause, at least I may claim the merit of zealous and persevering continuance in my vocation. We are all of us variously gifted from Above, and he who is content to walk, instead of to run, on his allotted path through life, although he may not so rapidly attain the goal, has the advantage of not being out of breath upon his arrival. | Buy | |
| Peyton Place | Grace Metalious | Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one in never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. | Buy | |
| Phineas Gage | John Fleischman | The most unlucky/lucky moment in the life of Phineas Gage is only a minute or two away. | Buy | |
| Pictures from Italy | Charles Dickens | If the readers of this volume will be so kind as to take their credentials for the different places which are the subject of its author's reminiscences, from the Author himself, perhaps they may visit them, in fancy, the more agreeably, and with a better understanding of what they are to expect. | Buy | |
| Pierre | Herman Melville | There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. | Buy | |
| Pigs in Heaven | Barbara Kingsolver | Women on their own run in Alice's family. | Buy | |
| Pilgrim's Inn | Elizabeth Goudge | The sun shining through the uncurtained east window woke Sally to a new day. | Buy | |
| Pinocchio | Carlo Collodi | Once upon a time there was . . . "A king!" my young readers will instantly exclaim. No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood." | Buy | |
| Pitcairn's Island | Charles Nordhoff and James Hall | On a day late in December, in the year of 1789, while the earth turned steadily on its course, a moment came when the sunlight illuminated San Roque, easternmost cape of the three Americas. Moving swiftly westward, a thousand miles each hour, the light swept over the jungle of the Amazons, and glittered along the icy summits of the Andes. Presently the level rays brought day to the Peruvian coast and moved on, across a vast stretch of lonely sea. | Buy | |
| Plains Song | Wright Morris | It is a curse in this family that all women bear only daughters, if anything at all. | Buy | |
| Playback | Raymond Chandler | The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn't hear too well what it said--partly because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down. | Buy | |
| Pleading Guilty | Scott Turow | The Management Oversight Committee of our firm, known among the partnership simply as "the Committee," meets each Monday at 3:00 p.m. over coffee and chocolate brioche, these three hotshots, the heads of the firm's litigations, transactional, and regulatory departments, decide what's what at Gage & Griswell for another week. | Buy | |
| Plum Island | Nelson DeMille | Through my binoculars, I could see this nice forty-something-foot cabin cruiser anchored a few hundred yards offshore. | Buy | |
| Plunder Squad | Richard Stark | Hearing the click behind him, Parker threw his glass straight back over his right shoulder, and dove off his chair to the left. | Buy | |
| Point Counter Point | Aldous Huxley | "You won't be late?" There was anxiety in Marjorie Carling's voice, there was something like entreaty. | Buy | |
| Point of Impact | Stephen Hunter | It was November, cold and wet in west Arkansas, a miserable dawn following on a miserable night. | Buy | |
| Point of No Return | John Phillips Marquand | Charles Gray had not thought for a long time, consciously at least, about Clyde, Massachusetts, and he sometimes wondered later what caused him to do so one morning in mid-April, 1947. | Buy | |
| Point of Origin | Patricia Cornwell | Benton Wesley was taking off his running shoes in my kitchen when I ran to him, my heart tripping over fear and hate and remembered horror. | Buy | |
| Poland | James A. Michener | In a small Polish farm community, during the fall planting season of 1981, events occurred which electrified the world, sending reverberations of magnitude to capitals as diverse as Washington, Peking and especially Moscow. | Buy | |
| Politically Correct Bedtime Stories | James Finn Garner | When they were first written, the stories on which the following tales are based certainly served their purpose--to entrench the patriarchy, to estrange people from their own natural impulses, to demonize "evil" and to "reward" an objective "good." However much we might like to, we cannot blame the Brothers Grimm for their insensitively to woman's issues, minority cultures, and the environment. | Buy | |
| Pollyanna | Eleanor Hodgman Porter | Miss Polly Harrington entered her kitchen a little hurriedly this June morning. Miss Polly did not usually make hurried movements; she specially prided herself on her repose of manner. But to-day she was hurrying--actually hurrying. | Buy | |
| Pollyanna Grows Up | Eleanor Hodgman Porter | Della Wetherby tripped up the somewhat imposing steps of her sister's Commonwealth Avenue home and pressed an energetic finger against the electric-bell button. | Buy | |
| Poor No More | Robert Chester Ruark | Young Sam Price stepped out of a patch of gray-dusty, dry-scraggly mesquite. | Buy | |
| Population: 485 | Michael Perry | Summer here comes on like a zaftig hippie chick, jazzed on chlorophyll and flinging fistfuls of butterflies to the sun. | Buy | |
| Port Of Saints | William S Burroughs | When Mr. Wilson, the American Consul, arrived at his office he noticed a young man sitting by the reception desk, and he hoped that whatever the young man wanted could be handled by the Vice Consul, Mr. Carter. | Buy | |
| Portnoy's Complaint | Philip Roth | She was so deeply imbedded in my conciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. | Buy | |
| Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce | Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. | Buy | |
| Possessing the Secret of Joy | Alice Walker | I did not realize for a long time that I was dead. | Buy | |
| Possession | Antonia Susan Byatt | The book was thick and black and covered with dust. | Buy | |
| Possession: A Romance | A S Byatt | The book was thick and black and covered with dust. | Buy | |
| Preserve and Protect | Allen Stuart Drury | Sometimes he read. | Buy | |
| Presumed Innocent | Scott Turow | "I should feel sorrier," Raymond Horgan says. I wonder at first if he is talking about the eulogy he is going to deliver. He has just looked over his notes again and is returning two index cards to the breast pocket of his blue serge suit. But when I catch his expression I recognize that his remark was personal. | Buy | |
| Pretend You Don't See Her | Mary Higgins Clark | It was the week after Labor Day, and from the steady ringing of the phones in the offices of Parker and Parker, it was clear to Lacey that the summer doldrums finally were over. | Buy | |
| Prey | Michael Crichton | Things never turn out the way you think they will. | Buy | |
| Prey | Michael Crichton | It's midnight now. The house is dark. I am not sure how this will turn out. | Buy | |
| Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. | Buy | Read |
| Pride's Castle | Frank Yerby | The middle years--the eighteen-seventies, 'eighties, 'nineties--were a time of moral bankruptcy when men stole millions by a stroke of the pen or by the simple expedient of printing tons of worthless paper. | Buy | |
| Primary Colors | Joe Klein | He was a big fellow, looking seriously pale on the streets of Harlem in deep summer. | Buy | |
| Primary Colors | Anonymous (Joe Klein) | He was a big fellow, looking seriously pale on the streets of Harlem in deep summer. I am small and not so dark, not very threatening to Caucasians; I do not strut my stuff. | Buy | |
| Primary Colors | Anonymous | He was a big fellow, looking seriously pale on the streets of Harlem in deep summer. I am small and not so dark, not very threatening to Caucasians; I do not strut my stuff. | Buy | |
| Prince of Foxes | Samuel Shellabarger | It was to be a lute this time, a lute fit for an angel. Perfect. Incomparable. | Buy | |
| Prince of the Palais Royle | Max Pemberton | Oh, yes, I remember her perfectly ... in the year 1862 ... the woman Lola Ferez, of whom all Paris had begun to talk. | Buy | |
| Prince Otto | Robert Louis Stevenson | You shall seek in vain upon the map of Europe for the bygone state of Grünewald. | Buy | |
| Princess Daisy | Judith Krantz | "We could always shoot this on top of the RCA Building," Daisy said, walking past the parapet, above which rose a high, metal railing designed to forestall would-be suicides. "They're not nearly as paranoid as you Empire State people." She gestured scornfully at the ledge behind her. "But, Mr. Jones, if it's not the view from precisely here, the message just won't be New York." | Buy | |
| Prisoner's Hope | David Feintuch | Admiral Tremaine drew himself up, jowls pursed in indignation. | Buy | |
| Private Eyeful | Henry Kane | On a dusty day in New York--hot afternoon in the springtime--Miss Marla Trent and Mr. William Winkle were seated in desultory tete-a-tete in the major office (Marla's) of MARLA TRENT ENTERPRISES. | Buy | |
| Private Worlds | Phyllis Bottome | Jane Everest glanced about her sitting-room to see if she hadn't an excuse for moving about in it. But it was relentlessly tidy. The file burned brightly, a tray with whisky-and-soda stood, equally ready, for triumph or defeat. | Buy | |
| Prizzi's Honor | Richard Condon | Corrado Prizzi's granddaughter was being married before the baroque altar of Santa Grazia de Traghetto, the lucky church of the Prizzi family. | Buy | |
| Prodigal Summer | Barbara Kingsolver | Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed. | Buy | |
| Pudd'nhead Wilson | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson's Landing, on
the Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day's journey, per
steamboat, below St. Louis. In 1830 it was a snug little collection of modest one- and two-story frame dwellings whose whitewashed exteriors were almost concealed from sight by climbing tangles of rose-vines, honeysuckles and morning-glories. | Buy | |
| Pylon | William Faulkner | For a full minutes Jiggs stood before the window in a light splatter of last night's confetti lying against the windowbase like spent dirty foam, lightpoised on the balls of his greasestained tennis shoes, looking at the boots. | Buy | |
| Pyramids | Terry Pratchett | Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces. | Buy |