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| T. Tembarom | Frances Hodgson Burnett | The boys at the Brooklyn public school which he attended did not know what the "T." stood for. He would never tell them. All he said in reply to questions was: "It don't stand for nothin'. You've gotter have a' 'nitial, ain't you?" His name was, in fact, an almost inevitable school-boy modification of one felt to be absurd and pretentious. His Christian name was Temple, which became "Temp." His surname was Barom, so he was at once "Temp Barom." In the natural tendency to avoid waste of time it was pronounced as one word, and the letter p being superfluous and cumbersome, it easily settled itself into "Tembarom," and there remained. | Buy | |
| Tai-Pan | James Clavell | "A pox on this stinking island," Brock said, staring around the beach and up at the mountains. "The whole of China at our feets and all we takes be this barren, sodding rock." | Buy | |
| Tai-Pan | James Clavell | Dirk Struan came up onto the quarterdeck of the flagship H.M.S. Vengeance, and strode for the gangway. The 74-gun ship of the line was anchored half a mile off the island. Surrounding her were the rest of the fleet's warships, the troopships of the expeditionary force, and the merchantmen and opium clippers of the China traders. | Buy | |
| Tales of a Female Nomad | Rita Golden Gelman | 1985. I am living someone else's life. | Buy | |
| Tales of the Night | Peter Høeg | On March 18, 1929, a young Dane, David Rehn, was in attendance when the railway line from Cabinda, near the mouth of the Congo, to Katanga in Central Africa was dedicated to integrity. | Buy | |
| Talk Before Sleep | Elizabeth Berg | This morning, before I came to Ruth's house, I made yet another casserole for my husband and my daughter. | Buy | |
| Tante | Anne Douglas Sedgwick | It was the evening of Madame Okraska's concert at the old St. James's Hall. London was still the place of the muffled roar and the endearing ugliness. | Buy | |
| Tapestry of Spies | Stephen Hunter | The trial of the assassin Benny Lal in the old courthouse at Moulmein, lower Burma, in February of 1931, caused a bit of a stir in its own day, but its memory has not lingered. | Buy | |
| Tara Road | Maeve Binchy | Ria's mother had always been very fond of film stars. It was a matter of sadness to her that Clark Gable had died on the day that Ria was born. | Buy | |
| Tarus Bulba | Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol | "Turn round, my boy! How ridiculous you look! What sort of a priest's cassock have you got on? Does everybody at the academy dress like that?" | Buy | |
| Tarzan Alive | Philip José Farmer | This is a biography of a living person. | Buy | |
| Tarzan at the Earth's Core | Edgar Rice Burroughs | Tarzan of the Apes paused to listen and to sniff the air. | Buy | |
| Tarzan of the Apes | Edgar Rice Burroughs | I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. | Buy | |
| Tell No Man | Adela Rogers St. Johns | This is a true story. As you will see, it is incumbent upon me to tell it as a novel. | 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 | |
| Tender Is the Night | F Scott Fitzgerald | On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. | Buy | |
| Terms of Endearment | Larry McMurtry | "The success of a marriage invariably depends on the woman," Mrs. Greenway said. | Buy | |
| Tess of the D'Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy | On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. | Buy | |
| Tess of the D'Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy | On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where his thumb came in taking it off. Presently he was met by an elderly parson astride on a gray mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering tune. | Buy | |
| Testimony of Two Men | Taylor Caldwell | When young Robert Sylvester Morgan had occasion to write his mother he always made what he wryly called "a first draft." | Buy | |
| Texas | James A. Michener | I was surprised when shortly after New Year's Day of 1983, the Governor of Texas summoned me to his office, because I hadn't been aware that he knew I was in town. | Buy | |
| The #7 File | William P McGivern | At ten-thirty in the morning a big man in a black leather jacket turned off Second Avenue into Thirty-first Street. | Buy | |
| The 120-Hour Clock | Francis M Nevins | The word went out from North Jersey and crossed the Hudson on phone lines that were checked for bugs three times a day, and filtered down through various layers of impolite society in the boroughs of the City of New York. | Buy | |
| The 13 Clocks | James Thurber | Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. | Buy | |
| The 151b. Matchmaker | Jill Limber | Today might qualify as theworst day of Jolie Carleton's life. | Buy | |
| The 42nd Parallel | John Roderigo Dos Passos | It was that emancipated race That was chargin up the hill Up to where them insurrectos Was afightin fit to kill CAPITAL CITY'S CENTURY CLOSED General Miles with his gaudy uniform and spirited charger was the center for all eyes especially as his steed was extremely restless. | Buy | |
| The 47 Ronin Story | John Allyn | March 13, 1701. The sun completed its route over the Pacific and began to set, reddening the waters around the islands of Japan. | Buy | |
| The Abbess Of Vlaye | Stanley J Weyman | Monsieur des Ageaux was a man of whom his best friends could not say that he shone, or tried to shine, in pursuit of the fair sex. | Buy | |
| The Ability to Kill | Eric Ambler | Word goes round the court that the jury is returning. | Buy | |
| The Accidental Tourist | Anne Tyler | They were supposed to stay at the beach a week, but neither of them had the heart for it and they decided to come back early. | Buy | |
| The Adventure of the Speckled Band | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic. | Buy | |
| The Adventurer | Mika Waltari | I was born and bred in a distant region that cosmographers call Finlandia, a beautiful and far-flung country unknown to most educated people. | Buy | |
| The Adventurers | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | It was ten years after the violence in which he died. And his time on this earth was over. | Buy | |
| The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow | I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles. | Buy | |
| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter | Buy | |
| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly--Tom's Aunt Polly, she is--and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before. | Buy | |
| The Adventures of Roderick Random | Tobias George Smollett | I was born in the northern part of this united kingdom, in the house of my grandfather; a gentleman of considerable fortune and influence, who had, on many occasions, signalised himself in behalf of his country; and was remarkable for his abilities in the law, which he exercised with great success, in the station of a judge, particularly against beggars, for whom he had a singular aversion. | Buy | |
| The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | Mark Twain | "TOM!" | Buy | |
| The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | "TOM!" No answer. "TOM!" No answer. "What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!" No answer. The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked through them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not service--she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear: "Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll--" | Buy | |
| The Aeneid | Virgil | Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by fate, And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate, Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore. [Lat., Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit Litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto Vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram.] | Buy | |
| The Aeneid | Virgil | I sing of arms and the man. | Buy | |
| The Aerodrome | Rex Ernest Warner | It would be difficult to overestimate the importance to me of the events which had taken place previous to the hour (it was shortly after ten o'clock in the morning) when I was lying in the marsh near the small pond at the bottom of Gurney's meadow, my face in the mud and the black mud beginning to ooze through the spaces between the fingers of my outstretched hands, drunk, but not blindly so, for I seemed only to have lost the use of my limbs. | Buy | |
| The African Queen | C S Forester | Although she herself was ill enough to justify being in bed had she been a person weak-minded enough to give up, Rose Sayer could see that her brother, the Reverend Samuel Sayer, was far more ill. | Buy | |
| The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton | On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York | Buy | |
| The Age of Innocence | Edith Newbold Wharton (nee Jones) | On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York. | Buy | |
| The Age of Reason | Jean Paul Sartre | Half-way down the Rue Vercingétorix, a tall man seized Matthieu by the arm: a policeman was patrolling the opposite pavement.. | Buy | |
| The Agony and the Ecstasy | Irving Stone | He sat before the mirror of the second-floor bedroom stretching his lean cheeks with their high bone ridges, the flat broad forehead, and ears too far back on the head, the dark hair curling forward in thatches, the amber-colored eyes wide-set but heavy-lidded. | Buy | |
| The Alexandria Quartet | Lawrence George Durrell | The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. | Buy | |
| The Alibi | Sandra Brown | He noticed her the moment she stepped into the pavilion. Even in a crowd of other women dressed, for the most part, in skimpy summer clothing, she was definitely a standout. Surprisingly, she was alone. | Buy | |
| The Alibi | Sandra Brown | The scream rent the air-conditioned silence of the hotel corridor. | Buy | |
| The Alienist | Caleb Carr | Theodore is in the ground. | Buy | |
| The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton | Jane Smiley | I have made up my mind to begin my account upon the first occasion when I truly knew where things stood with me, that is, that afternoon of the day my father, Arthur Harkness, was taken to the Quincy graveyard and buried between my mother, Cora Mary Harkness, and his first wife, Ella Harkness. | Buy | |
| The Amateur Gentleman | Jeffrey Farnol | John Barty, ex-champion of England and landlord of the 'Coursing Hound,' sat screwed round in his chair with his eyes yet turned to the door that has closed after the departing lawyer fully five minutes ago, and his eyes were wide and blank, and his mouth (grim and close-lipped as a rule) gaped, becoming aware of which, he closed it with a snap, and passed a great knotted fist across his brow. | Buy | |
| The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay | Michael Chabon | In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. "To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of The Comics Journal. | Buy | |
| The Amazing Interlude | Mary Roberts Rinehart | The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for most of us but one setting. | Buy | |
| The Amazing Web | Harry Stephen Keeler | Al Lipke, his sleek black hair parted in the middle, his checked suit pressed to fit every curve of his well shaped form, his lone valise unpacked and its contents placed on the bureau, took from the bell boy of the Hotel McAlpin in New York City the Chicago newspaper he had just sent out for, and dismissing the boy with the usual gratuity went over to the tiny desk at the window which looked out on Broadway. | Buy | |
| The Ambassador | Morris L. West | As a diplomat I have a good record. In his valedictory letter the President called it "a distinguished and meritorious career, the sum of whose service represents a great profit to the United States of America." | Buy | |
| The Ambassadors | Henry James Jr | Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconnected. | Buy | |
| The Ambushers | Donald Hamilton | The natives call it the River of Goats, the Rio de las Cabras. | Buy | |
| The American | Henry James Jr | On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carre, in the Museum of the Louvre. | Buy | |
| The American Claimant | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | It is a matchless morning in rural England. | Buy | |
| The Andromeda Strain | Michael Crichton | A man with binoculars. That is how it began: with a man standing by the side of the road, on a crest overlooking a small Arizona town, on a winter night. | Buy | |
| The Anti-Death League | Kingsley Amis | A girl and an older woman were walking along a metalled pathway. | Buy | |
| The Anubis Gates | Tim Powers | From between two trees at the crest of the hill a very old man watched, with a nostalgic longing he thought he'd lost all capacity for, as the last group of picnickers packed up their baskets, mounted their horses, and rode away south--they moved a little hastily, for it was a good six miles back to London, and the red sun was already silhouetting the branches of the trees along the River Brent, two miles to the west. | Buy | |
| The Apostle | Sholem Asch | Seven weeks had gone by since that memorable day when on the hill of Golgotha Yeshua of Nazareth had been crucified by command of Pontius Pilate. The disciples and followers of the crucified one had left the city and gone into hiding among their own on the Mount of Olives. | Buy | |
| The Aquitaine Progression | Robert Ludlum | Geneva. City of sunlight and bright reflections. Of billowing white sails on the lake--sturdy, irregular buildings above, their rippling images on the water below. Of myriad flowers surrounding blue-green pools of fountains--duets of exploding colors. Of small quaint bridges arching over the glassy surfaces of man-made ponds to tiny man-made islands, sanctuaries for lovers and friends and quiet negotiators. Reflections. | Buy | |
| The Arrangement | Elia Kazan | I still haven't figured out my accident. | Buy | |
| The Arrow of Gold | Joseph Conrad | Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame and the particular affection of their citizens. One of such streets is the Cannebiere, and the jest: "If Paris had a Cannebiere, it would be a little Marseilles" is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too, I have been under the spell. For me it has been a street leading into the unknown. | Buy | |
| The Aspern Papers | Henry James | I had taken Mrs Prest into my confidence; in truth without her I should have made but little advance, for the fruitful idea in the whole business dropped from her friendly lips | Buy | |
| The Assistant | Bernard Malamud | The early November street was dark though night had ended, but the wind, to the grocer's surprise, already clawed. It flung his apron into his face as he bent for the two milk cases at the curb. Morris Bober dragged the heavy boxes to the door, panting. A large brown bag of hard rolls stood in the doorway along with the sour-faced, gray-haired Poilisheh huddled there, who wanted one. | Buy | |
| The Atonement of Leam Dundas | E. Lynn Linton | To those who admire the kind of thing that it was, North Aston was one of the loveliest places to be found in England. | Buy | |
| The Austere Academy | Lemony Snicket | If you were going to give a gold medal to the least delightful person on Earth, you would have to give that medal to a person named Carmelita Spats, and if you didn't give it to her, Carmelita Spats was the sort of person who would snatch it from your hands anyway. | Buy | |
| The Autobiography of a Supertramp | William Henry Davies | I was born thirty-five years ago, in a public house called the Church House, in the town of N---, in the county of M---. | Buy | |
| The Awakening | Kate Chopin | A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: "Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right!" | Buy | |
| The Awakening of Helena Ritchie | Margaret Deland | Dr. Lavendar and Goliath had toiled up the hill to call on old Mr. Benjamin Wright; when they jogged back in the late afternoon it was with the peculiar complacency which follows the doing of a disagreeable duty. | Buy | |
| The Awkward Age | Henry James Jr | Save when it happened to rain Vanderbank always walked home, but he usually took a hansom when the rain was moderate and adopted the preference of the philosopher when it was heavy. On this occasion he therefore recognized, as the servant opened the door, a congruity between the weather and the 'four-wheeler' that, in the empty street, under the glazed radiance, waited and trickled and blackly glittered. | Buy | |
| The Ax | Donald E Westlake | I've never actually killed anybody before, murdered another person, snuffed out another human being. | Buy | |
| The Babe Ruth Story | Babe Ruth | I was a bad kid. | Buy | |
| The Bad Beginning | Lemony Snicket | If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. | Buy | |
| The Barrier | Rex Beach | Many men were in debt to the trader at Flambeau and many counted him as a friend. | Buy | |
| The Bars of Iron | Ethel May Dell | "Fight? I'll fight you with pleasure, but I shall probably kill you if I do. Do you want to be killed?" | Buy | |
| The Bars of Iron | Ethel May Dell | It was certainly not Caesar's fault. | Buy | |
| The Battle of Life | Charles Dickens | Once upon a time, it matters little when, and in stalwart England, it matters little where, a fierce battle was fought. | Buy | |
| The Battle of the Villa Fiorita | Rumer Godden | The hedges of scented whitethorn on either side of the villa gates had the longest fiercest thorns they had ever seen. | Buy | |
| The Beach | Alex Garland | Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time. | Buy | |
| The Beach at Falesa | Robert Louis Stevenson | I saw that island first when it was neither night nor morning. The moon was to the west, setting but still broad and bright. To the east, and right amidships of the dawn, which was all pinks, the daystar sparkled like a diamond. The land breeze blew in our faces and smellt strong of wild lime and vanilla: other things besides, but these were the most plain; and the chill of it set me sneezing. I should say I had been for years on a low island near the line, living for the most part solitary among natives. Here was a fresh experience; even the tongue would be quite strange to me; and the look of these woods and mountains, and the rare smell of them, renewed my blood. | Buy | |
| The Beach House | James Patterson and Peter de Jonge | It's like dancing sitting down. Squeeze--tap--release--twist. Left hand--right foot--left hand--right hand. | Buy | |
| The Bean Trees | Barbara Kingsolver | I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbines's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. | Buy | |
| The Bear and the Dragon | Tom Clancy | "So, who were his enemies?" Lieutenant Colonel Shablikov asked. | Buy | |
| The Beautiful and the Damned | F Scott Fitzgerald | In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. | Buy | |
| The Bell | Iris Murdoch | Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason. The absent Paul, haunting her with letters and telephone bells and imagined footsteps on the stairs had begun to be the greater torment. | Buy | |
| The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath | It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. | Buy | |
| The Best Christmas Pageant Ever | Barbara Robinson | The Hermans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker's old broken-down toolhouse. | Buy | |
| The Best Laid Plans | Sidney Sheldon | The first entry in Leslie Stewart's diary read: Dear Diary: This morning I met the man I am going to marry. | Buy | |
| The Betrayers | Donald Hamilton | There were no pretty girls with leis to meet me at the Honolulu International Airport, but a greeter-type lady handed me a glass of pineapple juice when I got inside the terminal. | Buy | |
| The Betrothed | Walter Dill Scott | The Chronicles, from which this narrative is extracted, assure us, that during the long period when the Welsh princes maintained their independence, the year 1187 was peculiarly marked as favorable to peace betwixt them and their warlike neighbors, the Lord Marchers, who inhabited those formidable castles on the frontiers of the ancient British, on the ruins of which the traveller gazes with wonder. | Buy | |
| The Betsy | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | I was sitting up in bed, sipping hot coffee, when the nurse came into the room. The English girl with the big tits. | Buy | |
| The Better World of Reginald Perrin | David Nobbs | He awoke suddenly, and for a few moments he didn't know who he was. | Buy | |
| The Big Fisherman | Lloyd Cassell Douglas | It was a calm, early summer noon in the southern mountains of Arabia. | Buy | |
| The Big Kiss-Off of 1944, | Andrew Bergman | t was a Thursday morning and I had lots to do, like sip black coffee out of a blackboard container and stare out the window at the file clerks shuffling paper in the office across the street. | Buy | |
| The Big Land | Frank Gruber | The guns were stilled, the carnage had ended. | Buy | |
| The Big Money | John Roderigo Dos Passos | Charley Anderson lay in his bunk in a glary red buzz. | Buy | |
| The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler | It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. | Buy | |
| The Billion Dollar Sure Thing | Paul E. Erdman | The president of the United States did not suffer from such disadvantages of birth. He claimed both Irish and Jewish blood, a contention which, though never proven, was of itself sufficient to carry New York State regularly for his party. Sceptics pointed out that the man was neither rich nor drunk very often. | Buy | |
| The Billion Dollar Sure Thing | Paul E. Erdman | It was just after seven in the evening of Monday, October 27. The fall weather had been fantastic all over Europe that year, and was still holding. The trees in the small park adjacent to the cathedral had not yet lost all of their leaves. But the brown leaves that remained rustled in the light breeze coming over the Rhine from the hills of the Black Forest, darkly brooding on the horizon. | Buy | |
| The Bishop Murder Case | S S Van Dine | Of all the criminal cases in which Philo Vance participated as unofficial investigator, the most sinister, the most bizarre, the seemingly most incomprehensible, and certainly the most terrifying was the one that followed the famous Greene murders. | Buy | |
| The Bishop's Mantle | Agnes Sligh Turnbull | The young man in the taxi leaned forward. | Buy | |
| The Black Arrow | Robert Louis Stevenson | On a certain afternoon, in the late springtime, the bell upon Tunstall Moat House was heard ringing at an unaccustomed hour. | Buy | |
| The Black Arrow | Robert Louis Stevenson | On a certain afternoon, in the late springtime, the bell upon Tunstall Moat House was heard ringing at an unaccustomed hour. | Buy | |
| The Black Bag | Louis Joseph Vance | Upon a certain dreary April afternoon in the year of grace, 1906, the apprehensions of Philip Kirkwood, Esquire, Artist-peintre, were enlivened by the discovery that he was occupying that singularly distressing social position, which may be summed up succinctly in a phrase through long usage grown proverbial: "Alone in London." | Buy | |
| The Black Cloud | Fred Hoyle | It was eight o'clock along the Greenwich meridian. In England the wintry sun of 7th January, 1964, was just rising. Throughout the length and breadth of the land people were shivering in ill-heated houses as they read the morning papers, ate their breakfasts, and grumbled about the weather, which, truth to tell, had been appalling of late. | Buy | |
| The Black Echo | Michael Connelly | The boy couldn't see in the dark, but he didn't need to. | Buy | |
| The Black Ice | Michael Connelly | The smoke carried up from the Cahuenga Pass and flattened beneath a layer of cool crossing air. | Buy | |
| The Black Ice Score | Richard Stark | Parker walked into his hotel room, and there was a guy in there going through his suitcase laid out on his bed. | Buy | |
| The Black Rose | Thomas B Costain | It was growing late, and still there was no sign of Engaine. Could Niniam have been mistaken? | Buy | |
| The Black Swan | Rafael Sabatini | Major Sands, conscious of his high deserts, was disposed to receive with condescension the gifts which he perceived that Fortune offered him. | Buy | |
| The Black Tulip | Alexandre Dumas père | On the 20th of August, 1672, the city of the Hague, always so lively, so neat, and so trim that one might believe every day to be Sunday, with its shady park, with its tall trees, spreading over its Gothic houses, with its canals like large mirrors, in which its steeples and its almost Eastern cupolas are reflected,--the city of the Hague, the capital of the Seven Provinces, was swelling in all its arteries with a black and red stream of hurried, panting, and restless citizens, who, with their knives in their girdles, muskets on their shoulders, or sticks in their hands, were pushing on to the Buytenhof, a terrible prison, the grated windows of which are still shown, on the charge of attempted murder preferred against him by the surgeon Tyckelaer, Cornelius de Witt, the brother of the Grand Pensionary of Holland was confined. | Buy | |
| The Blind Assassin | Margaret Atwood | Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left but charred smithereens. | Buy | |
| The Blithedale Romance | Nathaniel Hawthorne | The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor-apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly-man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street. | Buy | |
| The Bloody Red Baron: Anno Dracula 1918 | Kim Newman | Four miles from the lines, heavy guns sounded as a constant rumble. | Buy | |
| The Blue Flower | Henry Jackson van Dyke | The parents were abed and sleeping. The clock on the wall ticked loudly and lazily, as if it had time to spare. Outside the rattling windows there was a restless, whispering wind. The room grew light, and dark, and wondrous light again, as the moon played hide-and-seek through the clouds. The boy, wide-awake and quiet in his bed, was thinking of the Stranger and his stories. | Buy | |
| The Blue Nile | Alan Moorehead | he Blue Nile pours very quietly and uneventfully out of Lake Tana in the northern Highlands of Ethiopia. | Buy | |
| The Blue Window | Irene Temple Bailey | Hildegarde had always known that her mother was different from the others, but she had not known why. | Buy | |
| The Bluest Eye | Toni Morrison | Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. | Buy | |
| The Body | William Sansom | To hold the syringe gently, firmly but delicately--not to squirt, but to prod the sleeper into wakefulness with the nozzle, taking care to start no abrupt flight of fear. Only to stir a movement, to initiate a presence from such a deep dead sleep. | Buy | |
| The Bonfire of the Vanities | Tom Wolfe | At that very moment, in the very sort of Park Avenue co-op apartment that so obsessed the Mayor . . . twelve-foot ceilings . . . two wings, one for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who own the place and one for the help . . . Sherman McCoy was kneeling in his front hall trying to put a leash on a dachshund. | Buy | |
| The Bonfire of the Vanities | Tom Wolfe | "And then say what? Say, 'Forget you're hungry, forget you got shot inna back by some racist cop--Chuck was here? Chuck come up to Harlem--'" | Buy | |
| The Book Of Dave | Will Self | Carl Dévúsh, spindle-shanked, bleach-blond, lampburnt, twelve years old, kicked up buff puffs of sand with his bare feet as he scampered along the path fr the manor. | Buy | |
| The Book of Virtues | William J Bennett | In self-discipline one makes a "disciple" of oneself. One is one's own teacher, trainer, coach, and "disciplinarian." It is an odd sort of relationship, paradoxical in its own way, and many of us don't handle it very well. | Buy | |
| The Bostonians | Henry James Jr | "Olive will come down in about ten minutes; she told me to tell you that." | Buy | |
| The Bottle Imp | Robert Louis Stevenson | There was a man in the island of Hawaii, whom I shall call Keawe; for the truth is, he still lives, and his name must be kept secret; but the place of his birth was not far from Honaunau, where the bones of Keawe the Great lie hidden in a cave. | Buy | |
| The Bourne Identity | Robert Ludlum | The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out an impenetrable swamp. The waves rose to goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind. Everywhere there were the sounds of inanimate pain, wood straining against wood, ropes twisting, stretched to the breaking point. The animal was dying. | Buy | |
| The Bourne Supremacy | Robert Ludlum | Kowloon. The teeming final extension of China that is no part of the north except in spirit--but the spirit runs deep and descends into the caverns of men's souls without regard for the harsh, irrelevant practicalities of political borders. The land and the water are one, and it is the will of the spirit that determines how man will use the land and the water--again without regard for such abstractions as useless freedom or escapable confinement. The concern is only with empty stomachs. Survival. There is nothing else. All the rest is dung to be spread over the infertile fields. | Buy | |
| The Bourne Ultimatum | Robert Ludlum | The cacophony spun out of control as the crowds swelled through the amusement park in the countryside on the outskirts of Baltimore. The summer night was hot, and nearly everywhere faces and necks were drenched with sweat, except for those screaming as they plunged over the crests of a roller coaster, or shrieking as they plummeted down the narrow, twisting gullies of racing water in torpedo sleds. The garishly colored, manically blinking lights along the midway were joined by the grating sounds of emphatic music metallically erupting out of an excess of loudspeakers--calliopes presto, marches prestissimo. | Buy | |
| The Brass Bowl | Louis Joseph Vance | In the dull hot dusk of a summer's day a green touring-car, swinging out of the East Drive, pulled up smartly, trembling, at the edge of the Fifty-ninth Street car-tracks, then more sedately, under the dispassionate eye of a mounted member of the Traffic Squad, lurched across the Plaza and merged itself in the press of vehicles south-bound on the Avenue. | Buy | |
| The Breaking Point | Mary Roberts Rinehart | "Heaven and earth," sang the tenor, Mr. Henry Wallace, owner of the Wallace garage. His larynx, which gave him somewhat the effect of having swallowed a crab-apple and got it only part way down, protruded above his low collar. | Buy | |
| The Brethren | John Grisham | For the weekly docket the court jester wore his standard garb of well-used and deeply faded maroon pajamas and lavender terry-cloth shower shoes with no socks. | Buy | |
| The Briar King | J. Gregory Keyes (Greg Keyes) | The sky cracked and lightning fell through its crooked seams. With it came a black sleet tasting of smoke, copper, and brimstone. With it came a howling like a gale from hell. | Buy | |
| The Bride of Lammermoor | Sir Walter Scott | Few have been in my secret while I was compiling these narratives, nor is it probable that they will ever become public during the life of their author | Buy | |
| The Bride of Lammermoor | Walter Dill Scott | Few have been in my secret while I was compiling these narratives, nor is it probable that they will ever become public during the life of their author. | Buy | |
| The Bridge of Desire | George Warwick Deeping | Visitors from the Hotel Leopardi who climbed the mule path that went winding up the hillside through a forest of stone pines, would pass Martin Frensham's white villa half hidden among olive, orange, and mimosa trees. The villa stood in a miniature valley of its own, through which a torrent trickled untorrentially, save when heavy rains sent it foaming over the smooth white bowlders. | Buy | |
| The Bridge of San Luis Rey | Thornton Wilder | On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. | Buy | |
| The Bridge of San Luis Rey | Thornton Niven Wilder | On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below. | Buy | |
| The Bridges of Madison County | Robert Waller | On the morning of August 8, 1965, Robert Kincaid locked the door to his small two-room apartment on the third floor of a rambling house in Bellingham, Washington. | Buy | |
| The Bridges of Madison County | Robert James Waller | On the morning of August 8, 1965, Robert Kincaid locked the door to his small two-room apartment on the third floor of a rambling house in Bellingham, Washington. He carried a knapsack full of photography equipment and a suitcase down wooden stairs and through a hallway to the back, where his old Chrevelet pickup truck was parked in a space reserved for residents of the building. | Buy | |
| The Bridges of Madison County | Robert James Waller | There are songs that come from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. | Buy | |
| The Brimming Cup | Dorothy Canfield Fisher | Lounging idly in the deserted little waiting-room was the usual shabby, bored, lonely ticket-seller, prodigiously indifferent to the grave beauty of the scene before him and to the throng of ancient memories jostling him where he stood. | Buy | |
| The British Museum is Falling Down | David Lodge | It was Adam Appleby's misfortune that at the moment of awakening from sleep his consciousness was immediately flooded with everything he least wanted to think about. | Buy | |
| The Broad Highway | Jeffrey Farnol | As I sat of an early summer morning in the shade of a tree, eating fried bacon with a tinker, the thought came to me that I might some day write a book of my own: a book that should treat of the roads and by-roads, of trees, and wind in lonely places, of rapid brooks and lazy streams, of the glory of dawn, the glow of evening, and the purple solitude of night; a book of wayside inns and sequestered taverns; a book of country things and ways and people. And the thought pleased me much. | Buy | |
| The Brothers K | David James Duncan | Papa is in his easy chair, reading the Sunday sports page. I am lying across his lap. | Buy | |
| The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this "landowner"- for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate- was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. | Buy | |
| The Buddha of Suburbia | Hanif Kureishi | My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. | Buy | |
| The Buffalo Box | Frank Gruber | Hollywood is a place where a man who wears shorts and has a long white beard runs down Sunset Boulevard every morning. | Buy | |
| The Burden of Proof | Scott Turow | They had been married for thirty-one years, and the following spring, full of resolved and a measure of hope, he would marry again. But that day, on a late afternoon near the end of March, Mr. Alejandro Stern had returned home and, with his attached case and garment bag still in hand, called out somewhat absently from the front entry for Clara, his wife. He was fifty-six years old, stout and bald, and never particularly goodlooking, and he found himself in a mood of intense preoccupation. | Buy | |
| The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling | Lawrence Block | I suppose he must have been in his early twenties. | Buy | |
| The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza | Lawrence Block | Around five-thirty I put down the book I'd been reading and started shooing customers out of the store. | Buy | |
| The Butter Battle Book | Dr. Seuss (pseudonym of Theodore Seuss Geisel) | On the last day of summer, ten hours before fall . . . . . . my grandfather took me out to the Wall. | Buy | |
| The Byzantine Omelet | Hector Hugh (H.H.) Munro (Saki) | Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage. | Buy | |
| The Caine Mutiny | Herman Wouk | He was of medium height, somewhat chubby, and good looking, with curly red hair, and an innocent, gay face, more remarkable for a humorous air about the eyes and large mouth than for any strength of chin or nobility of nose. | Buy | |
| The Call of Cthulhu | Howard Phillips Lovecraft | The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. | Buy | |
| The Call of the Canyon | Zane Grey | What subtle strange message had come to her out of the West? Carley Burch laid the letter in her lap and gazed dreamily through the window. | Buy | |
| The Call of the Wild | Jack London | Buck did not read the newspapers or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. | Buy | |
| The Canceled Czech | Lawrence Block | For a crow, the cities of Vienna and Prague are just a shade over 150 miles apart. | Buy | |
| The Cancer Ward | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | On top of everything, the cancer wing was Number 13. Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov had never been and could never be a superstitious person, but his heart sank when they wrote "Wing 13" on his admission card. They should have had the ingenuity to assign 13 to some kind of prosthetic or intestinal department. | Buy | |
| The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer | Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote. | Buy | |
| The Captain | Jan de Hartog | I found both letters waiting for me among my mail when I came home from Valparaiso, Chile. | Buy | |
| The Captain from Connecticut | C S Forester | Although it was mid-afternoon it was nearly as dark as a summer night. | Buy | |
| The Cardinal | Henry Morton Robinson | What vehicle, bottle-green in color, arkish in shape, cranky in motion, and dilapidated in repose, was a familiar feature of the Mystic River flatlands between Boston and Medford during the early years of the present century? | Buy | |
| The Cardinal | Henry Morton Robinson | Like many a Florentine before him, Captain Gaetano Orselli, master of the luxury-liner Vesuvio, was inordinately fond of jewelry. As a younger man he had not wholly resisted the temptation to overload his person--especially his hands--with costly stones; but now in his meridian forties a purer taste was asserting itself. The gem for its own sake had become a canon with Captain Orselli. | Buy | |
| The Cardinal of the Kremlin | Tom Clancy | Business was being conducted. All kinds of business. Everyone there knew it. Everyone there was a part of it. Everyone there needed it. And yet everyone there was in one way or another dedicated to stopping it. For every person there in the St. George Hall of the Great Kremlin Palace, the dualism was a normal part of life. | Buy | |
| The Carfitt Crisis | J B Priestly | It was the dull leaden middle of a Friday afternoon in November. | Buy | |
| The Carolinian | Rafael Sabatini | With compressed lips and an upright line of pain between his brows Mr. Harry Latimer sat down to write a letter. | Buy | |
| The Carpetbaggers | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | The sun was beginning to fall from the sky into the white Nevada desert as Reno came up beneath me. I banked the Waco slowly and headed due east. I could hear the wind pinging the biplane's struts and I grinned to myself. The old man would really hit the roof when he saw this plane. But he wouldn't have anything to complain about. It didn't cost him anything. I won it in a crap game. | Buy | |
| The Case of the Counterfeit Coin | George Wyatt | I don't think I'll ever forget that bottle of soda pop. | Buy | |
| The Case of the Missing Message | Charles Spain Verral | I might as well explain right away that my name is Jimmy Carson and I live at 43 Maple Street in the town of Crestwood. | Buy | |
| The Case of the Roving Rolls | George Wyatt | Long time no crime. | Buy | |
| The Cask of Amontillado | Edgar Allan Poe | The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. | Buy | |
| The Cassini Division | Ken MacLeod | There are, still, photographs of the woman who gate-crashed the party on the observation deck of the Casa Azores, one evening in the early summer of 2303. | Buy | |
| The Castle | Franz Kafka | It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill has hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him. | Buy | |
| The Castle Inn | Stanley J Weyman | About a hundred and thirty years ago, when the third George, whom our grandfathers knoew in his blind dotage, was a young and sturdy bridegroom; when old Q., whom 1810 found peering from his balcony in Piccadilly, deaf, toothless, and a skeleton, was that gay and lively spark, the Earl of March; when bore and boreish were words of haut ton, unknown to the vulgar, and the price of a borough was 5,000 l., when gibbets still served for sign-posts, and railways were not and highwaymen were - to be more exact, in the early spring of the year 1767, a travelling chariot-and-four drew up about five in the evening before the inn at Wheatley Bridge, a short stage from Oxford on the Oxford road. | Buy | |
| The Castle of Otranto | Horace Walpole | Manfred, Prince of Otranto, had one son and one daughter: the latter, a most beautiful virgin, aged eighteen, was called Matilda | Buy | |
| The Cat in the Hat | Dr. Seuss (pseudonym of Theodore Seuss Geisel) | The sun did not shine. It was too wet too play. So we sat in the house All that cold, cold, wet day. | Buy | |
| The Catcher in the Rye | J D Salinger | If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. | Buy | |
| The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger | If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. | Buy | |
| The Caxtons | Edward George Bulwer-Lytton | "Sir--Sir, it is a boy!" "A boy," said my father, looking up from his book, and evidently much puzzled; "what is a boy?" | Buy | |
| The Celestine Prophecy | James Redfield | I drove up to the restaurant and parked, then leaned back in my seat to think for a moment. Charlene, I knew, would already be inside, waiting to talk with me. But why? | Buy | |
| The Cement Garden | Ian McEwan | I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed. | Buy | |
| The Centaur | John Updike | Caldwell turned and as he turned his ankle received an arrow. | Buy | |
| The Chamber | John Grisham | The decision to bomb the office of the radical Jew lawyer was reached with relative ease. | Buy | |
| The Chapman Report | Irving Wallace | Once a day, at exactly ten minutes to nine in the morning, a long, gray sight-seeing bus, streaked with dust, lumbered up Sunset Boulevard and entered that suburb of Los Angeles known as The Briars. The uniformed guide and driver of the bus adjusted the silver microphone before his lips and resumed his soporific drone: "Ladies and gentlemen, we are now passing through "The Briars . . ." | Buy | |
| The Charterhouse of Parma | de Stendhal | On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of that young army which had shortly before crossed the Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after all these centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. | Buy | |
| The Child's Story | Charles Dickens | Once upon a time, a good many years ago, there was a traveller, and he set out upon a journey. | Buy | |
| The Chimes | Charles Dickens | There are not many people - and it is desireable that a story-teller and a story-reader should establish a mutual understanding as soon as possible, I beg it to be noticed that I cinfine this observation neither to young people nor to little people, but extend it to all conditions of people: little and big, young and old: yet growing up, or already growing down again - there are not, I say many people who would care to sleep in a church. | Buy | |
| The Chinese Bandit | Stephen Becker | That summer they hanged a fat man at the Western Gate as a warning and example to all. | Buy | |
| The Chocolate Touch | Patrick Catling | Most of the time John Midas was a very nice boy. | Buy | |
| The Choirboys | Joseph Wambaugh | The Third Marines were bleeding and dying for three nameless hills north of Khe Sanh in 1967. | Buy | |
| The Chosen | Chaim Potok | For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the others existence. | Buy | |
| The Chosen | Chaim Potok | For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the other's existence. | Buy | |
| The Christmas Box | Richard Paul Evans | It may be that I am growing old in this world and have used up more than my share of allotted words and eager audiences. | Buy | |
| The Christmas Train | David Baldacci | Tom Langdon was a journalist, a globetrotting one, because it was in his blood to roam widely. | Buy | |
| The Circular Staircase | Mary Roberts Rinehart | This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agences happy and prosperous. | Buy | |
| The Citadel | Archibald Joseph Cronin | Late one October afternoon in the year 1921, a shabby young man gazed with fixed intensity through the window of a third-class compartment in the almost empty train labouring up the Penowell valley from Swansea. | Buy | |
| The City in the Sahara | Jules Verne | At the beginning of the century even the most accurate and recent of maps represented the Sahara, that immense stretch of nearly 300,000 square miles, only by a blank space. | Buy | |
| The Civil War | Shelby Foote | It was a Monday in Washington, January 21; Jefferson Davis rose from his seat in the Senate. | Buy | |
| The Clansman | Thomas Dixon Jr | The fair girl who was playing a banjo and singing to the wounded
soldiers suddenly stopped, and, turning to the surgeon,
whispered: "What's that?" "It sounds like a mob--" | Buy | |
| The Client | John Grisham | Mark was eleven and had been smoking off and on for two years, never trying to quit but being careful not to get hooked. He preferred Kools, his ex-father's brand, but his mother smoked Viginia Slims at the rate of two packs a day, and could in an average week pilfer ten or twelve from her. | Buy | |
| The Cloister and the Hearth | Charles Reade | Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer great sorrows. Of these obscure heroes, philosophers, and martyrs, the greater part will never be known till that hour, when many that are great shall be small, and the small great; but of others the world's knowledge may be said to sleep: their lives and characters lie hidden from nations in the annals that record them. | Buy | |
| The Closing of the American Mind | Allan David Bloom | There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. | Buy | |
| The Clown | Heinrich Böll | It was dark by the time I reached Bonn, and I forced myself not to succumb to the series of mechanical actions which had taken hold of me in five years of traveling back and forth: down the station steps, up the station steps, put down my suitcase, take my ticket out of my coat pocket, pick up my suitcase, hand in my ticket, cross over to the newstand, buy the evening newspaper, go outside and signal for a taxi. | Buy | |
| The Clown | Heinrich Boll | It was dark by the time I reached Bonn, and I forced myself not to succumb to the series of mechanical actions which had taken hold of me in five years of traveling back and forth: down the station steps, up the station steps, put down my suitcase, take my ticket out of my coat pocket, pick up my suitcase, hand in my ticket, cross over to the newsstand, buy the evening papers, go outside, and signal for a taxi. | Buy | |
| The Club Dumas | Arturo Pérez-Reverte | The flash projected the outline of the hanged man onto the wall. | Buy | |
| The Coast of Folly | Coningsby William Dawson | She awoke reluctantly, drawing the sheets closer in an effort to avoid the dazzling shaft of sunlight. Having lain motionless for a while she yawned, took a sly peep into the familiar room and sank her head once more into the inviting hollow of the lacy pillow. | Buy | |
| The Cold War Swap | Ross Thomas | He was the last one aboard the flight from Tempelhof to the Cologne-Bonn airport. | Buy | |
| The Color of Water | James McBride | I'm dead. You want to talk about my family and here I been dead to them for fifty years. Leave me alone. Don't bother me. They want no parts of me and me I don't want no parts of them. Hurry up and get this interview over with. I want to watch Dallas. | Buy | |
| The Color Purple | Alice Walker | You better not never tell nobody but God. | Buy | |
| The Comedy of Errors | William Shakespeare | Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall, And by the doom of death end woes and all. | Buy | |
| The Common Law | Robert William Chambers | There was a long, brisk, decisive ring at the door. He continued working. After an interval the bell rang again, briefly, as though the light touch on the electric button had lost its assurance. | Buy | |
| The Concrete Blonde | Michael Connelly | The house in Silverlake was dark, its windows as empty as a dead man's eyes. | Buy | |
| The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself. | Buy | |
| The Confessions of Nat Turner | William Styron | TO THE PUBLIC - The late insurrection in Southampton has greatly excited the public mind and led to a thousand idle, exaggerated and mischievous reports. | Buy | |
| The Confidence-Man | Herman Melville | At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the waterside in the city of St. Louis. | Buy | |
| The Confusions of Young Toerless | Robert Edler von Musil | A little station on the stretch leading towards Russia. Infinitely straight, four parallel iron tracks ran in both directions, between the yellow gravel of the wide track. Alongside each, like a dirty shadow, was the dark line burned into the ground by the exhaust. | Buy | |
| The Conspirators | Alexandre Dumas père | On the 22d of March, in the year of our Lord 1718, a young cavalier of high bearing, about twenty-six or twenty-eight years of age, mounted on a pure-bred Spanish charger, was waiting, towards eight o'clock in the morning, at that end of the Pont Neuf which abuts on the Quai de l'Ecole. | Buy | |
| The Constant Image | Marcia Davenport | The last moment before the house went dark was pure enchantment. All had been splendour and brilliance, laughter and gossip, amidst the loveliest colours of festivity, white and gold and scarlet. | Buy | |
| The Constant Nymph | Margaret Kennedy | At the time of his death the name of Albert Sanger was barely known to the musical public of Great Britain. Among the very few who had heard of him there were even some who called him Sanje, in the French manner, being disinclined to suppose that great men are occasionally born in Hammersmith. | Buy | |
| The Consul's Wife | W T Tyler | I first heard about African sorcery at a Catholic mission station on the Congo River below Bumba, a few hundred miles north of the equator. | Buy | |
| The Continental Op | Dashiell Hammett | It was a wandering daughter job. | Buy | |
| The Coral Island | R M Ballantyne | Roving has always been, and still is, my ruling passion, the joy of my heart, the very sunshine of my existence. | Buy | |
| The Corpse Moved Upstairs | Frank Gruber | Johnny Fletcher had the key in his hand, but it wasn't necessary to put it in the lock, for the door was slightly ajar. | Buy | |
| The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen | The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. | Buy | |
| The Corsican Brothers | Alexandre Dumas père | During the early part of the month of March, in the year 1841, I traveled in Corsica. | Buy | |
| The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas père | On the 24th of February, 1810, the look-out at Notre-Dame de la
Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon from Smyrna,
Trieste, and Naples. As usual, a pilot put off immediately, and rounding the Chateau d'If, got on board the vessel between Cape Morgion and Rion island. Immediately, and according to custom, the ramparts of Fort Saint-Jean were covered with spectators; it is always an event at Marseilles for a ship to come into port, especially when this ship, like the Pharaon, has been built, rigged, and laden at the old Phocee docks, and belongs to an owner of the city. | Buy | |
| The Country of the Pointed Firs | Sarah Orne Jewett | There was something about the coast of Dunnet which made it seem more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine. | Buy | |
| The Coup | John Updike | My country of Kush, landlocked between the mongrelized, neo-capitalist puppet states of Zanj and Sahel, is small for Africa, though larger than any two nations of Europe. | Buy | |
| The Courts of Idleness | Dornford Yates | "This," said Fairie, "is too thick." | Buy | |
| The Courts of the Morning | John Buchan | The story begins, so far as I am concerned, in the August of 19--, when I had for the second time a lease of the forest of Machray. | Buy | |
| The Courtship of Miles Standish | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | In the Old Colony days, in Plymouth the land of the Pilgrims, To and fro in a room of his simple and primitive dwelling, Clad in doublet and hose, and boots of Cordovan leather, Strode, with a martial air, Miles Standish the Puritan Captain. Buried in thought he seemed, with his hands behind him, and pausing Ever and anon to behold his glittering weapons of warfare, Hanging in shining array along the walls of the chamber,-- Cutlass and corselet of steel, and his trusty sword of Damascus, Curved at the point and inscribed with its mystical Arabic sentence, While underneath, in a corner, were fowling-piece, musket, and matchlock. | Buy | |
| The Covenant | James A. Michener | It was the silent time before dawn, along the shores of what had been one of the most beautiful lakes in southern Africa. | Buy | |
| The Covered Wagon | Emerson Hough | "Look at 'em come, Jesse! More and more! Must be forty or fifty families." | Buy | |
| The Cricket in Times Square | George Selden | A mouse was looking at Mario. The mouse's name was Tucker, and he was sitting in the opening of an abandoned drain pipe in the subway station at Times Square. | Buy | |
| The Cricket on the Hearth | Charles Dickens | The kettle began it! | Buy | |
| The Crisis | Winston Churchill | Faithfully to relate how Eliphalet Hopper came to St. Louis is to betray no secret. | Buy | |
| The Cross On the Drum | Hugh B Cave | On maps of the Caribbean the north coast of the island of St. Joseph has no name or number. | Buy | |
| The Crossing | Winston Churchill | I was born under the Blue Ridge, and under that side which is blue in the evening light, in a wild land of game and forest and rushing waters. | Buy | |
| The Crossing | Cormac McCarthy | When they came south of Grant County Boyd was not much more than a baby and the newly formed county they'd named Hidalgo was itself little older than the child. In the country they'd quit lay the bones of a sister and the bones of his maternal grandmother. The new county was rich and wild. You could ride clear to Mexico and not strike a crossfence. | Buy | |
| The Crow Road | Ian M Banks | It was the day my grandmother exploded. | Buy | |
| The Cruel Sea | Nicholas Monsarrat | This is the story--the long and true story--of one ocean, two ships, and about a hundred and fifty men. | Buy | |
| The Cruise of the Midge | Michael Scott | I had been for six months fourth lieutenant of H.M.S. Gazelle, on board of which Sir Oliver Oakplank had his broad pennant* hoisted, as the commander-in-chief on the African station. The last time we touched at Cape Coast we took in with us a Spanish felucca, that we had previously cut out of the Bonny river, with part of her cargo of slaves on board. | Buy | |
| The Crystal Cave | Mary Stewart | I am an old man now, but then I was already past my prime when Arthur was crowned King. | Buy | |
| The Cunning Man | Robertson Davies | Should I have taken the false teeth? | Buy | |
| The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time | Mark Haddon | It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shear's house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. | Buy | |
| The Custom of the Country | Edith Newbold Wharton (nee Jones) | "Undine Spragg--how can you?" her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid "bell-boy" had just brought in. | Buy | |
| The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown | Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece towards himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed in a heap beneath the canvas. | Buy | |
| The Dancing Floor | John Buchan | Romance (he said) is a word I am shy of using. | Buy | |
| The Dark Frigate | Charles Boardman Hawes | Philip Marsham was bred to the sea as far back as the days when he was cutting his milk teeth, and he never thought he should leave it; but leave it he did, and once and again, as I shall tell you. | Buy | |
| The Dark Half | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | The May 23rd issue of People magazine was pretty typical. | Buy | |
| The Dark Heart of Time | Philip José Farmer | Tarzan did not hear the hunters coming toward him through the rain forest of the African afternoon. | Buy | |
| The Darkening Sea | Alexander Kent | The meandering track that ran around the wide curve of Falmouth Bay was just wide enough to allow passage to horse and rider, and only slightly less dangerous than the footpath which was somewhere beneath it. | Buy | |
| The Datchley Inheritance | Stephen McKenna | Of the fifty readers who learned last spring that John Datchley, of Datchley Castle, was dead, hardly five can have realized that one of the strangest chapters in the history of succession was opening under their eyes. | Buy | |
| The Daughter of Anderson Crow | George Barr McCutcheon | He was imposing, even in his pensiveness. | Buy | |
| The Davidian Report | Dorothy B Hughes | The girl had boarded the plane at Kansas City. | Buy | |
| The Day Before Midnight | Stephen Hunter | It snowed that night, and sometime after three, Beth Hummel awoke, as she always did, to the sound of small bare feet padding urgently across the hard wood of the floor. | Buy | |
| The Day of the Jackal | Frederick Forsyth | It was cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad. | Buy | |
| The Day of the Locust | Nathanael West | Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard a great din on the road outside his office. The groan of leather mingled with the jangle of iron and over all beat the tattoo of a thousand hooves. He hurried to the window. | Buy | |
| The Day of the Triffids | John Wyndham | When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere. | Buy | |
| The Dead Pull Hitter | Alison Gordon | The reading light over my seat didn't work. | Buy | |
| The Dead Zone | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | The two things Sarah remembered about that night later were his run of luck at the Wheel of Fortune and the mask. But as time passed, years of it, it was the mask she thought about--when she could bring herself to think about that horrible night at all. | Buy | |
| The Death of the Heart | Elizabeth Bowen | That morning's ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam. | Buy | |
| The Debacle | Emile Zola | A mile from Mulhouse, near the Rhine, in the middle of the fertile plain, the camp had been set up. In the fading light of this August evening, beneath a troubled sky laden with heavy clouds, the tents were pitched in rows, and the stacks of arms could be seen glinting at regular intervals along the edge of the camp, with sentinels standing guard over them, rifles at the ready, motionless, eyes somewhere on the far horizon, lost in the purplish mists drifting up from the great river. | Buy | |
| The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | Edward Gibbon | In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. | Buy | |
| The Deemster | Sir Hall Caine | Thorkell Mylrea had waited long for a dead man's shoes, but he was wearing them at length. | Buy | |
| The Deep | Peter Benchley | In sea water more than a few feet deep, blood is green. Water filters the light from above, seeming to consume the colors of the spectrum shade by shade. Red is the first to succumb, to disappear. Green lasts longer. But then, below 100 feet, green, too, fades away, leaving blue. In the twilight depths--180, 200 feet, and beyond,--blood looks black. | Buy | |
| The Deerslayer | James Fenimore Cooper | On the human imagination, events produce the effects of time. | Buy | |
| The Defense | Vladimir Nabokov | What struck him most was the fact that from Monday on he would be Luzhin. His father--the real Luzhin, the elderly Luzhin, the writer of books--left the nursery with a smile, rubbing his hands (already smeared for the night with transparent cold cream), and with his suede-slippered evening gait padded back to his bedroom. His wife lay in bed. She half raised herself and said: "Well, how did it go?" | Buy | |
| The Definite Object | Jeffrey Farnol | In the writing of books, as all the world knows, two things are above all other things essential--the one is to know exactly when and where to leave off, and the other to be equally certain when and where to begin. | Buy | |
| The Deliverance | Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow | When the Susquehanna stage came to the daily halt beneath the blasted pine at the cross-roads, an elderly man, wearing a flapping frock coat and a soft slouch hat, stepped gingerly over one of the muddy wheels, and threw a doubtful glance across the level tobacco fields, where the young plants were drooping in the June sunshine. | Buy | |
| The Deluge | Henryk Sienkiewicz | The new year came in the midst of a cold, dry Winter that covered all of Zmudya with a deep white quilt. The trees bent and crackled under the weight of snow that blinded the eyes of passersby in daylight. At night, by moonlight, the fields and pastures sparkled with pinpoint lights as if the moon had tossed a multitude of spangles on the frozen soil. | 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 | |
| The Desert of Wheat | Zane Grey | Late in June the vast northwestern desert of wheat began to take on a tinge of gold, lending an austere beauty to that endless, rolling, smooth world of treeless hills, where miles of fallow ground and miles of waving grain sloped up to the far-separated homes of the heroic men who had conquered over sage and sand. | Buy | |
| The Devil Knows You're Dead | Lawrence Block | On the last Thursday in September, Lisa Holtzmann went shopping on Ninth Avenue. | Buy | |
| The Devil's Alternative | Frederick Forsyth | The castaway would have been dead before sundown but for the sharp eyes of an Italian seaman called Mario. | Buy | |
| The Devil's Cure | Ken Oppel | Lying wasted in the quarantine room of the prison infirmary, Frank Hayworth had refused all medication, even the pills that would at least numb the pain as his lungs filled with fluid. | Buy | |
| The Devil's Garden | William Babington Maxwell | The village postmaster stood staring at an official envelope that had just been shaken out a mailbag upon the sorting table. It was addressed to himself; and for a few moments his heart beat quicker, with sharp, clean percussions, as if it were trying to imitate the sounds made by two clerks as they plied their stampers on the blocks. Perhaps this envelope contained his fate. | Buy | |
| The Dim Lantern | Irene Temple Bailey | Sherwood Park is twelve miles from Washington. Starting as a somewhat pretentious suburb on the main line of the railroad, it was blessed with easy accessibility until encroaching trolleys swept the tide of settlement away from it, and left it high and dry--its train service, unable to compete with modern motor vehicles, increasingly inefficient. | Buy | |
| The Disenchanted | Budd Wilson Schulberg | It's the waiting, Shep was thinking. You wait to get inside the gate, you wait outside the great man's office, you wait for your agent to make the deal, you wait for the assignment, you wait for instructions on how to write what they want you to write, and then, when you finish your treatment and turn it in, you wait for that unique contribution to art, the story conference. | Buy | |
| The Dispossessed | Ursula Le Guin | There was a wall. | Buy | |
| The Divine Comedy | Dante | Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. | Buy | |
| The Divine Comedy | Dante | Midway along the path of our life. [It., Nel mezzo del cammin de nostra vita.] | Buy | |
| The Dixie Association | Donald "Skip" Hays | I sat in my cell, packing my shit in a cardboard box. | Buy | |
| The Doctor | Mary Roberts Rinehart | Young Doctor Arden was gong through the process of reorienting himself after a night's sleep. | Buy | |
| The Doctor | Ralph Connor | There were two ways by which one could get to the Old Stone Mill. One, from the sideroad by a lane which, edged with grassy, flower-decked banks, wound between snake fences, along which straggled irregular clumps of hazel and blue beech, dogwood and thorn bushes, and beyond which stretched on one side fields of grain just heading out this bright June morning, and on the other side a long strip of hay fields of mixed timothy and red clover, generous of colour and perfume, which ran along the snake fence till it came to a potato patch which, in turn, led to an orchard where the lane began to drop down to the Mill valley. | Buy | |
| The Doctor's Wife | Brian Moore | The plane from Belfast arrived on time, but when the passengers disembarked there was a long wait for baggage. | Buy | |
| The Dogs of War | Frederick Forsyth | There were no stars that night on the bush airstrip, nor any moon; just the West African darkness wrapping round the scattered groups like warm, wet velvet. The cloud cover was lying hardly off the tops of the iroko trees, and the waiting men prayed it would stay a while longer to shield them from the bombers. | Buy | |
| The Dolliver Romance | Nathaniel Hawthorne | Dr. Dolliver, a worthy personage of extreme antiquity, was aroused rather prematurely, one summer morning, by the shouts of the child Pansie, in an adjoining chamber, summoning old Martha (who performed the duties of nurse, housekeeper, and kitchen-maid, in the Doctor's establishment) to take up her little ladyship and dress her. | Buy | |
| The Domesday Report | Rock Bryner | Terry Bancroft arrived at her office above Fifth Avenue early on the Monday following New Year's Day, and even before removing her rain-soaked jacket, she signaled the start of 1998 by logging on to her computer. | Buy | |
| The Doomsday Conspiracy | Sidney Sheldon | He was back in the crowded hospital ward at Cu Chi Base in Vietnam and Susan was leaning over his bed, lovely in her crisp white nurse's uniform, whispering, "Wake up, sailor. You don't want to die." | Buy | |
| The Door | Mary Roberts Rinehart | I have wrenched knee, and for the past two weeks my days have consisted of three trays, two of them here in the library, a nurse at ten o'clock each morning with a device of infernal origin which is supposed to bake the pain out of my leg, and my thoughts for company. | Buy | |
| The Door in the Wall | H G Wells | One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall | Buy | |
| The Door into Summer | Robert A. Heinlein | One winter before the Six Weeks War my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut. | Buy | |
| The Double Image | Helen MacInnes | April in Paris, and a sprinkle of rain, a sudden whip of cool breeze, a graying sky to end the bright promise of the evening. John Craig decided that his saunter along the Boulevard Saint-Germain might come to a quick end any moment now, and began looking for a place of retreat. | Buy | |
| The Dreadful Lemon Sky | John D MacDonald | I was in deep sleep, alone aboard my houseboat, alone in the half acre of the bed, alone in a sweaty dream of chase, fear, and monstrous predators. | Buy | |
| The Drifters | James A. Michener | Youth is truth. | Buy | |
| The Dynamiter | Robert Louis Stevenson | In the city of encounters, the Bagdad of the West, and, to be more precise, on the broad northern pavement of Leicester Square, two young men of five- or six-and-twenty met after years of separation. | Buy | |
| The Eagle Has Landed | Jack Higgins | Someone was digging a grave in one corner of the cemetery as I went in through the lychgate. I remember that quite clearly because it seemed to set the scene for nearly everything that followed. | Buy | |
| The Eagle Of The Ninth | Rosemary Sutcliffe | From the Fosseway westward to the Isca Dumnoniorum the road was simply a British trackway, broadened and roughly metalled, strengthened by corduroys of logs in the softest places, but otherwise unchanged from its old estate, as it wound among the hills, thrusting farther and farther into the wilderness. | Buy | |
| The Edge of Sadness | Edwin O'Connor | This story at no point becomes my own. | Buy | |
| The Education of Little Tree | Forrest Carter | Ma lasted a year after Pa was gone. | Buy | |
| The Egyptian | Mika Waltari | I, Sinuhe, the son of Senmut and of his wife Kipa, write this. I do not write it to the glory of the gods in the land of Kem, for I am weary of gods, nor to the glory of the Pharaohs, for I am weary of their deeds. I write neither from fear nor from any hope of the future but for myself alone. During my life I have seen, known, and lost too much to be the prey of vain dread; and, as for the hope of immortality, I am as weary of that as I am of gods and kings. For my own sake only I write this; and herein I differ from all other writers, past and to come. | Buy | |
| The Eighth Day | Thornton Niven Wilder | In the summer of 1902 John Barrington Ashley of Coaltown, a small mining center in southern Illinois, was tried for the murder of Breckenridge Lansing, also of Coaltown. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Five days later, at one in the morning of Tuesday, July 22, he escaped from his guards on the train that was carrying him to his execution. | Buy | |
| The Eighth Dwarf | Ross Thomas | During the war Minor Jackson had served with the Office of Strategic Services, in Europe mostly, although some four months before the fighting there was done they had flown him out to Burma. | Buy | |
| The Embezzler | Louis Auchincloss | I have the distinctions of having become a legend in my lifetime, but not a very nice one. | Buy | |
| The Enchanted April | Countess Elizabeth von Arnim | It began in a woman's club in London on a February afternoon,--an uncomfortable club, and a miserable afternoon--when Mrs. Wilkins, who had come down from Hampstead to shop and had lunched at her club, took up The Times from the table in the smoking-room, and running her listless eye down the Agony Column saw this: To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let Furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times. That was its conception; yet, as in the case of many another, the conceiver was unaware of it at the moment. | Buy | |
| The End of the Affair | Graham Henry Greene | A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. | Buy | |
| The End of the Night | John D MacDonald | Dear Ed, Well, we had the big day here, and we sent the four of them off to their reward with what Satchel-Butt Shires, our lovable Warden called "splendid efficiency". | Buy | |
| The Enemy | Desmond Bagley | I met Penelope Ashton at a party thrown by Tom Packer. | Buy | |
| The Enemy Camp | Jerome Weidman | If it was trouble you were after, Miss Akst was your girl. | Buy | |
| The English Patient | Michael Ondaatje | She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. | Buy | |
| The Establishment | Howard Fast | Cohen, a large, heavyset man of forty-three, was gradually losing his patience, and that would be a prelude to losing his temper and taking it out on everyone around him, and that had been happening too often. | Buy | |
| The Etruscan Bull | Frank Gruber | The savings and loan bank occupied the first two floors of the new high-rise building and the upper floors were leased to desirable tenants--those able to pay the rent, which was high even for Beverly Hills. | Buy | |
| The Eustace Diamonds | Anthony Trollope | It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies--who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two--that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself. | Buy | |
| The Eve of St. Agnes | John Keats | St. Agnes's Eve--Ah, bitter chill is was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold. | 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 | |
| The Excorcist | William Peter Blatty | Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men's eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all. | Buy | |
| The Exhibitionist | Henry Sutton | It wasn't any lack of human feeling. There were people in the town who said it was that, but it wasn't. | Buy | |
| The Exorcist | William Peter Blatty | Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men's eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all. It was difficult to judge. | Buy | |
| The Eye of the World | Robert Jordan | The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of the Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning. | Buy | |
| The Eye of the World | Robert Jordan | The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory, groaned as if it would deny what had happened. | Buy | |
| The Eyes of the Dragon | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a King with two sons. Delain was a very old kingdom and it had had hundreds of Kings, perhaps even thousands; when time goes on long enough, not even historians can remember everything. Roland the Good was neither the best nor the worst King ever to rule the land. | Buy | |
| The Eyes of the World | Harold Bell Wright | It was winter--cold and snow and ice and naked trees and leaden clouds and stinging wind. | Buy | |
| The Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston | Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. | Buy | |
| The Face of Battle | John Keegan | I have not been in a battle; not near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath. | Buy | |
| The Faerie Queene | Edmund Spenser | Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds, Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds; Whose prayses hauing slept in silence long, Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds To blazon broad emongst her learned throng: Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song. | Buy | |
| The Faerie Queene | Edmund Spenser | A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde, Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine, The cruell markes of many' a bloudy fielde; Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield: His angry steede did chide his foming bitt, As much disdayning to the curbe to yield: Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt, As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt. | Buy | |
| The Faerie Queene | Edmund Spenser | The Patron of true Holinesse, Foule Errour doth defeate: Hypocrisie him to entrappe, Doth to his home entreate. | Buy | |
| The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin | David Nobbs | When Reginald Iolanthe Perrin set out for work on the Thursday morning, he had no intention of calling his mother-in-law a hippopotamus. | Buy | |
| The Fall of the House of Usher | Edgar Allan Poe | During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher | Buy | |
| The Fallen Sparrow | Dorothy B Hughes | There was the heat. | Buy | |
| The Family | Nina Fedorova | The only thing the Family managed to retain from the prolific line of their noble ancestors was a long and shapely aristocratic nose. | Buy | |
| The Family of Pascual Duarte | Camilo Jose Cela | I am not, sir, a bad person, though in truth I am not lacking in
reasons for being one. [Sp., Yo, senor, no soy malo, aunque no me faltarian motivos para serlo.] | Buy | |
| The Fan Club | Irving Wallace | It was not long after daybreak this early June morning--ten minutes after seven o'clock, according to his wristwatch--and the sun was continuing to rise, slowly warming the vast sprawl of buildings and the long stretch of Southern California country. | Buy | |
| The Fantastic Island | Kenneth Robeson | The disappearance of William Harper Littlejohn attracted no public attention whatever. | Buy | |
| The Farm | Louis Bromfield | Johnny's earliest memory of the Farm was filled with snow and the sound of sleighbells. | Buy | |
| The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe | That homely proverb, used on so many occasions in England, viz. "That what is bred in the bone will not go out of the flesh," was never more verified than in the story of my Life | Buy | |
| The Fellowship of the Ring | J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien) | When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. | Buy | |
| The Field of Vision | Wright Morris | The seat in the shady side of the bullring made McKee cold. | Buy | |
| The Fifth Horseman | Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre | The rain, the bitter rain of winter, flayed the window with its silken lash, sending jagged rivulets coursing down its plate-glass surface. The man peered out, across the empty canyons, into the black recesses of the night. He shuddered. | Buy | |
| The Fifth Horseman | Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre | The unseasonably cold December day drew to a close. Mounds of still-fresh snow, the heritage of the unexpected storm which had swept up the eastern seaboard seventy two hours before, lined the streets of the nation's capital. That snow, and the freezing weather which had followed it, had kept most of the city's 726,000 inhabitants indoors this Sunday afternoon, December 13. | Buy | |
| The Fighting Chance | Robert William Chambers | The speed of the train slackened; a broad tidal river flashed into sight below the trestle, spreading away on either hand through yellowing level meadows. And now, above the roaring undertone of the cars, from far ahead floated back the treble bell-notes of the locomotive; there came a gritting vibration of the brakes; slowly, more slowly the cars glided to a creaking standstill beside a sun-scorched platform gay with the bright flutter of sunshades and summer gowns. | Buy | |
| The Fireship | C Northcote Parkinson | The frigate Medusa was on her passage home from the Mediterranean and lay becalmed almost in sight of Falmouth. | Buy | |
| The Firm | John Grisham | The senior partner studied the resume for the hundredth time and again found nothing he disliked about Mitchell Y. McDeere, at least not on paper. He had the brains, the ambition, the good looks. And he was hungry; with his background, he had to be. He was married, and that was mandatory. | Buy | |
| The Firm of Girdlestone | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The approach to the offices of Girdlestone and Co. was not a very dignified one, nor would the uninitiated who traversed it form any conception of the commercial prosperity of the firm in question. | Buy | |
| The First Circle | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | The fretwork hands stood at five past four. | Buy | |
| The First Man in Rome | Colleen McCollough | Having no personal commitment to either of the new consuls, Gaius Julius Caesar and his son simply tacked themselves onto the procession which started nearest to their own house, the procession of the senior consul, Marcus Minucius Rufus. | Buy | |
| The First Men in the Moon | H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells) | As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the blue sky of southern Italy it comes to me with a certain quality of astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr. Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident. | Buy | |
| The Five People You Meet In Heaven | Mitch Albom | This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. | Buy | |
| The Fixer | Bernard Malamud | From the small crossed window of his room above the stable in the brickyard, Yakov Bok saw people in their long overcoats running somewhere early that morning, everybody in the same direction | Buy | |
| The Fixer | Bernard Malamud | From the small crossed window of his room above the stable in the brickyard, Yakov Bok saw people in their long overcoats running somewhere early that morning, everybody in the same direction. | Buy | |
| The Flayed Hand | Guy de Maupassant | One evening about eight months ago I met with some college comrades at the lodgings of our friend Louis R. We drank punch and smoked, talked of literature and art, and made jokes like any other company of young men. Suddenly the door flew open, and one who had been my friend since boyhood burst in like a hurricane. | Buy | |
| The Food of the Gods | H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells) | In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called--"Scientists." | Buy | |
| The Forest and the Fort | Hervey Allen | In the beginning was the forest. God made it and no man knew the end of it. | Buy | |
| The Forsyte Saga | John Galsworthy | Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight--an upper middle-class family in full plumage. But whosoever of these favoured persons has possessed the gift of psychological analysis (a talent without monetary value and properly ignored by the Forsytes), has witnessed a spectacle, not only delightful in itself, but illustrative of an obscure human problem. In plainer words, he has gleaned from a gathering of this family--no branch of which had a liking for the other, between no three members of whom existed anything worthy of the name of sympathy--evidence of that mysterious concrete tenacity which renders a family so formidable a unit of society, so clear a reproduction of society in miniature. He has been admitted to a vision of the dim roads of social progress, has understood something of patriarchal life, of the swarmings of savage hordes, of the rise and fall of nations. | Buy | |
| The Fortunate Youth | William John Locke | Paul Kegworthy lived with his mother, Mrs. Button, his stepfather, Mr. Button, and six little Buttons, his half brothers and sisters. His was not an ideal home; it consisted in a bedroom, a kitchen and a scullery in a grimy little house in a grimy street made up of rows of exactly similar grimy little houses, and forming one of a hundred similar streets in a northern manufacturing town. Mr. and Mrs. Button worked in a factory and took in as lodgers grimy single men who also worked in factories. They were not a model couple; they were rather, in fact, the scandal of Budge Street, which did not itself enjoy, in Bludston, a reputation for holiness. | Buy | |
| The Fortunes of Captain Blood | Rafael Sabatini | She was a beautiful ship, in the frigate class, fashioned, not merely in her lines but in her details, with an extreme of that loving care that Spanish builders not infrequently bestowed. | Buy | |
| The Forty Days of Musa Dagh | Franz Werfel | "How did I get here?" | Buy | |
| The Forty-Five Guardsmen | Alexandre Dumas père | On the 26th of October, in the year 1585, the barriers of the gate of Saint Antoine were still closed, contrary to the usual custom, at half-past ten in the morning. | Buy | |
| The Foundling | Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman | No one noticed the solitary, wistful soldier peeling an orange with his teeth. Once this lean, long-legged lad could have taken the fruit in his hands and stripped its skin with his fingers. But that was in other years--years before war screamed into the world, mastered men, bent them to its vengeful, lustful will and left them, as it had left Paul, struck down and maimed in the Argonne. | Buy | |
| The Fountain | Charles Morgan | On an afternoon of January 1915, a small train dragged itself across the flat Dutch countryside in the neighbourhood of Bodegraven, carrying a group of English officers under guard. | Buy | |
| The Fountainhead | Ayn Rand | Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. | Buy | |
| The Four Feathers | Alfred Edward Woodley Mason | Lieutenant Sutch was the first of General Feversham's guests to reach Broad Place. He arrived about five o'clock on an afternoon of sunshine in mid June, and the old red-brick house, lodged on a southern slope of the Surrey hills, was glowing from a dark forest depth of pines with the warmth of a rare jewel. | Buy | |
| The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse | Vicente Blasco Ibanez | They were to have met in the garden of the Chapelle Expiatoire at five o'clock in the afternoon, but Julio Desnoyers with the impatience of a lover who hopes to advance the moment of meeting by presenting himself before the appointed time, arrived an half hour earlier. The change of the seasons was at this time greatly confused in his mind, and evidently demanded some readjustment. | Buy | |
| The Fourth Durango | Ross Thomas | When the white bedside telephone rang at 4:03 A.M. on that last Friday in June, the 36-year-old mayor answered the call halfway through its fourth ring and kicked the 39-year-old chief of police on the ankle to make sure he too was awake. | Buy | |
| The Fourth Hand | John Irving | Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event--the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age. | Buy | |
| The Fourth King | Harry Stephen Keeler | J. Hamilton Eaves, seated in the leather-lined swivel chair of his private office in the National Industrial Securities Company, gazed down curiously at the small and inconspicuous parcel the mail carrier had just delivered with the rest of the afternoon's letters. | Buy | |
| The Fourth Protocol | Frederick Forsyth | The man in gray decided to take the Glen Suite of diamonds at midnight. Provided they were still in the apartment safe and the occupants away. This he needed to know. So he watched and he waited. At half past seven he was rewarded. | Buy | |
| The Fox in the Attic | Richard Hughes | Only the steady creaking of a flight of swans disturbed the silence, labouring low overhead with outstretched necks towards the sea. | Buy | |
| The Foxes of Harrow | Frank Yerby | About fifteen miles above New Orleans the river goes very slowly. It has broadened out there until it is almost a sea and the water is yellow with the mud of half a continent. Where the sun strikes it, it is golden. | Buy | |
| The French Key | Frank Gruber | The key wouldn't go into the lock, because someone had already inserted a key and broken it off. | Buy | |
| The French Lieutenant's Woman | John Fowles | An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay -- Lyme Bay being that largest byte from the underside of England's outstretched southwestern leg -- and a person of curiousity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867. | Buy | |
| The Fringes of the Fleet | Rudyard Kipling | The Navy is very old and very wise. | Buy | |
| The Fruits of the Earth | André Gide | Do not hope, Nathaniel, to find God here or there - but everywhere. | Buy | |
| The Gabriel Hounds | Mary Stewart | I met him in the street called Straight. | Buy | |
| The Galaxy | Susan Ertz | Laura Alicia Deverell was born on May 10th, 1862, at precisely a quarter past one o'clock on a Thursday morning. Those interested in that pseudo-science astrology or astromancy may trace her life and character, if they wish, among the stars, where no doubt it is all written. | Buy | |
| The Gambler | Katherine Cecil Thurston (nee Madden) | An eight-mile drive over rain-washed Irish roads in the quick-falling dusk of autumn is an experience trying to the patience, even to the temper, of the average Saxon. | Buy | |
| The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight | Jimmy Breslin | The idea for the six-day bike race came out of a meeting held in November, in Brooklyn, in the offices of Anthony Pastrumo, Sr. | Buy | |
| The Garden of Allah | Robert Smythe Hichens | The fatigue caused by a rough sea journey, and, perhaps, the consciousness that she would have to be dressed before dawn to catch the train for Beni-Mora, prevented Domini Enfilden from sleeping. There was deep silence in the Hotel de la Mer at Robertville. The French officers who took their pension there had long since ascended the hill of Addouna to the barracks. The cafes had closed their doors to the drinkers and domino players. The lounging Arab boys had deserted the sandy Place de la Marine. | Buy | |
| The Gay Desperado | Berkeley Gray | The fun started when the Frampton Fury hit an air pocket of such impressive size that Norman Conquest experienced all the sensations of a man who walks over the edge of a cliff. | Buy | |
| The General | C S Forester | Nowadays Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Curzon, K.C.M.G., C.B., D.S.O., is just one of Bournemouth's seven generals, but with the distinction of his record and his social position as a Duke's son-in-law, he is really far more eminent than those bare words would imply. | Buy | |
| The General Danced at Dawn | George MacDonald Fraser | Our coal bunker is old, and it stands beneath an ivy hedge, so that when I go to it in wet weather, I catch the combined smells of damp earth and decaying vegetation. | Buy | |
| The Geography of the Imagination | Guy Davenport | The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination. | Buy | |
| The German Money | Lev Raphael | I used to think that some people had a true gift for life, more than just a talent or even a skill. | Buy | |
| The Ghost | Danielle Steel | In the driving rain of a November day, the cab from London to Heathrow took forever. It was so dark it looked like late afternoon, and Charlie Waterston could barely see out the windows as familiar landmarks slid past him. | Buy | |
| The Gift | Danielle Steel | Annie Whittaker loved everything about Christmas. She loved the weather, and the trees, brightly lit on everyone's front lawn, and the Santas outlined in lights on the roofs of people's houses. She loved the carols, and waiting for Santa Claus to come, going skating and drinking hot chocolate afterwards, and stringing popcorn with her mother and sitting wide-eyed afterwards looking at how beautiful their Christmas tree was, all lit up. Her mother just let het sit there in the glow of it, her five-year-old face filled with wonder. | Buy | |
| The Gift Horse | Frank Gruber | It didn't take much to make Johnny Fletcher happy. | Buy | |
| The Ginger Man | J P Donleavy | It was a steep hill up to Balscaddoom | Buy | |
| The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. Trisha McFarland discovered this when she was nine years old. | Buy | |
| The Girls of Slender Means | Muriel Spark | Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. | Buy | |
| The Giver | Lois Lowry | It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. | Buy | |
| The Glass-Blowers | Daphne du Maurier | One day in the June of 1844 Madame Sophie Duval, nee Busson, eighty years of age and mother of the mayor of Vibraye, a small commune in the departement of Sarthe, rose from her chair in the salon of her property at le Gue de Launay, chose her favourite walkingstick from a stand in the hall, and calling to her dog made her way, as was her custom at this hour of the afternoon every Tuesday, down the short approach drive to the entrance gate. | Buy | |
| The Glitter Dome | Joseph Wambaugh | It was six inches long. He stroked it lightly, but he could not conjure an appropriate response: eroticism, revulsion, fascination, terror. | Buy | |
| The Glory That Was | L Sprague de Camp | The Dagmar II sank into the trough of the waves, hiding all but her naked poles. | Buy | |
| The Gnostic Gospels | Elaine Pagels | "Jesus Christ rose from the grave." With this proclamation, the Christian church began. This may be the fundamental element of Christian faith; certainly it is the most radical. | Buy | |
| The Go-Between | Leslie Poles Hartley | The 8th of July was a Sunday, and on the following Monday I left West Hatch, the village where we lived near Salisbury, for Brandham Hall. My mother arranged that my Aunt Charlotte, a Londoner, should take me across London. Between bouts of stomach-turning trepidation I looked forward wildly to the visit. | Buy | |
| The Go-Between | Leslie Poles Hartley | The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. | Buy | |
| The God of Small Things | Arundhati Roy | May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. | Buy | |
| The Godfather | Mario Puzo | Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her. | Buy | |
| The Gold Bug | Edgar Allan Poe | Many years ago, I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand. He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been wealthy; but a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want. | Buy | |
| The Golden Bowl | Henry James Jr | The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber. | Buy | |
| The Golden Butterfly | Sir Walter Besant and J Rice | The largest and most solid of all the substantial houses in Carnarvon Square, Bloomsbury, is Number Fifteen, which, by reason of its corner position (Mulgrave Street intersecting it at right angles at this point), has been enabled to stretch itself out at the back. It is a house which a man who wanted to convey the idea of a solid income without ostentation or attempt at fashion would find the very thing to assist his purpose. | Buy | |
| The Golden Butterfly | Sir Walter Besant and J. Rice | The largest and most solid of all the substantial houses in Carnarvon Square, Bloomsbury, is Number Fifteen, which, by reason of its corner position (Mulgrave Street intersecting it at right angles at this point), has been enabled to stretch itself out at the back. It is a house which a man who wanted to convey the idea of a solid income without ostentation or attempt at fashion would find the very thing to assist his purpose. | Buy | |
| The Golden Compass | Philip Pullman | Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen. | Buy | |
| The Golden Hawk | Frank Yerby | There was no wind in all that sweep of sky. | Buy | |
| The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing | The two women were alone in the London flat. | Buy | |
| The Good Companions | J B Priestly | There far below, is the knobbly backbone of England, the Pennine Range. | Buy | |
| The Good Earth | Pearl Buck | It was Wang Lung's marriage day. | Buy | |
| The Good Earth | Pearl S. Buck | It was Wang Lung's marriage day. | Buy | |
| The Good Shepherd | C S Forester | In that hour after dawn the horizon did not seem far away. | Buy | |
| The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford | This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy--or, with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. | Buy | |
| The Good Soldier Schweik | Jaroslav Hasek | Great times call for great men. | Buy | |
| The Good Soldier Schweik | Jaroslav Hasek | "And so they've killed out Ferdinand,"1 said the
charwoman to Mr Svejk, who had left military service years
before, after having been finally certified by an army medical
board as an imbecile, and now lived by selling dogs--ugly,
mongrel monstrosities whose pedigrees he forged. 1 The archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of the Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph, was assassinated with his wife at Sarajevo by the Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, in 1914. | Buy | |
| The Good Soldier Svejk | Jaroslav Hasek | 'And so they've killed our Ferdinand,' said the charwoman to Mr Svejk, who had left military service years before, after having been finally certified by an army medical board as an imbecile, and now lived by selling dogs--ugly, mongrel monstrosities whose pedigrees he forged. | Buy | |
| The Good-Natured Lady | J E Buckrose | The train in which Catherine journeyed was one in which it would be a delight for the worn-out dollar-snatcher of any nationality to travel. | Buy | |
| The Goose Girl | Harold MacGrath | An old man, clothed in picturesque patches and tatters, paused and leaned on his stout oak staff. He was tired. He drew off his rusty felt hat, swept a sleeve across his forehead, and sighed. He had walked many miles that day, and even now the journey's end, near as it really was, seemed far away. | Buy | |
| The Gown of Glory | Agnes Sligh Turnbull | On a gusty March afternoon in the year eighteen and eighty-one, a battered black hack drawn by two gray horses appeared on the top of Haldeman's Hill, swayed for a moment as the wind from the high ground struck it, and then lurched forward in the hub-deep mud almost upon the horses' haunches as the down grade sharply began. | Buy | |
| The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. | Buy | |
| The Grapes of Wrath | John Ernst Steinbeck | To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. | Buy | |
| The Great Brain | John D Fitzgerald | Most everyone in Utah remembers 1896 as the year the territory became a state. | Buy | |
| The Great Brain at the Academy | John D Fitzgerald | When my brother Tom began telling people in Adenville, Utah, that he had a great brain everybody laughed at him, including his own family. | Buy | |
| The Great Brain Does it Again | John D Fitzgerald | My brother Tom knew the A, B, C's, could write numbers from one to one hundred, spell a lot of words, and read simple sentences before he started school. | Buy | |
| The Great Brain Reforms | John D Fitzgerald | My brother Tom and eldest brother Sweyn arrived home for summer vacation on Sunday, June 5, 1898. | Buy | |
| The Great Fire | Shirley Hazzard | Now they were starting. Finality ran through the train, an exhalation. | Buy | |
| The Great Gatsby | F Scott Fitzgerald | In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some
advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." | Buy | |
| The Great Impersonation | Edward Phillips Oppenheim | The trouble from which great events were to come began when Everard Dominey, who had been fighting his way through the scrub for the last three quarters of an hour towards those thin, spiral wisps of smoke, urged his pony to a last despairing effort and came crashing through the great oleander shrub to pitch forward on his head in the little clearing. It developed the next morning, when he found himself for the first time for many months on the truckle bed, between linen sheets, with a cool, bamboo-twisted roof between him and the relentless sun. He raised himself a little in the bed. | Buy | |
| The Great Rascal | Jay Monaghan | In the late summer of 1869 a short man with a seamed and weatherbeaten face limped down the steep steps of a Union Pacific coach at North Platte, Nebraska. | Buy | |
| The Great Train Robbery | Michael Crichton | Forty minutes out of London, passing through the rolling green fields and cherry orchards of Kent, the morning train of the South Eastern Railway attained its maximum speed of fifty-four miles an hour. Riding the bright blue-painted engine, the driver in his red uniform could be seen standing upright in the open air, unshielded by any cab or windscreen, while at his feet the engineer crouched, shoveling coal into the glowing furnaces of the engine. Behind the chugging engine and tender were three yellow first-class coaches, followed by seven second-class carriages; and at the very end, a gray, windowless luggage van. | Buy | |
| The Greek Treasure | Irving Stone | She was helping the other girls of the village decorate the icon
of St. Meletios, putting daisies, end-of-August chrysanthemums
and skyllakia around the shrine in the middle of the small
church for the coming holiday. Her younger sister Marigo rushed
in breathless, and cried: "Sophia! The American has arrived, Your suitor, Mr. Schliemann!" | Buy | |
| The Green Berets | Robin Moore | The headquarters of Special Forces Detachment B-520 in one of Vietnam's most active war zones looks exactly like a fort out of the old West. Although the B detachments are strictly support and administrative units for the Special Forces A teams fighting the Communist Viet Cong guerrillas in the jungles and rice paddies, this headquarters had been attacked twice in the last year by VC and both times had sustained casualties. | Buy | |
| The Green Berets | Robin Moore | The Green Berets is a book of truth. | Buy | |
| The Green Eagle Score | Richard Stark | Parker looked in at the beach and there was a guy in a black suit standing there, surrounded by all the bodies in bathing suits. | Buy | |
| The Green Hat | Michael Arlen | It has occurred to the writer to call this unimportant history The Green Hat because a green hat was the first thing about her that he saw: as also it was, in a way, the last thing about her that he saw. | Buy | |
| The Green Mile | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too, of course. | Buy | |
| The Green Years | Archibald Joseph Cronin | Holding Mama's hand tightly, I came out of the dark arches of the railway station and into the bright streets of the strange town. | Buy | |
| The Greene Murder Case | S S van Dine | It has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological writers--men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H.B. Irving, Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton--have not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy, for here, surely, is one of the outstanding mysteries of modern times--a case practically unique in the annals of latter-day crime. | Buy | |
| The Greene Murder Case | S S Van Dine | It has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological writers--men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H. B. Irving, Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton--have not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy; for here, surely, is one of the outstanding murder mysteries of modern times--a case practically unique in the annals of latter-day crime. | Buy | |
| The Group | Mary McCarthy | It was June, 1933, one week after Commencement, when Kay Leiland Strong, Vassar '33, the first of her class to run around the table at the Class Day dinner, was married to Harald Petersen, Reed '27, in the chapel of St. George's Church, P.E., Karl F. Reiland, Rector. | Buy | |
| The Groves of Academe | Mary McCarthy | When Henry Mulcahy, a middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President's letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer. | Buy | |
| The Gulag Archipelago | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? | Buy | |
| The Gun | C S Forester | A defeated army was falling back through the mountains from Espinosa. | Buy | |
| The Guns of August | Barbara W. Tuchman | So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. | Buy | |
| The Gunslinger | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. | Buy | |
| The Hair of Harold Roux | Thomas Alonzo Williams | Aaron Benham sits at his desk hearing the wrong voices. | Buy | |
| The Hamlet | William Faulkner | Frenchman's Bend was a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties and owning allegiance to neither, it had been the original grant and side of a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which--the gutted shell on an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades--were still known as the Old Frenchman's place, although the original boundaries now existed only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk's office in the county courthouse in Jefferson, and even some of the once-fertile fields had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them. | Buy | |
| The Hand in Glove | Rex Stout | It was not surprising that Sylvia Raffray, on that Saturday in September, had occasion for discourse with various men, none of them utterly ordinary, and with one remarkable young woman; it was not surprising that all this happened without any special effort on Sylvia's part, for she was rich, personable to an extreme, an orphan, and six months short of twenty-one years. | Buy | |
| The Handle | Richard Stark | When the engine stopped, Parker came up on deck for a look around. | Buy | |
| The Handmaid's Tale | Margaret Atwood | We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball net were still in place, though the nets were gone. | Buy | |
| The Harbor | Ernest Poole | "You chump," I thought contemptuously. I was seven years old at the time, and the gentleman to whom I referred was Henry Ward Beecher. What it was that aroused my contempt for the man will be more fully understood if I tell first of the grudge that I bore him. | Buy | |
| The Harvester | Gene Stratton-Porter | "Bel, come here!" | Buy | |
| The Haunted House | Charles Dickens | Under none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by none of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make acquaintance with the house which is the subject of this Christmas piece. | Buy | |
| The Haunted Man | Charles Dickens | Everybody said so. | Buy | |
| The Haunting of Hill House | Shirley Jackson | No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. | Buy | |
| The Head of the House of Coombe | Frances Hodgson Burnett | The history of the circumstances about to be related began many years ago--or so it seems in these days. It began, at least, years before the world being rocked to and fro revealed in the pause between each of its heavings some startling suggestion of a new arrangement of its kaleidoscopic particles, and then immediately a re-arrangement, and another and another until all belief in a permanency of design seemed lost, and the inhabitants of the earth waited, helplessly gazing at changing stars and colours in a degree of mental chaos. | Buy | |
| The Headless Horseman | Capt. Mayne Reid (Thomas Mayne Reid) | On the great plain of Texas, about a hundred miles southward from the old Spanish town of San Antonio de Bejar, the noonday sun is shedding his beams from a sky of cerulean brightness. Under the golden light appears a group of objects, but little in unison with the landscape around them: since they betoken the presence of human beings, in a spot where there is no sign of human habitation. | Buy | |
| The Headless Horseman | Capt. Mayne Reid (Thomas Mayne Reid) | The stag of Texas, reclining in midnight lair, is startled from his slumbers by the hoofstroke of a horse. | Buy | |
| The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers | In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. | Buy | |
| The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers | In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. | Buy | |
| The Heart of a Goof | Pelham Grenville Wodehouse | It was a morning when all nature shouted "Fore!" | Buy | |
| The Heart of Rachael | Kathleen Norris | The day had opened so brightly, in such a welcome wave of April sunshine, that by mid-afternoon there were two hundred players scattered over the links of the Long Island Country Club at Belvedere Bay; the men in thick plaid stockings and loose striped sweaters, the women's scarlet coats and white skirts making splashes of vivid color against the fresh green of grass and the thick powdering of dandelions. | Buy | |
| The Heart of the Hills | John William Fox | Twin spirals of blue smoke rose on either side of the spur, crept tendril-like up two dark ravines, and clearing the feathery green crests of the trees, drifted lazily on upward until, high above, they melted shyly together and into the haze that veiled the drowsy face of the mountain. | Buy | |
| The Heart of the Matter | Graham Henry Greene | Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork. | Buy | |
| The Heat of the Day | Elizabeth Bowen | That Sunday, from six o'clock in the evening, it was a Viennese orchestra that played. The season was late for an outdoor concert; already leaves were drifting on to the grass stage--here and there one turned over, crepitating as though in the act of dying, and during the music some more fell. | Buy | |
| The Heat's On | Chester Himes | "You're my friend, ain't you?" the giant asked. | Buy | |
| The Helmet of Navarre | Bertha Runkle (Bertha Runkle Bash) | At the stair-foot the landlord stopped me. "Here, lad, take a candle. The stairs are dark, and, since I like your looks, I would not have you break your neck." | Buy | |
| The Heritage of the Desert | Zane Grey | 'But the man's almost dead.' | Buy | |
| The High and the Mighty | Ernest Kellogg Gann | The forecaster caressed his bald head and then swept his bony fingers across the course from Honolulu to San Francisco. | Buy | |
| The High Window | Raymond Chandler | The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Knoll section of Pasadena, a big solid cook-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra-cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim. | Buy | |
| The Highbinders | Oliver Bleeck | The carnation made me feel silly. | Buy | |
| The Hills at Home | Nancy Clark | Outside, the night blew perfectly foul and all of the Hills had stayed at home. | Buy | |
| The History Man | Malcolm Bradbury | Now it is the autumn again; the people are all coming back. | Buy | |
| The History of Henry Esmond | William Makepeace Thackeray | When Francis, fourth Viscount Castlewood, came to his title, and presently after to take possession of his house of Castlewood, County Hants, in the year 1691, almost the only tenant of the place besides the domestics was a lad of twelve years of age, of whom no one seemed to take any note until my Lady Viscountess lighted upon him, going over the house with the housekeeper on the day of her arrival. | Buy | |
| The History of Mr. Polly | H G Wells | "Hole!" said said Mr Polly, and then for a change, and with greatly increased emphasis: "'Ole!" | Buy | |
| The History of Sir Richard Calmady | Lucas Malet | In that fortunate hour of English history, when the cruel sights and haunting insecurities of the Middle Ages had passed away, and while, as yet, the fanatic zeal of Puritanism had not cast its blighting shadow over all merry and pleasant things, it seemed good to one Denzil Calmady, esquire, to build himself a stately red-brick and freestone house upon the southern verge of the great plateau of moorland which ranges northward to the confines of Windsor Forest and eastward to the Surrey Hills. | Buy | |
| The History of Troilus and Cressida | William Shakespeare | In Troy there likes the scene. From isles of Greece The princes orgulous, their high blood chafed, Have to the port of Athens sent their ships, Fraught with the ministers and instruments Of cruel war. | Buy | |
| The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy | Douglas Adams | Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. | Buy | |
| The Hobbit | J R R Tolkien | In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. | Buy | |
| The Hobbit | J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien) | In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. | Buy | |
| The Holcroft Covenant | Robert Ludlum | JANUARY 197-- "Attention! Le train de sept heures a destination de Zurich partira du quai numero douze." The tall American in the dark-blue raincoat glanced up at the cavernous dome of the Geneva railway station, trying to locate the hidden speakers. The expression on his sharp, angular face was quizzical; the announcement was in French, a language he spoke but little and understood less. Nevertheless, he was able to distinguish the word Zurich; it was his signal. | Buy | |
| The Hollow Hills | Mary Stewart | There was a lark singing somewhere high above. Light fell dazzling against my closed eyelids, and with it the song, like a distant dance of water. I opened my eyes. | Buy | |
| The Hollow Tree | Janet Lunn | Throughout all her long life, Phoebe Olcott never forgot a single moment of the last happy afternoon she spent at home by the Connecticut River. | Buy | |
| The Holly-Tree | Charles Dickens | I have kept one secret in the course of my life. | Buy | |
| The Home-Maker | Dorothy Canfield Fisher | She was scrubbing furiously at a line of grease spots which led from the stove towards the door to the dining-room. That was where Henry had held the platter tilted as he carried the steak in yesterday. And yet if she had warned him once about that, she had a thousand times! | Buy | |
| The Honest Whore, Part One | Thomas Dekker | Behold, yon comet shows his head again; Twice hath he thus at cross-turns thrown on us Prodigious looks, twice hath he troubled The waters of our eyes. See, he's turn'd wild; Go on, in God's name. | Buy | |
| The Honorary Consul | Graham Henry Greene | Doctor Eduardo Plarr stood in the small port on the Parana, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where a horizontal plume of smoke stretched over the Chaco. It lay between the red bars of sunset like a stripe on a national flag. Doctor Plarr found himself alone at that hour except for the one sailor who was on guard outside the maritime building. It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognized plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten. | Buy | |
| The Honourable Schoolboy | John Le Carré | Afterwards, in the dusty little corners where London's secret servants drink together, there was argument about where the Dolphin case history should really begin. | Buy | |
| The Honourable Schoolboy | John Le Carre | Afterwards, in the dusty little corners where London's secret servants drink together, there was argument about where the Dolphin case history should really begin. | Buy | |
| The Horse Whisperer | Nicholas Evans | There was death at its beginning as there would be death again at its end. Though whether is was some fleeting shadow of this that passed acroess the girl's dreams and woke her on that least likely of mornings she would never know. All she knew, when she opened her eyes, was that the world was somehow altered. | Buy | |
| The Horse's Mouth | Joyce Cary | I was walking by the Thames. | Buy | |
| The Hotel New Hampshire | John Irving | The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born - we weren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Fanny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg. | Buy | |
| The Hotel New Hampshire | John Irving | The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born--we weren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny; the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg. | Buy | |
| The Hound Of The Baskervilles | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table | Buy | |
| The Hound of the Baskervilles | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before. | Buy | |
| The Hounds of Spring | Sylvia Thompson | Edgar Renner dozed and ruminated through the July afternoon. | Buy | |
| The Hours | Michael Cunningham | There are still the flowers to buy. Clarisa feigns exasperation
(though she loves doing errands like this), leaves Sally cleaning
the bathroom, and runs out, promising to be back in half an hour. It is New York City. It is the end of the twentieth century. | Buy | |
| The Hours | Michael Cunningham | She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another was has begun. | Buy | |
| The House of a Thousand Candles | Meredith Nicholson | Pickering's letter bringing news of my grandfather's death found me at Naples early in October. | Buy | |
| The House of Bernard Alba | Federico Garcia Lorca | FIRST SERVANT (entering): The tolling of those bells hits me right between the eyes. | Buy | |
| The House of Mirth | Edith Newbold Wharton (nee Jones) | Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart. | Buy | |
| The House of the Seven Gables | Nathaniel Hawthorne | Halfway down a bystreet of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. | Buy | |
| The House on the Strand | Daphne du Maurier | The first thing I noticed was the clarity of the air, and then the sharp green colour of the land. | Buy | |
| The Houses in Between | Howard Spring (Robert Howard Spring) | I remember that I was dancing up and down. "Shall I see the Queen?" I cried. "Shall I see the Queen's husband? Shall I see--?" | Buy | |
| The Hucksters | Frederic Wakeman (1) | Victor Norman came awake quietly and looked at his watch. Twenty after nine. He glanced at the mussed but empty twin bed beside his, picked up a cigarette, then put it down. He was against smoking before breakfast, on the theory that it promoted ulcers. | Buy | |
| The Human Comedy | William Saroyan | The little boy named Ulysses Macauley one day stood over the new gopher hole in the backyard of his house on Santa Clara Avenue in Ithaca, California. | Buy | |
| The Human Factor | Graham Henry Greene | Castle, ever since he had joined the firm as a young recruit more than thirty years ago, had taken his lunch in a public house behind St. James's Street, not far from the office. | Buy | |
| The Hunchback of Notre Dame | Victor Hugo | It was three hundred forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago today that the citizens of Paris were awakened by the pealing of all the bells in the triple precincts of the City, the University, and the Town. | Buy | |
| The Hundred Secret Senses | Amy Tan | My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. | Buy | |
| The Hundredth Chance | Ethel May Dell | "My dear Maud, I hope I am not lacking in proper pride. But it is an accepted--though painful--fact that beggars cannot be choosers." | Buy | |
| The Hunt Club | Bret Lott | My name is Huger Dillard. You say it YOU-gee, not like it's spelled. It's French, I heard. | Buy | |
| The Hunt for Red October | Tom Clancy | The Red October Captain First Rank Marko Ramius of the Soviet Navy was dressed for the Artic conditions normal to the Northern Fleet submarine base at Polyarnyy. Five layers of wool and oilskin enclosed him. A dirty harbor tug pushed his submarine's bow around to the north, facing down the channel. | Buy | |
| The Hurricane | Charles Nordhoff and James Hall | Scattered over a thousand miles of ocean in the eastern tropical Pacific, below the Equator, lies a vast collection of coral islands extending in a general northwesterly, southeasterly direction across ten degrees of latitude. Seventy-eight atolls, surf-battered dykes of coral, enclosing lagoons, make up this barrier to the steady westward roll of the sea. | Buy | |
| The Icarus Agenda | Robert Ludlum | The angry waters of the Oman Gulf were a prelude to the storm racing down through the Strait of Hormuz into the Arabian Sea. It was sundown, marked by the strident prayers nasally intoned by bearded muezzins in the minarets of the port city's mosques. The sky was darkening under the black thunderheads that swirled ominously across the lesser darkness of evening like roving behemoths. Blankets of heat lightning sporadically fired the eastern horizon over the Makran Mountains of Turbat, two hundred miles across the sea in Pakistan. | Buy | |
| The Idiot | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Towards the end of November, during a warm spell, at around nine o'clock in the morning, a train of the Petersburg-Warsaw line was approaching Petersburg at full steam. It was so damp and foggy that dawn could barely break; ten paces to right or left of the line it was hard to make out anything at all through the carriage windows. Among the passengers there were some who were returning from abroad; but the third-class compartments were more crowded, and they were petty business folk from not far away. Everyone was tired, as usual, everyone's eyes had grown heavy overnight, everyone was chilled, everyone's face was pale yellow, matching the color of the fog. | Buy | |
| The Iliad | Homer | Achilles' cursed anger sing, O goddess, that son of Peleus, which stated a myriad sufferings for the Achaeans. | Buy | |
| The Iliad | Homer | Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing! | Buy | |
| The Iliad | Homer | Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls Of heroes into Hades' dark And left their bodies to rot as feasts For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done. | Buy | |
| The Ill Wind Contract | Philip Atlee | There was a hint of snow in the air as I drove back into the Ozark Mountains, headed for my remote eyrie. | Buy | |
| The Image Men | J B Priestly | It was the end of a wet Monday afternoon in autumn. | Buy | |
| The Immoralist | André Gide | Yes, my dear brother, Michel has spoken to us, as you thought he would. Here is the account he gave us. You asked to hear it and I promised to tell you, but at the point of sending it to you I still hesitate; the more times I reread it, the more terrible it seems. Oh, what will you think of our friend? For that matter, what do I think of him myself. | Buy | |
| The Incredible Shrinking Man | Richard Matheson | First he thought it was a tidal wave. | Buy | |
| The Indian in the Cupboard | Lynne Reid Banks | It was not that Omri didn't appreciate Patrick's birthday present to him. | Buy | |
| The Indiscreet Letter | Ellen Hallowell Abbott | The Railroad Journey was very long and slow. The Traveling Salesman was rather short and quick. And the Young Electrician who lolled across the car aisle was neither one length nor another, but most inordinately flexible, like a suit of chain armor | Buy | Read |
| The Indwelling | Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins | Leah Rose prided herself on thinking under pressure. She'd been chief administrative nurse in a large hospital for a decade and had also been one on few believers there the last three and a half years. | Buy | |
| The Inheritors | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | I was on my third cup of coffee when the telephone began to ring. I let it ring. You wait three years for a phone call, you can wait thirty seconds more. | Buy | |
| The Inner Shrine | Anonymous (Basil King) | Though she had counted the strokes of every hour since midnight, Mrs. Eveleth had no thought of going to bed. | Buy | |
| The Inner Shrine | Anonymous | Though she had counted the strokes of every hour since midnight, Mrs. Eveleth had no thought of going to bed. | Buy | |
| The Innocents Abroad | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | For months the great pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land was chatted about in the newspapers everywhere in America and discussed at countless firesides. | Buy | |
| The Innocents Abroad | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of solemn scientific expedition, it would have about it that gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind, and withal so attractive. Yet notwithstanding it is only a record of a pic-nic, it has a purpose, which is to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. | Buy | |
| The Inshore Squadron | Alexander Kent | Admiral Sir George Beauchamp held his thin hands towards the blazing log fire and rubbed his palms slowly together to restore his circulation. | Buy | |
| The Inside of the Cup | Winston Churchill | With few exceptions, the incidents recorded in these pages take place in one of the largest cities of the United States of America, and of that portion called the Middle West,--a city once conservative and provincial, and rather proud of these qualities; but now outgrown them, and linked by lightning limited trains to other teeming centers of the modern world: a city overtaken, in recent years, by the plague which has swept our country from the Atlantic to the Pacific--Prosperity. | Buy | |
| The Intimidators | Donald Hamilton | It was a good day, until we got back to the dock and found the messenger waiting. | Buy | |
| The Intriguers | Donald Hamilton | The morning I got shot at, down there in Mexico, I'd been out fishing the high-powered little boat Mac had lent me, along with a trailer to carry it and a station wagon to pull it. | Buy | |
| The Intruders | Hugh Garner | It was a warm summer Friday evening, the not yet setting sun disappearing behind the stores, restaurants and the few tall houses on the west side of Parliament Street, its light fast rising up the walls of the business block fronting on the street's eastern sidewalk. | Buy | |
| The Invisible Man | H G Wells | The stranger came early in February one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand | Buy | |
| The Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | I am an invisible man. | Buy | |
| The Invisible Man | H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells) | The stranger came early in February one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. | Buy | |
| The Ionian Mission | Patrick O'Brian | Marriage was once represented as a field of battle rather than a bed of roses, and perhaps there are some who may still support this view; but just as Dr Maturin had made a far more unsuitable match than most, so he set about dealing with the situation in a far more compendious, peaceable and efficacious way than the great majority of husbands. | Buy | |
| The Ipcress File | Len Deighton | They came through on the hot line at about half past two in the afternoon. | Buy | |
| The Iron Woman | Margaret Deland | "Climb up this tree, and play house!" Elizabeth Ferguson commanded. | Buy | |
| The Island Nights Entertainments | Robert Louis Stevenson | There was a man of the Island of Hawaii, whom I shall call Keawe; for the truth is, he still lives, and his name must be kept secret; but the place of his birth was not far from Honaunau, where the bones of Keawe the Great lie hidden in a cave | Buy | |
| The Island of Doctor Moreau | H G Wells | On February the First 1887, the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1' S. and longitude 107' W. | Buy | |
| The Jade of Destiny | Jeffrey Farnol | The Captain gave his battered hat the true swashbuckling cock, cast his ragged cloak about him with superb, braggadocio flourish, clashed his rusty spurs and bowed. | Buy | |
| The Joy Luck Club | Amy Tan | My father asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club. | Buy | |
| The Judgment House | Sir Gilbert Parker | The music throbbed in a voice of singular and delicate power; the air was resonant with melody, love and pain. The meanest Italian in the gallery far up beneath the ceiling, the most exalted of the land in the boxes and the stalls, leaned indulgently forward, to be swept by this sweet storm of song. | Buy | |
| The Jugger | Richard Stark | When the knock came at the door, Parker was just turning to the obituary page. | Buy | |
| The Jungle | Upton Beall Sinclair | It was four o'clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive. | Buy | |
| The Jungle Book | Rudyard Kipling | It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. | Buy | |
| The Just and the Unjust | Vaughan Kester | Custer felt it his greatest privilege to sit of a Sunday morning in his mother's clean and burnished kitchen and, while she washed the breakfast dishes, listen to such reflections as his father might care to indulge in. | Buy | |
| The Keeper of the Bees | Gene Stratton-Porter | "JAMES LEWIS MACFARLAND." The bearer of this name swung his feet to the floor and sat up suddenly, cupping his big hands over his knees to steady himself. | Buy | |
| The Key to Rebecca | Ken Follett | The last camel collapsed at noon. It was the five-year-old white bull he had bought in Gialo, the youngest and strongest of the three beasts, and the least ill-tempered: he liked the animal as much as a man could like a camel, which is to say that he hated it only a little. | Buy | |
| The Keys of the Kingdom | Archibald Joseph Cronin | Late one afternoon in September 1938 old Father Francis Chisholm limped up the steep path from the church of St. Columba to his house upon the hill. | Buy | |
| The Killer Angels | Michael Joseph Shaara Jr | He rode into the dark of the woods and dismounted. | Buy | |
| The King Must Die | Mary Renault | The Citadel of Troizen, where the Palace stands, was built by giants before anyone remembers. | Buy | |
| The King Of The Mountains | Edmond About | At about six in the morning of July 3, 1860, while I was watering my petunias, and thinking of nothing in particular, I perceived coming towards me, a tall, beardless, fair-haired young fellow, wearing a German cap and gold-rimmed spectacles. | Buy | |
| The King's General | Daphne du Maurier | September 1653. The last of summer. The first chill winds of autumn. | Buy | |
| The King's General | Daphne du Maurier | September 1653. The last of summer. The first chill winds of autumn. The sun no longer strikes my eastern window as I wake, but, turning laggard, does not top the till before eight o'clock. | Buy | |
| The King's Own | Captain Frederick Marryat | There is perhaps no event in the annals of our history which excited more alarm at the time of its occurrence, or has since been the subject of more general interest, than the Mutiny at the Nore, in the year 1797. Forty thousand men, to whom the nation looked for defence from its surrounding enemies, and in steadfast reliance upon whose bravery it lay down every night in tranquillity, - men who had dared everything for their king and country, and in whose breasts patriotism, although suppressed for the time, could never be extinguished, - irritated by ungrateful neglect on the one hand, and by seditious advisers on the other, turned the guns which they had so often manned in defence of the English flag against their own countrymen and their own home, and, with all the acrimony of feeling ever attending family quarrels, seemed determined to sacrifice the nation and themselves, rather than listen to the dictates of reason and of conscience. | Buy | |
| The Kingdom of Slender Swords | Hallie Erminie Rives | Barbara leaned against the palpitant rail, the light air fanning her breeze-cool cheek, her arteries beating like tiny drums, atune with the throb, throb, throb, of the steel deck as the black ocean leviathan swept on toward its harbor resting-place. | Buy | |
| The Kingdom Round the Corner | Coningsby William Dawson | It was on a blustering March morning in 1919 that Tabs regained his freedom. His last five months had been spent among doctors, having sundry bullets extracted from his legs. | Buy | |
| The Kiss | Danielle Steel | Isabelle Forrester stood looking down at the garden from her bedroom window, in the house on the rue de Grenelle, in the seventh arrondissement in Paris. It was the house she and Gordon had lived in for the past twenty years, and both her children had been born there. It has been built in the eighteenth century, and had tall, imposing bronze door on the street that led to the inner courtyard. The house was familiar and old and beautiful, with tall ceiling and splendid boiseries, lovely moldings, and parquet floors the color of brandy. | Buy | |
| The Klone and I | Danielle Steel | My first, and thus far only, marriage ended exactly two days before Thanksgiving. I remember the moment perfectly. | Buy | |
| The Lady in the Lake | Raymond Chandler | The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side. | Buy | |
| The Lady Kills | Bruno Fischer | The first time I saw the publisher's daughter she wore slippers and a couple of scant strips of black cloth and a cigarette. | Buy | |
| The Lady of the Decoration | Frances Little (pseudonym of Fannie Macaulay) | San Francisco, July 30, 1901 My dearest Mate: Behold a soldier on the eve of battle! I am writing this in a stuffy little hotel room and I don't dare stop whistling for a minute. You could cover my courage with a postage stamp. In the morning I sail for the Flowery Kingdom, and if the roses are waiting to strew my path it is more than they have done here for the past few years. | Buy | |
| The Lady of the Lake | Walter Dill Scott | Harp of the North! that mouldering long hast hung On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan's spring And down the fitful breeze thy numbers flung, Till envious ivy did around thee cling, Muffling with verdant ringlet every string,-- Mid rustling leaves and fountains murmuring, Still must thy sweeter sounds their silence keep, Nor bid a warrior smile, nor teach a maid to weep? | Buy | |
| The Lady Regrets | James M Fox | As far as I'm concerned, it never pays to speculate about the laws and principles of fate, if any. | Buy | |
| The Lamp in the Desert | Ethel May Dell | A great roar of British voices pierced the jewelled curtain of the Indian night. A toast with musical honours was being drunk in the sweltering dining-room of the officers' mess. The enthusiastic hubbub spread far, for every door and window was flung side. Though the season was yet in its infancy, the heat was intense. | Buy | |
| The Lamplighter | Charles Dickens | 'If you talk of Murphy and Francis Moore, gentlemen,' said the lamplighter who was in the chair, 'I mean to say that neither of 'em ever had any more to do with the stars than Tom Grig had.' | Buy | |
| The Last Chronicle of Barset | Anthony Trollope | "I can never bring myself to believe it, John," said Mary Walker, the pretty daughter of Mr. George Walker, attorney, of Silverbridge. | Buy | |
| The Last Coyote | Michael Connelly | "Any thoughts that you'd like to start with?" | Buy | |
| The Last Days of Pompeii | Edward George Bulwer-Lytton | "Ho, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus to-night?" said a
young man of small stature, who wore his tunic in those loose and
effeminate folds which proved him to be a gentleman and a coxcomb. "Alas, no! dear Clodinus; he has not invited me," replied Diomed, a man of portly frame and of middle age. "By Pollux, a scurvy trick! for they say his suppers are the best in Pompeii." | Buy | |
| The Last Don | Mario Puzo | On Palm Sunday, one year after the Great War against the Santadio, Don Domenico Clercuzio celebrated the christening of two infants of his own blood and made the most important decision of his life. He invited the greatest Family chiefs in America, as well as Alfred Gronefelt, the owner of the Xanadu Hotel in Vegas, and David Redfellow, who had built up a vast drug empire in the United States. All his partners to some degree. | Buy | |
| The Last Enchantment | Mary Stewart | Not every king would care to start his reign with the wholesale massacre of children. This is what they whisper of Arthur, even though in other ways he is held up as the type itself of the noble ruler, the protector alike of high and lowly. | Buy | |
| The Last Gentleman | Walker Percy | One fine day in early summer a young man lay thinking in Central Park. | Buy | |
| The Last Hurrah | Edwin O'Connor | It was early in August when Frank Skeffington decided--or rather, announced his decision, which actually had been arrived at some months before--to run for re-election as mayor of the city. | Buy | |
| The Last of the Barons | Edward George Bulwer-Lytton | Westward, beyond the still pleasant, but, even then, no longer solitary, hamlet of Charing, a broad space, broken here and there by scattered houses and venerable pollards, in the early spring of 1467, presented the rural scene for the sports and pastimes of the inhabitants of Westminister and London. | Buy | |
| The Last of the Mohicans | James Fenimore Cooper | It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet. | Buy | |
| The Last Precinct | Patricia Cornwell | I know from Lucy's voice that she is scared. Rarely is my brilliant, forceful, helicopter-piloting, fitness-obsessed, federal-law-enforcement-agent niece scared. | Buy | |
| The Last Puritan | George Santayana | In the first years after the war Mario Van de Weyer was almost my neighbour in Paris, for he lived just where the Left Bank ceases to be the Latin Quarter and I where it's not yet the Faubourg Saint Germain. | 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 | |
| The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse | Louise Erdrich | The grass was white with frost on the shadowed sides of the reservation hills and ditches, but the morning air was almost warm, sweetened by a southern wind. Father Damien's best hours were late at night and just after rising, when all he'd had to break his fast was a cup of hot water. He was old, very old, but alert until he had to eat. | Buy | |
| The Last Temptation of Christ | Nikos Kazantzakis | A cool heavenly breeze took possession of him. | Buy | |
| The Last Time They Met | Anita Shreve | She had come from the plane and was even now forgetting the ride from the airport. As she stepped from the car, she emerged to an audience of a doorman in uniform and another man in a dark coat moving through the revolving door of the hotel. The man in the dark coat hesitated, taking a moment to open an umbrella that immediately, in one fluid motion, blew itself inside out. He looked abashed and then purposefully amused--for now she was his audience--as he tossed the useless appendage into a bin and moved on. | Buy | |
| The Last Tycoon | F Scott Fitzgerald | Though I haven't ever been on the screen I was brought up in pictures. Rudolph Valentino came to my fifth birthday party--or so I was told. I put this down to indicate that even before the age of reason I was in a position to watch the wheels go round. | Buy | |
| The Late Bourgeois World | Nadine Gordimer | I opened the telegram and said, "He's dead--" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say. | Buy | |
| The Late Mrs. Null | Frank R Stockton | There was a wide entrance-gate to the old family mansion of Midbranch, but it was never opened to admit the family or visitors; although occasionally a load of wood, drawn by two horses and two mules, came between its tall chestnut posts, and was taken by a roundabout way among the trees to a spot at the back of the house, where the chips of several generations of sturdy wood-choppers had formed a ligneous soil deeper than the arable surface of any portion of the nine hundred and fifty acres which formed the farm of Midbranch. | Buy | |
| The Laughing Policeman | Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlö | On the evening of the thirteenth of November it was pouring in Stockholm. | Buy | |
| The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices | Charles Dickens | In the autumn month of September, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, wherein these presents bear date, two idle apprentices, exhausted by the long hot summer, and the long, hot work it had brought with it, ran away from their employer. | Buy | |
| The League of Gentlemen | John Boland | The first of the registered packages was received by Peter Race. | Buy | |
| The Legacy of Reginald Perrin | David Nobbs | The great November gale killed a plumber in Slough, a lady on her way to demonstrate the boning of a shoulder of lamb to the Bromyard Women's Institute, an aromatherapist from Wakefield, and Reginald Iolanthe Perrin. | Buy | |
| The Legend of Sleepy Hollow | Washington Irving | In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. | Buy | |
| The Leopard | Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa | Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. The daily recital of the Rosary was over. | Buy | |
| The Life and Death of King John | William Shakespeare | Now, say, Chatillion, what would France with us? | Buy | |
| The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay | Maurice Hewlett | I choose to record how Richard Count of Poictou rode all through one smouldering night to see Jehane Saint-Pol a last time. | Buy | |
| The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay | Maurice Hewlett | I like this good man's account of leopards, and find it more pertinent to my matter than you might think. | Buy | |
| The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz | Joan Rivers | Can we talk? When someone mentions the name of Heidi Abromowitz, words such as "virtuous," "chaste," "honorable," "moral," and "upright" never come to mind. | 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 | |
| The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman | Laurence Sterne | I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;--and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;--Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,--I am verily persuaded that I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me. | Buy | |
| The Life of King Henry the Eighth | William Shakespeare | I come no more to make you laugh. Things now That bear a weighty and a serious brow, Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe, Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow We now present. | Buy | |
| The Life of King Henry the Fifth | William Shakespeare | O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention; A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! | Buy | |
| The Life of Timon of Athens | William Shakespeare | Good day, sir. | Buy | |
| The Lifted Veil | George Eliot | The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many months. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence. | Buy | |
| The Light Fantastic | Terry Pratchett | The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure that it was worth all the effort. | Buy | |
| The Light in the Clearing | Irving Bacheller | Once upon a time I owned a watermelon. | Buy | |
| The Light That Failed | Rudyard Kipling | "What do you think she'd do if she caught us?" | Buy | |
| The Light That Failed | Rudyard Kipling | "What do you think she'd do if she caught us? We oughtn't to have
it, you know," said Maisie. "Beat me, and lock you up in your bedroom," Dick answered, without hesitation. "Have you got the cartridges?" "Yes; they're in my pocket, but they are joggling horribly. Do pin-fire cartridges go off of their own accord?" "Don't know. Take the revolver, if you are afraid, and let me carry them." "I'm not afraid." Maisie strode forward swiftly, a hand in her pocket an her chin the air. Dick followed with a small pin-fire revolver. | Buy | |
| The Lion of the North | G A Henty | It was late in the afternoon in the spring of the year 1630; the hilltops of the south of Scotland were covered with masses of cloud, and a fierce wind swept the driving rain before it with such force that it was not easy to make way against it. | Buy | |
| The Lion's Skin | Rafael Sabatini | Mr. Caryll, lately from Rome, stood by the window, looking out over the rain-swept, steaming quays to Notre-Dame on the island yonder. | Buy | |
| The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe | C S Lewis | Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy. | Buy | |
| The Listener | Taylor Caldwell | Mrs. Merrill Sloane entered the sitting room with resistance. She wore severe tweeds and a sable scarf and carried a leather purse soundly closed. She was fifty years old, gray and sharp of face, neat and trim of figure, and had a hat that was at least five years old and good for another five years. | Buy | |
| The Listener | Walter de la Mare | "Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door. | Buy | |
| The Little Country | Charles de Lint | There were two things Janey Little loved best in the world: music and books, and not necessarily in that order. | Buy | |
| The Little Drummer Girl | John Le Carre | It was the Bad Godesberg incident that gave the proof, though the German authorities had no earthly means of knowing this. | Buy | |
| The Little Engine that Could | Watty Piper | Chug, chug, chug. Puff, puff, puff. Ding-dong, ding-dong. | Buy | |
| The Little French Girl | Anne Douglas Sedgwick | A clock struck eight, a loud yet distant clock. The strokes, Alix thought, seemed to glide downwards rather than to fall through the fog and tumult of the station, and, counting them as they emerged, they were so slow and heavy that they made her think of tawny drones pushing their way forth from among the thickets of hot thyme in the jardin potager at Montarel. | Buy | |
| The Little Prince | Antoine de Saint-Exupery | Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificient picture in a book, called True Stories From Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. here is a copy of the drawing. | Buy | |
| The Little Savage | Captain Frederick Marryat | I am about to write a very curious history, as the reader will agree with me when he has read this book. We have more than one narrative of people being cast away upon desolate islands, and being left to their own resources, and no works are perhaps read with more interest; but I believe I am the first instance of a boy being left alone upon an uninhabited island. Such was, however, the case; and now I shall tell my own story. | Buy | |
| The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come | John William Fox | The days of that April had been days of mist and rain. Sometimes, for hours, there would come a miracle of blue sky, white cloud, and yellow light, but always between dark and dark the rain would fall and the mist creep up the mountains and steam from the tops--only to roll together from either range, drip back into the valleys, and lift, straightway, as mist again. | Buy | |
| The Little Sister | Raymond Chandler | The pebbled glass door is lettered in flaked black paint: "Phillip Marlowe . . . Investigations." It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is locked, but next to it is another door with the same legend which is not locked. Come on in--there's nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle fly. But not if you're from Manhattan, Kansas. | Buy | |
| The Littlest Angel | Charles Tazewell | Once upon a time--oh, many, many years ago as time is calculated by men--but which was only Yesterday in the Celestial Calendar of Heaven--there was, in Paradise, a most miserable, thoroughly unhappy, and utterly dejected cherub who as known throughout Heaven as The Littlest Angel. | Buy | |
| The Lockwood Concern | John O'Hara | On Sunday afternoons people would drive out to have a look at George Lockwood's wall, and sometimes they would see, from a distance, George Lockwood doing the same thing they were doing. | Buy | |
| The Lone Gunhawk | Frank Gruber | An emigrant train, seeking the shortcut to the golden land on the Pacific Coast, had once toiled up the eastern slope of this mountain and looking down the almost vertical western side had abandoned all hope. | Buy | |
| The Lone Star Ranger | Zane Grey | So it was in him, then--an inherited fighting instinct, a driving intensity to kill. | Buy | |
| The Lonely Lady | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | She sat at the top of the stairs and cried. | Buy | |
| The Lonely Silver Rain | John D MacDonald | Once upon a time I was very lucky and located a sixty-five-foot hijacked motor sailer in a matter of days, after the authorities had been looking for months. | Buy | |
| The Lonesome Gods | Louis L'Amour | I sat very still, as befitted a small boy among strangers,
staring wide-eyed into a world I did not know. I was six years old and my father was dying. Only last year I had lost my mother. | Buy | |
| The Long Afternoon of Earth | Brian W Aldiss | Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, spreading riotous and strange in their instinct for growth. | Buy | |
| The Long Goodbye | Raymond Chandler | The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. | Buy | |
| The Long Lavender Look | John D MacDonald | Late April. | Buy | |
| The Long Road Home | Danielle Steel | A clock ticked loudly in the hall as Gabriella Harrison stood silently in the utter darkness of the closet. It was filled with winter coats, and they scratched her face, as she pressed her thin six-year-old frame as far back as she could, deep among them. | Buy | |
| The Long Roll | Mary Johnston | On this wintry day, cold and sunny, the small town breathed hard in its excitement. It might have climbed rapidly from a lower land, so heightened now were its pulses, so light and rare the air it drank, so raised its mood, so wide, so very wide the opening prospect. Old red-brick houses, old box-planted gardens, old high, leafless trees, out it looked from its place between the mountain ranges. Its point of view, its position in space, had each its value--whether a lesser value or a greater value than other points and positions only the Judge of all can determine. The little town tried to see clearly and to act rightly. If, in this time so troubled, so obscured by mounting clouds, so tossed by winds of passion and of prejudice, it felt the proudest assurance that it was doing both, at least that self-infatuation was shared all around the compass. | Buy | |
| The Looking Glass War | John Le Carre | Snow covered the airfield. | Buy | |
| The Lords of Discipline | Pat Conroy | I wear the ring. | Buy | |
| The Loring Mystery | Jeffrey Farnol | The clock of St. Clement Danes was chiming the hour of eleven as Mr. Gillespie, folding up the brief which had engaged his attention all the evening, yawned, drained the last of his toddy and rose to betake himself to bed; indeed he had just taken up his chamber candle and was in the act of extinguishing the candelabrum upon the table when he paused and stood staring beneath puckered brows as a sudden knocking sounded upon the outer door. | Buy | |
| The Lost World | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth - a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centred upon his own silly self. | Buy | |
| The Lost World | Michael Crichton | The late twentieth century has witnessed a remarkable growth in scientific interest in the subject of extinction. | Buy | |
| The Lost World | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth--a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centered upon his own silly self. If anything could have driven me from Gladys, it would have been the thought of such a father-in-law. | Buy | |
| The Love Machine | Jacqueline Susann | At nine in the morning, she was standing on the steps in front of the Plaza Hotel, shivering in a linen dress. One of the clothespins that held the back of the dress together clattered to the ground. A dresser hurried to replace it, and the photographer used the time to reload his camera. The hairdresser quickly retouched a few stray hairs with a can of hair spray and the session resumed. | Buy | |
| The Loved One | Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh | All day the head had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts. | Buy | |
| The Lovely Ambition | Mary Ellen Chase | I dreamed last night again about Mrs. Gowan. | Buy | |
| The Lovely Bones | Alice Sebold | My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. | Buy | |
| The Lover | Marguerite Duras | One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, "I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged. | Buy | |
| The Luck of Roaring Camp | Bret Harte | There was commotion in Roaring Camp. It could not have been a fight, for in 1850 that was not novel enough to have called together the entire settlement. | Buy | |
| The Luck of the Bodkins | Pelham Grenville Wodehouse | Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. | Buy | |
| The Lure of the Mask | Harold MacGrath | Out of the unromantic night, out of the somber blurring January fog, came a voice lifted in song, a soprano, rich, full and round, young yet matured, sweet and mysterious as a night-bird's, haunting and elusive as the murmur of the sea in a shell: a lilt from La Fille de Madame Angot, a light opera long since forgotten in New York. Hillard, genuinely astonished, lowered his pipe and listened. | Buy | |
| The Magic Barrel | Bernard Malamud | Feld, the shoemaker, was annoyed that his helper, Sobol, was so insensitive to his reverie that he wouldn't for a minute cease his fanatic pounding at the other bench. | Buy | |
| The Magic Mountain | Thomas Mann | An ordinary young man was on his way from his hometown of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the canton of Graubunden. It was the height of summer, and he planned to stay for three weeks. | Buy | |
| The Magic Plus Fours | Pelham Grenville Wodehouse | "After all," said the young man, "golf is only a game." | Buy | |
| The Magic Walking Stick | John Buchan | When Bill came back for long-leave that autumn half, he had before him a complicated programme of entertainment | Buy | |
| The Magnificent Ambersons | Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) | Major Amberson had "made a fortune" in 1873, when other people were losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then. | Buy | |
| The Magus | John Fowles | I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. | Buy | |
| The Major | Ralph Connor | Spring had come. Despite the many wet and gusty days which April had thrust in rude challenge upon reluctant May, in the glory of the triumphant sun which flooded the concave blue of heaven and the myriad shaded green of earth, the whole world knew to-day, the whole world proclaimed that spring had come. The yearly miracle had been performed. | Buy | |
| The Makioka Sisters | Junichiro Tanizaki | "Would you do this please, Koi-san?" Seeing in the mirror that Taeko had come up behind her, Sachiko stopped powdering her back and held out the puff to her sister. Her eyes were still on the mirror, appraising the face as if it belonged to someone else. The long under-kimono, pulled high at the throat, stood out stiffly behind to reveal her back and shoulders. | Buy | |
| The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett | Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. | Buy | |
| The Mammoth Hunters | Jean M Auel | Trembling with fear, Ayla clung to the tall man beside her as she watched the strangers approach. Jondlar put his arm around her protectively, but she still shook. | Buy | |
| The Man | Irving Wallace | Standing there in the cold office, at this ungodly hour, no longer night, not yet day, she felt apprehensive and nervous. She wondered why, but instantly her memory had traced the source of worry, and she knew its answer was right. | Buy | |
| The Man from Brodney's | George Barr McCutcheon | The death of Taswell Skaggs was stimulating, to say the least, inapplicable though the expression may seem. | Buy | |
| The Man from Glengarry | Ralph Connor | The winter had broken early and the Scotch River was running ice-free and full from bank to bank. | Buy | |
| The Man from St. Petersburg | Ken Follett | It was a slow Sunday afternoon, the kind Walden loved. He stood at an open window and looked across the park. The broad, level lawn was doted with mature trees: a Scotch pine, a pair of mighty oaks, several chestnuts and a willow like a head of girlish curls. The sun was high and the trees cast dark, cool shadows. The birds were silent, but a hum of contented bees came from the flowering creeper beside the window. The house as still, too. | Buy | |
| The Man in Lower Ten | Mary Roberts Rinehart | McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business. | Buy | |
| The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit | Sloan Wilson | By the time they had lived seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, Connecticut, they had deserted it. | Buy | |
| The Man in the High Castle | Philip K. Dick | For a week Mr. R. Childan had been anxiously watching the mail. But the valuable shipment from the Rocky Mountain States had not arrived. As he opened up his store on Friday morning and saw only letters on the floor by the mail slot he thought, I'm going to have an angry customer. | Buy | |
| The Man In The Iron Mask | Alexandre Dumas père | Whilst every one at court was busily engaged upon his own affairs, a man mysteriously entered a house situated behind the Place de Grève. | Buy | |
| The Man in the Iron Mask | Alexandre Dumas père | Since Aramis's singular transformation into a confessor of the order, Baisemeaux was no longer the same man. Up to that period, the place which Aramis had held in the worthy governor's estimation was that of a prelate whom he respected and a friend to whom he owed a debt of gratitude; but now he felt himself an inferior, and that Aramis was his master. | Buy | |
| The Man in the Yellow Raft | C S Forester | In United States destroyer Boon the babies had grown into adolescents overnight apparently, and all the troubles associated with adolescence were making their appearance. | Buy | |
| The Man of Property | John Galsworthy | Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsythes have seen that charming and instructive sight - an upper middle class family in full plumage. | Buy | |
| The Man of the Forest | Zane Grey | At sunset hour the forest was still, lonely, sweet with tang of fir and spruce, blazing in gold and red and green; and the man who glided on under the great trees seemed to blend with the colors and, disappearing, to have become a part of the wild woodland. | Buy | |
| The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | It was many years ago. | Buy | |
| The Man Who Laughs | Victor Hugo | Ursus and Home were fast firends. Ursus was a man, Homo a wolf. Their dispositions tallied. | Buy | |
| The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself | KC Constantine | They were on the Addleman farm, one of the dozen or so farms leased by the Rocksburg Police Rod and Gun Club for the small-game season. | Buy | |
| The Man Who Loved Children | Christina Stead | All the June Saturday afternoon Sam Pollit's children were on the lookout for him as they skated round the dirt sidewalks and seamed old asphalt of R Street and Reservoir Road that bounded the deep-grassed acres of Tohoga House, their home. They were not usually allowed to run helter-skelter about the streets, but Sam was out late with the naturalists looking for lizards and salamanders round the Potomac bluffs. Henrietta, their mother, was in town, Bonnie, their youthful and general servant, had her afternoon off, and they were being minded by Louisa, their half sister, eleven and a half years old, the eldest of their brood. | Buy | |
| The Man Who Was Not With It | Herbert Gold | There he is on the midway, Grack the Frenchie, talking for his counterstore or his zoo while the loudspeaker clamored under his come-on with a hee hee hee and a ho ho ho. | Buy | |
| The Man Who Was Thursday | Gilbert Keith Chesterton | The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged a cloud of sunset. | Buy | |
| The Man With the Dancing Eyes | Sophie Dahl | In the golden half-light of a midsummer's evening, the sort where any kind of magic can occur, and often does, in the midst of a party held in a wild and rambling garden, stood Pierre, teetering on highly unsuitable heels, surrounded by a symphony of overripe roses. | Buy | |
| The Man with the Getaway Face | Richard Stark | When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger. | Buy | |
| The Man With The Golden Arm | Nelson Algren | The captain never drank. Yet, toward nightfall in that smoke-colored season between Indian summer and December's first true snow, he would sometimes feel half drunken. He would hang his coat neatly over the back of his chair in the leaden station-house twilight, say he was beat from lack of sleep and lay his head across his arms upon the query-room desk. | Buy | |
| The Man with the Golden Gun | Ian Fleming | The Secret Service holds much that is kept secret even from very senior officers in the organization. Only M. and his Chief of Staff know absolutely everything there is to know. The latter is responsible for keeping the Top Secret record known as The War Book so that, in the event of the death of both of them, the whole story, apart from what is available to individual Sections and Stations, would be available to their successors. | Buy | |
| The Man Without a Country | Edward Everett Hale | I suppose that very few casual readers of the New York
Herald of August 13, 1863, observed, in an obscure corner,
among the "Deaths," the announcement,-- "NOLAN. Died, on board U.S. Corvette 'Levant,' Lat. 2o 11' S., Long. 131o W., on the 11th of May, PHILIP NOLAN." | Buy | |
| The Manchurian Candidate | Richard Condon | It was sunny in San Francisco; a fabulous condition. | Buy | |
| The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years | Jamyang Norbu | Too many of Dr John Watson's unpublished manuscripts (usually discovered in 'a travel-worn and batterred tin dispatch box' somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox & Company, at Charing Cross) have come to light in recent years, for a long-suffering reading public not to greet the discovery of yet another Sherlock Holmes story with suspicion, if not outright incredulity. | Buy | |
| The Mandarins | Simone de Beauvoir | Henri found himself looking at the sky again--a clear, black crystal dome overhead. It was difficult for the mind to conceive of hundreds of planes shattering that black, crystalline silence! And suddenly, words began tumbling through his head with a joyous sound--the offensive was halted . . . the German collapse had begun . . . at last he would be able to leave. | Buy | |
| The Mandarins | Simone de Beauvoir | Henri found himself looking at the sky again--a clear, black crystal dome overhead. It was difficult for the mind to conceive of hundreds of planes shattering that black, crystalline silence! And suddenly, words began tumbling through his head with a joyous sound--the offensive was halted . . . the German collapse had begun . . . at last he would be able to leave. | Buy | |
| The Mandelbaum Gate | Muriel Spark | Sometimes, instead of a letter to thank his hostess, Freddy Hamilton would compose a set of formal verses--roudeaux redoubles, villanelles, rondels, or Sicilian octaves--to express his thanks neatly. It was part of his modest nature to do this. He always felt he had perhaps been boring during his stay, and it was one's duty in life to be agreeable. | Buy | |
| The Mansion | William Faulkner | The jury said "Guilty" and the Judge said "Life" but he didn't hear them. | Buy | |
| The Manticore | Robertson Davies | "When did you decide you should come to Zürich, Mr. Staunton?" | Buy | |
| The Marathon Man | William Goldman | Everytime he drove through Yorkville, Rosenbaum got angry, just on general principles. | Buy | |
| The Marble Faun | Nathaniel Hawthorne | Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the sculpture gallery in the Capitol at Rome. | Buy | |
| The Mark | Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins | It was midafternoon in New Babylon, and David Hassid was frantic. Annie was nowhere in sight and he had heard nothing from her, yet he could barely turn his eyes from the gigantic screens in the palace courtyard. | Buy | |
| The Marriage of William Ashe | Mrs. Humphry Ward | "He ought to be here," said Lady Tranmore, as she turned away from the window. | Buy | |
| The Martian Chronicles | Ray Bradbury | One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets. | Buy | |
| The Martyred | Richard E. Kim | The war came early one morning in June of 1950, and by the time the North Koreans occupied out capital city, Seoul, we had already left our university, where we were instructors in the History of Human Civilization. | Buy | |
| The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald | Clifford Hicks | Alvin awoke with a start the instant the string jerked his big toe. | Buy | |
| The Masquerader | Anonymous (Katherine Cecil Thurston) | Two incidents, widely different in character yet bound together by results, marked the night of January the twenty-third. | Buy | |
| The Masquerader | Anonymous | Two incidents, widely different in character yet bound together by results, marked the night of January the twenty-third. | Buy | |
| The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch's ponds. One of them--fortyish, wearing a gray summer suit--was short, dark-haired, bald on top, paunchy, and held his proper fedora in his hand; black horn-rimmed glasses of supernatural proportions adorned his well-shaven face. The other one--a broad-shouldered, reddish-haired, shaggy young man with a checked cap cocked on the back of his head--was wearing a cowboy shirt, crumpled white trousers, and black sneakers. | Buy | |
| The Master of Ballantrae | Robert Louis Stevenson | The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for, and public curiosity is sure to welcome | Buy | |
| The Master of Ballantrae | Robert Louis Stevenson | The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for and the public curiosity is sure to welcome. | Buy | |
| The Master of Jalna | Mazo de la Roche | Renny Whiteoak stood with his brows drawn together but a smile softening his lips while a wire-haired terrier belonging to his brother Piers strove with controlled energy to dig her way into the burrow of some small animal. | Buy | |
| The Master of the World | Jules Verne | If I speak of myself in this story, it is because I have been deeply involved in its startling events, events doubtless among the most extraordinary which this twentieth century will witness. Sometimes I even ask myself if all this has really happened, if its pictures dwell in truth in my memory, and not merely in my imagination. | Buy | |
| The Masters | C P Snow | The snow had only just stopped, and in the court below my rooms all sounds were dulled. | Buy | |
| The Matarese Circle | Robert Ludlum | The band of carolers huddled at the corner, stamping their feet and swinging their arms, their young voice penetrating the cold night air between the harsh sounds of automobile horns and police whistles and the metallic strains of Christmas music blaring out from storefront speakers. The snowfall was dense, snarling traffic, causing the hordes of last-minute shoppers to shield their eyes. | 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 | |
| The Matlock Paper | Robert Ludlum | Loring walked out the side entrance of the Justice Department and looked for a taxi. It was nearly first thirty, a spring Friday, and the congestion in the Washington streets was awful. Loring stood by the curb and held up his left hand, hoping for the best. He was about to abandon the effort when a cab that had picked up a fare thirty feet down the block stopped in front of him. | Buy | |
| The Mauritius Command | Patrick O'Brian | Captain Aubrey of the Royal Navy lived in a part of Hampshire well supplied with sea-officers, some of whom had reached flag-rank in Rodney's day while others were still waiting for there first command. | Buy | |
| The Mayor of Casterbridge | Thomas Hardy | One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot. They were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now. | Buy | |
| The Mean Streets | Thomas B Dewey | He came tearing down the street with his newspaper in his hand, looking back over his shoulder, and I figured he'd swiped it from some stand. | Buy | |
| The Melting of Molly | Maria Thompson Davies | Yes, I truly think that in all the world there is nothing so dead as a young widow's deceased husband, and God ought to give His wisest man-angel special charge concerning looking after her and the devil at the same time. They both need it! | Buy | |
| The Member of the Wedding | Carson McCullers | It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. | Buy | |
| The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon | William Makepeace Thackeray | Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it. | Buy | |
| The Menacers | Donald Hamilton | I always feel a little bad about smuggling a firearm through Mexican customs. | Buy | |
| The Merchant of Venice | William Shakespeare | In sooth I know not why I am so sad. | Buy | |
| The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood | Howard Pyle | In merry England in the time of old, when good King Henry the Second ruled the land, there lived within the green glades of Sherwood Forest, near Nottingham Town, a famous outlaw whose name was Robin Hood. No archer ever lived that could speed a gray goose shaft with such skill and cunning as his, nor were there ever such yeomen as the sevenscore merry men that roamed with him through the greenwood shades. | Buy | |
| The Merry Wives of Windsor | William Shakespeare | Sir Hugh, persuade me not--I will make a Starchamber matter of it. If he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, Esquire. | Buy | |
| The Mettle of the Pasture | James Lane Allen | She did not wish any supper and she sank forgetfully back into the stately oak chair. | Buy | |
| The Midlander | Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) | People used to say of the two Oliphant brothers that Harlan Oliphant looked as if he lived in the Oliphant's house, but Dan didn't. | Buy | |
| The Mighty and Their Fall | Ivy Compton-Burnett | "Agnes first, Henngist second, Leah third!" said Lavinia Middleton, as her sisters and brother contested the access to the cloakroom in the hall. | Buy | |
| The Mill on the Floss | George Eliot | A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. | Buy | |
| The Million Pound Cypher, or, MW-XX.3 | Roland Pertwee | Admiral Sir Jesmond Bridger defined the situation clearly enough. | Buy | |
| The Mine with the Iron Door | Harold Bell Wright | From every street and corner in Tucson we see the mountains. | Buy | |
| The Minister's Wooing | Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe | Mrs. Katy Scudder had invited Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Jones, and Deacon Twitchel's wife to take tea with her on the afternoon of June second, A.D. 17--. | Buy | |
| The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint | Brady Udall | If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San Carlos Apache Indian reservation. | Buy | |
| The Miracle of the Bells | Russell Janney | A tall figure of a man stepped down from the last day coach at the end of the express train from the West. | Buy | |
| The Mirror Crack'd | Agatha Christie | Miss Jane Marple was sitting by her window. | Buy | |
| The Miserable Mill | Lemony Snicket | Sometime in your life--in fact, very soon--you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book's first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains. | Buy | |
| The Mississippi Bubble | Emerson Hough | "Gentleman, this is America!" | Buy | |
| The Money Moon | Jeffrey Farnol | When Sylvia Marchmont went to Europe, George Bellew being, at the same time, desirous of testing his newest acquired yacht, followed her, and mutual friends in New York, Newport, and elsewhere, confidently awaited news of their engagement. | Buy | |
| The Moneychangers | Arthur Hailey | Long afterward, many would remember those two days in the first week of October with vividness and anguish. | Buy | |
| The Moneyman | Thomas B Costain | The Royal Standard of France waved above the towers of the Louvre. It was an unusual sight, for the King bore Paris no love and seldom came there. | Buy | |
| The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress | Robert A. Heinlein | I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect--and tax--public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure. | Buy | |
| The Moon Is Down | John Ernst Steinbeck | By ten-forty-five it was all over. The town was occupied, the defenders defeated, and the war finished. | Buy | |
| The Moonstone | Wilkie | I address these lines--written in India--to my relatives in England. My object is to explain the motive which has induced me to refuse the right hand of friendship to my cousin, John Herncastle. | Buy | |
| The Moral Compass | William J Bennett | All children need bread and shelter. But a true home, of course, is much more than that. Children also need love and order and, because they are not born knowing the difference between right and wrong, a place where they can begin to develop a moral sense. The transmission of virtues is one important reason for a home, and attention to the virtues is one the important ties that bind a family together. | Buy | |
| The Mortal Storm | Phyllis Bottome | When Freya woke up, she felt as if she were recovering from a long and painful illness, out of the reach for the first time of all disagreeable sensations. | Buy | |
| The Mosquito Coast | Paul Theroux | We drove past Tiny Polski's mansion house to the main road, and then the five miles into Northampton, Father talking the whole way about savages and the awfulness of America - how it got turned into a dope-taking, door locking, ulcerated danger zone of rabid scavengers and criminal millionaires and moral sneaks. | Buy | |
| The Mourner | Richard Stark | When the guy with the asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away. | Buy | |
| The Mouse That Roared | Leonard Wibberley | The Duchy of Grand Fenwick lies in a precipitous fold of the northern Alps and embraces in its tumbling landscape portions of three valleys, a river, one complete mountain with an elevation of two thousand feet and a castle. | Buy | |
| The Moviegoer | Walker Percy | This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch. I know what this means. | Buy | |
| The Mugger | Ed McBain | The city could be nothing but a woman, and that's good because your business is women. | Buy | |
| The Multimillion-Dollar Murders | F van Wyck Mason | Judy Forthier kept her eyes pinned on her dressing-table mirror. | Buy | |
| The Murder Room | P D James | On Friday 25 October, exactly one week before the first body was discovered at the Dupayne Museum, Adam Dalgleish visited the museum for the first time. | Buy | |
| The Murders in the Rue Morgue | Edgar Allan Poe | The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis | Buy | |
| The Mutineers | Charles Boardman Hawes | My father's study, as I entered it on an April morning in 1809, to learn his decision regarding a matter that was to determine the course of all my life, was dim and spacious and far removed from the bustle and clamor of the harbor-side. | Buy | |
| The Mysterious Rider | Zane Grey | A September sun, losing some of its heat if not its brilliance, was dropping low in the west over the black Colorado range. Purple haze began to thicken in the timbered notches. Gray foothills, round and billowy, rolled down from the higher country. They were smooth, sweeping, with long velvety slopes and isolated patches of aspens that blazed in autumn gold. Splotches of red vine colored the soft gray of sage. Old White Slides, a mountain scarred by avalanche, towered with bleak rocky peak above the valley, sheltering it form the north. | Buy | |
| The Mysterious Stranger | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | It was in 1590--winter. Austria was far away from the world, and asleep; it was still the Middle Ages in Austria, and promised to remain so forever. Some even set it away back centuries upon centuries and said that by the mental and spiritual clock it was still the Age of Belief in Austria. But they meant it as a compliment, not a slur, and it was so taken, and we were all proud of it. I remember it well, although I was only a boy; and I remember, too, the pleasure it gave me. | Buy | |
| The Mystery of Edwin Drood | Charles Dickens | An ancient English Cathederal Tower? | Buy | |
| The Mystery Of The Laughing Shadow | William Arden | Bob Andrews and Pete Crenshaw were still two miles from their homes in Rocky Beach when they had to turn on their bicycle lights. | Buy | |
| The Naked and the Dead | Norman Mailer | Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead. | Buy | |
| The Name of the Rose | Umberto Eco | It was a beautiful morning at the end of November. During the night it had snowed, but only a little, and the earth was covered with a cool blanket no more than three fingers high. In the darkness, immediately after lauds, we heard Mass in a village in the valley. Then we set off toward the mountain, as the sun first appeared. | Buy | |
| The Nanny Diaries | Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus | "Hi, this is Alexis at the Parent League. I'm just calling to follow up on the uniform guidelines we sent over . . ." | Buy | |
| The Nazarene | Sholem Asch | Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition of our existence. If the lore of the transmigration of souls is a true one, then these, between their exchange of bodies, must pass through the sea of forgetfulness. | Buy | |
| The Net | Rex Beach | The train from Palermo was late. Already long, shadowy fingers were reaching down the valleys across which the railroad track meandered. Far to the left, out of an opalescent sea, rose the fairy-like Lipari Islands, and in the farthest distance Stromboli lifted its smoking cone above the horizon. On the landward side of the train, as it reeled and squealed along its tortuous course, were gray and gold Sicilian villages perched high against the hills or drowsing among fields of artichoke and sumac and prickly pear. | Buy | |
| The Neverending Story | Michael Ende | All the beasts in Howling Forest were safe in their caves, nests, and burrows. | Buy | |
| The New Life | Dante | In that part of the book of my memory before the which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying, Incipit Vita Nova. Under such rubric I find written many things; and among them the words which I purpose to copy into this little book; if not all of them, at the least their substance. | Buy | |
| The Newcomes | William Makepeace Thackeray | A crow, who had flown away with a cheese from a dairy window, sate perched on a tree looking down at a great big frog in a pool underneath him. | Buy | |
| The Next Best Thing | John Ralston Saul | The river ferry was a clumsy, wooden affair, low in the water. | Buy | |
| The Nigger of the "Narcissus" | Joseph Conrad | Mr. Baker, chief mate of the ship Narcissus, stepped in one stride out of his lighted cabin into the darkness of the quarter-deck. Above his head, on the break of the poop, the night watchman rang a double stroke. It was nine o'clock. Mr. Baker, speaking up to the man above him, asked: "Are all the hands aboard, Knowles?" | Buy | |
| The Nine Unknown | Talbot Mundy | I had this story from a dozen people, or thirteen if you count Chullunder Ghose, whose accuracy is frequently perverted. | Buy | |
| The Notebook | Nicholas Sparks | Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end? | Buy | |
| The Number of the Beast | Robert A. Heinlein | "He's a Mad Scientist and I'm his Beautiful Daughter." | Buy | |
| The Octopus | Frank Norris | Just after passing Caraher's saloon, on the County Road that ran south from Bonneville, and that divided the Broderson ranch from that of Los Muertos, Presley was suddenly aware of the faint and prolonged blowing of a steam whistle that he knew must come from the railroad shops near the depot at Bonneville | Buy | |
| The Odd Sea | Frederick Reiken | Years ago, on New Year's Day, my older brother, Ethan, and I went skating on a river. | Buy | |
| The Odessa File | Frederick Forsyth | There was a thin robin's-egg-blue dawn coming up over Tel Aviv when the intelligence analyst finished typing his report. | Buy | |
| The Odyssey | Homer | Tell me, Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered far and wide after he had sacked Troy's sacred city, and saw the towns of many men and knew their mind. | Buy | |
| The Old Countess | Anne Douglas Sedgwick | "You are an artist, Monsieur?" | Buy | |
| The Old Curiosity Shop | Charles Dickens | Night is generally my time for walking. | Buy | |
| The Old Devils | Kingsley Amis | 'If you want my opinion,' said Gwen Cellan-Davies, 'the old boy's a terrifically distinguished citizen of Wales. Or at any rate what passes for one these days.' | Buy | |
| The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway | He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf stream and he had gone 84 days now without taking a fish. | Buy | |
| The Old Men at the Zoo | Angus Wilson | I opened the large central window of my office room to its full on the fine early May morning. Then I stood for a few moments, breathing in the soft, warm air that was charged with the scent of white lilacs below. | Buy | |
| The Old Wives' Tale | Arnold Bennett | Those two girls, Constance and Sophia Baines, paid no need to the manifold interest of their situation, of which, indeed, they had never been conscious. | Buy | |
| The Once and Future King | Terence Hanbury White | On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology. The governess was always getting muddled she would take it out of the Wart by rapping his knuckles. | Buy | |
| The One Woman | Thomas Dixon Jr | "Quick--a glass of water!" A man sprang to his feet, beckoning to
an usher. When he reached the seat, the woman had recovered by a supreme effort of will and sat erect, her face flushed with anger at her own weakness. "Thank you, I am quite well now," she said with dignity. | Buy | |
| The Optimist's Daughter | Eudora Welty | A nurse held the door open for them. Judge McKelva going first, then his daughter Laurel, then his wife Fay, they walked into the windowless room where the doctor would make his examination. | Buy | |
| The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold | Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh | It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century. | Buy | |
| The Other | Thomas Tryon | How old do think Miss DeGroot really is? Sixty, if she's a day, wouldn't you say? She's been around here as long as I can remember--quite a stretch, if you calculate it--and I know she goes back a good many years before that. Which should give you an idea of how old that spot on the ceiling must be, because she says it's been there as long as she can remember, Miss DeGroot. | Buy | |
| The Other Log of Phileas Fogg | Philip José Farmer | How much did Jules Verne know of the real story behind Around the World in Eighty Days? | Buy | |
| The Outcasts of Poker Flat | Bret Harte | As Mr. John Oakhurst, gambler, stepped into the main street of Poker Flat on the morning of the twenty-third of November, 1850, he was conscious of a change in its moral atmosphere since the preceding night. Two or three men, conversing earnestly together, ceased as he approached, and exchanged significant glances. There was a Sabbath lull in the air, which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous. | Buy | |
| The Outcry | Henry James Jr | "No, my lord," Banks had replied, "no stranger has yet arrived. But I'll see if any one has come in--or who has." | Buy | |
| The Outfit | Richard Stark | When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed. | Buy | |
| The Outsider | Albert Camus | Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure. The telegram from the Home says: Your mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Deep sympathy. Which leaves the matter doubtful: it could have been yesterday. | Buy | |
| The Outsider | Colin Wilson | At first sight, the Outsider is a social problem. He is the hole-in-corner man. | Buy | |
| The Outsiders | S.E. Hinton | When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home. | Buy | |
| The Ox-Bow Incident | Walter van Tilburg Clark | Gil and I crossed the eastern divide about two by the sun. | Buy | |
| The Ox-Bow Incident | Walter Van Tilburg Clark | Gil and I crossed the eastern divide about two by the sun. | Buy | |
| The Page Turner | David Leavitt | "Paul! Let me fix your tie!" | Buy | |
| The Painted Bird | Jerzy Kosinski | In the first weeks of World War II, in the fall of 1939, a six year old boy from a large city in Eastern Europe was sent by his parents, like thousands of other children, to the shelter of a distant village. | Buy | |
| The Parasites | Daphne du Maurier | It was Charles who called us the parasites. | Buy | |
| The Parisian Affair | Nick Carter | There's something about a graveyard, even one in a city as bright and bustling as Paris, that makes all your senses just a little more alert. | Buy | |
| The Parsifal Mosaic | Robert Ludlum | The cold rays of the moon streaked down from the night sky and bounced off the rolling surf, which burst into suspended sprays of white where isolated waves crashed into the rocks of the shoreline. The stretch of beach between the towering boulders of the Costa Brava was the execution ground. It had to be. May God damn this goddamned world--it had to be! | Buy | |
| The Partner | John Grisham | They found him in Ponta Pora, a pleasant little town in Brazil, on the border of Paraguay, in a land still known as the Frontier. | Buy | |
| The Passions of the Mind | Irving Stone | They moved up the trail vigorously, their slim young figures in rhythmic cadence. | Buy | |
| The Path of the King | John Buchan | The three of us in that winter camp in the Selkirks were talking the slow aimless talk of wearied men. | Buy | |
| The Pathfinder | James Fenimore Cooper | The sublimity connected with vastness, is familiar to every eye. | Buy | |
| The Pawns Count | Edward Phillips Oppenheim | The usual little crowd was waiting in the lobby of a fashionable London restaurant a few minutes before the popular lunch hour. Pamela Van Teyl, a very beautiful American girl, dressed in the extreme of fashion, which she seemed somehow to justify, directed the attention of her companions to the notice affixed to the wall facing them. | Buy | |
| The Peacemaker | C S Forester | Doctor Edward Pethwick, mathematics and physics master at the Liverpool School, was sitting at a window in his room adjoining the senior physics laboratory. | Buy | |
| The Pearl | John Steinbeck | Kino awakened in the near dark. | Buy | |
| The Pearl | John Ernst Steinbeck | Kino awakened in the near dark. The stars still shone and the day had drawn only a pale wash of light in the lower sky to the east. The roosters had been crowing for some time, and the early pigs were already beginnning their ceaseless turning of twigs and bits of wood to see whether anything to eat had been overlooked. | Buy | |
| The Pelican Brief | John Grisham | He seemed incapable of creating such chaos, but much of what he saw below could be blamed on him. And that was fine. He was ninety-one, paralyzed, strapped in a wheelchair and hooked to oxygen. | Buy | |
| The People of the Abyss | Jack London | "But you can't do it, you know," friends said, to whom I applied for assistance in the matter of sinking myself down into the East End of London. "You had better see the police for a guide," they added, on second thought, painfully endeavoring to adjust themselves to the psychological processes of a madman who had come to them with better credentials than brains. | Buy | |
| The Perennial Bachelor | Anne Parrish | As she lay floating in the grey river that flows between sleeping and waking, Maggie Campion knew, without remembering why, that it was a happy day. | Buy | |
| The Perfect Gift | Christina Skye | The first snowflakes of Winter danced over Scotland's green hills. | Buy | |
| The Perils of Certain English Prisoners | Charles Dickens | It was in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and forty-four, that I, Gill Davis to command, His Mark, having then the honour to be a private in the Royal Marines, stood a-leaning over the bulwarks of the armed sloop Christopher Columbus, in the South American waters off the Mosquito shore. | Buy | |
| The Phantom Tollbooth | Norton Juster | There was a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always. | Buy | |
| The Pickwick Papers | Charles Dickens | The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted. | Buy | |
| The Picture Of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde | The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. | Buy | |
| The Pigskin Bag | Bruno Fischer | I phoned Redfern Motors from a drugstore on Flatbush Avenue. | Buy | |
| The Pilgrim's Progress | John Bunyan | As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. | Buy | |
| The Pillars of the Earth | Ken Follett | In a broad valley, at the foot of a sloping hillside, beside a clear bubbling stream, Tom was building a house. | Buy | |
| The Pillow Fight | Nicholas Monsarrat | Johannesburg from the air is not like a miniature New York, whatever the South African Tourist Corporation may claim; but its compactness and modestly tall buildings do vaguely recall a stunted Manhattan Island surrounded by sandcastles. | Buy | |
| The Pilot | James Fenimore Cooper | A single glance at the map will make the reader acquainted with the position of the eastern coast of the island of Great Britain, as connected with the shores of the opposite continent. | Buy | |
| The Pinballs | Betsy Byars | One summer two boys and a girl went to a foster home to live together. One of the boys was Harvey. He had two broken legs. He got them when he was run over by his father's new Grand Am. | Buy | |
| The Pioneers | James Fenimore Cooper | Near the centre of that State of New York lies an extensive district of country, whose surface is a succession of hills and dales, or, to speak with greater deference to geographical definitions, of mountains and valleys. | Buy | |
| The Pirate | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | The needlepoint spray of the shower on his scalp drowned out the sound of the four big jet engines. Steam began to fog the walls of the narrow shower stall. Quickly, he rubbed the rich soap into a perfumed lather over his body, then rinsed and cut the water from hot to ice cold. Instantly, fatigue left him and he was wide awake. He turned off the water and stepped from the shower stall. | Buy | |
| The Pirate | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | It was the eighth day of the storm. There had never been a storm like this one before. Not even in the memory of old Mustapha, the camel keeper, who himself an old man when all the others in the caravan were boys. | Buy | |
| The Pit | Frank Norris | At eight o'clock in the inner vestibule of the Auditorium Theatre by the window of the box office, Laura Dearborn, her younger sister Page, and their aunt--Aunt Wess'--were still waiting for the rest of the theatre-party to appear. | Buy | |
| The Pit and the Pendulum | Edgar Allan Poe | I was sick--sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence--the dread sentence of death--was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. | Buy | |
| The Plague | Albert Camus | The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194- at Oran. Everyone agreed that considering their extraordinary character, they were out of place there. For its ordinariness is what strikes one first about the town of Oran, which is merely a large French port on the Algerian coast, headquarters of the prefect of a French department. | Buy | |
| The Plains of Passage | Jean M Auel | The woman caught a glimpse of movement through the dusty haze ahead and wondered if it was the wolf she had seen loping in front of them earlier. | Buy | |
| The Plastic Age | Percy Marks | When an American sets out to found a college, he hunts first for a hill. John Harvard was an Englishman and indifferent to high places. The result is that Harvard has become a university of vast proportions and no color. | Buy | |
| The Plot | Irving Wallace | He stared ahead, waiting. There were late. | Buy | |
| The Plutocrat | Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) | Out of the north Atlantic a January storm came down in the night, sweeping the American coast with wind and snow and sleet upon a great oblique front from Nova Scotia to the Delaware capes. | Buy | |
| The Poet | Michael Connelly | Death is my beat. | Buy | |
| The Poison Oracle | Peter Dickinson | With as much passion as his tepid nature was ever likely to generate, Wesley Morris stared at Dinah through the observation window. | Buy | |
| The Poisoners | Donald Hamilton | Nobody was supposed to meet me at the Los Angeles Airport, and nobody did. | Buy | |
| The Poky Little Puppy | Janette Sebring Lowrey | Five little puppies dug a hole under the fence and went for a walk in the wide, wide world. | Buy | |
| The Poor Gentleman | Ian Hay | My morning walk is a matter of routine, and quite unambitious. | Buy | |
| The Poor Relation's Story | Charles Dickens | He was very reluctant to take precedence of so many respected members of the family, by beginning the round of stories they were to relate as they sat in a goodly circle by the Christmas fire; and he modestly suggested that it would be more correct if "John our esteemed host" (whose health he begged to drink) would have the kindness to begin. | Buy | |
| The Port of Missing Men | Meredith Nicholson | "The knowledge that you're alive gives me no pleasure," growled the grim old Austrian premier. | Buy | |
| The Portrait of a Lady | Henry James Jr | Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. | Buy | |
| The Portygee | Joseph Crosby Lincoln | Overhead the clouds cloaked the sky; a ragged cloak it was, and, here and there, a star shone through a hole, to be obscured almost instantly as more cloud tatters were hurled across the rent. | Buy | |
| The Poseidon Adventure | Paul Gallico | At seven o'clock, the morning of the 26th of December, the S.S. Poseidon, 81,000 tons, homeward bound for Lisbon after a month-long Christmas cruise to African and South American ports, suddenly found herself in the midst of an unaccountable swell, 400 miles south-west of the Azores, and began to roll like a pig. | Buy | |
| The Postman Always Rings Twice | James M. Cain | They threw me off the hay truck about noon. | Buy | |
| The Power and the Glory | Graham Henry Greene | Mr. Trench went out to look for his ether cylinder: out into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. | Buy | |
| The Power House | William Haggard | Bob Snake was talking to his friend Jim Mott. | Buy | |
| The Prairie | James Fenimore Cooper | Much was said and written, at the time, concerning the policy of adding the vast regions of Louisiana, to the already immense, and but half-tenanted territories of the United-States. | Buy | |
| The Praise Singer | Mary Renault | "A good song, I think." | 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 | |
| The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | Muriel Spark | The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away. | Buy | |
| The Prince and the Pauper | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him. | Buy | |
| The Prince of Graustark | George Barr McCutcheon | "My dear," said Mr. Blithers, with decision, "you can't tell me." | Buy | |
| The Prince of Tides | Pat Conroy | My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call. | Buy | |
| The Princess Bride | William Goldman | This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it. | Buy | |
| The Princess Casamassima | Henry James Jr | "Oh yes, I daresay I can find the child, if you would like to see him," Miss Pynsent said; she had a fluttering wish to assent to every suggestion made by her visitor, whom she regarded as a high and rather terrible personage. | Buy | |
| The Princess Passes | Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson | "To your happiness," I said, lifting my glass, and looking the girl in the eyes. She had the grace to blush, which was the least that she could do, for a moment ago she had jilted me. | Buy | |
| The Prisoner of Zenda | Anthony Hope | "I wonder when in the world you're going to do anything, Rudolf?" said my brother's wife. | Buy | |
| The Private Life of Helen of Troy | John Erskine | The point of this story is that Paris gave the prize to Aphrodite, not because she bribed him, but because she was beautiful. After all, it was a contest in beauty, though Athena and Hera started a discussion about wisdom and power. It was they who tried to bribe him. They had their merits and they had arguments, but Aphrodite was the thing itself. | Buy | |
| The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner | James Hogg | It appears from tradition, as well as some parish registers still extant, that the lands of Dalcastle (or Dalchastel, as it is often spelled) were possessed by a family of the name of Colwan, about one hundred and fifty years ago, and for at least a century previous to that period. | Buy | |
| The Prize | Irving Wallace | The northern night had come early to Stockholm this day, and that meant that autumn was almost gone and the dark winter was near at hand. | Buy | |
| The Prodigal Judge | Vaughan Kester | The Quintards had not prospered on the barren lands of the pine woods whither they had emigrated to escape the malaria of the low coast, but this no longer mattered, for the last of his name and race, old General Quintard, was dead in the great house his father had built almost a century before and the thin acres of the Barony, where he had made his last stand against age and poverty, were to claim him, now that he had given up the struggle in their midst. | Buy | |
| The Professor | Charlotte Brontë | The other day, in looking over my papers, I found in my desk the following copy of a letter, sent by me a year since to an old school acquaintance. | Buy | |
| The Professor | Willa Sibert Cather | The moving was over and done. | Buy | |
| The Promise | Chaim Potok | All around us everything was changing in the order of things we had fashioned for ourselves. | Buy | |
| The Puppet Crown | Harold MacGrath | The king sat in his private garden in the shade of a potted orange tree, the leaves of which were splashed with brilliant yellow. It was high noon of one of those last warm sighs of passing summer which now and then lovingly steal in between the chill breaths of September. The velvet hush of the mid-day hour had fallen. | Buy | |
| The Puppet Masters | Robert A. Heinlein | Were they truly intelligent? By themselves, that is? | Buy | |
| The Queen of the Damned | Anne Rice | I'm the Vampire Lestat. Remember me? The vampire who became a super rock star, the one who wrote the autobiography? The one with the blond hair and the gray eyes, and the insatiable desire for visibility and fame? You remember. | Buy | |
| The Queen's Necklace | Alexandre Dumas père | The winter of 1784, that monster which devoured a sixth of France, we could not see, although he growled at the doors, while at the house of Monsieur de Richelieu, shut in as we were in that warm and comfortable dining-room. | Buy | |
| The Quiet American | Graham Henry Greene | After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat: he had said, "I'll be with you at latest by ten," and when midnight had struck I couldn't stay quiet any longer and went down into the street. | Buy | |
| The Quincunx | Charles Palliser | It must have been late autumn of that year, and probably it was towards dusk for the sake of being less conspicuous. | Buy | |
| The Radetzky March | Joseph Roth | The Trottas were a young dynasty. Their progenitor had been knighted after the Battle of Solferino. He was a Slovene. Sipolje--the German name for his native village--became his title of nobility. Fate had elected him for a special deed. But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him. | Buy | |
| The Rainbow | D H Lawrence | The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire. | Buy | |
| The Rainbow and the Rose | Nevil Shute | John Pascoe must have created something like a record for a pilot in civil aviation, because he went on flying a DC-6B across the Pacific from Sydney to Vancouver as a senior captain of AusCan Airways till he was sixty years old. | Buy | |
| The Rainmaker | John Grisham | My decision to become a lawyer was irrevocably sealed when I realized my father hated the legal profession. | Buy | |
| The Rains Came | Louis Bromfield | It was the hour of the day that Ransome loved best and he sat on the verandah now, drinking brandy and watching the golden light flood all the banyan trees and the yellow-gray house and the scarlet creeper for one brilliant moment before the sun, with a sudden plunge, dropped below the horizon and left the whole countryside in darkness. | Buy | |
| The Ramage Touch | Dudley Pope | When Ramage eventually succeeded in focusing the night-glass on the two distant ships, because it showed an inverted image they were faintly outlined against the stars and looked like bats hanging side by side and upside down from a beam. | Buy | |
| The Ranch | Danielle Steel | In any other supermarket, the woman walking down the aisle, pushing a cart between canned good and gourmet spices, would have looked strangely out of place. | Buy | |
| The Rare Coin Score | Richard Stark | Parker spent two weeks on the white sand beach at Biloxi, and on a white sandy bitch named Belle, but he was restless, and one day without thinking about it he checked out and sent a forwarding address to Handy McKay and moved on to New Orleans. | Buy | |
| The Ravagers | Donald Hamilton | It was an acid job, and they're never pleasant to come upon, even when you're more or less prepared to find something wrong, as I'd been. | Buy | |
| The Razor's Edge | William Somerset Maugham | I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don't know what else to call it. I have little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage. | Buy | |
| The Re-Creation of Brian Kent | Harold Bell Wright | I remember as well as though it were yesterday the first time I met Auntie Sue. | Buy | |
| The Real Adventure | Henry Kitchell Webster | "Indeed," continued the professor, glancing demurely down at his notes, "if one were the editor of a column of --er advice to young girls, such as I believe is to be found, along with the household hints and the dress patterns, on the ladies' page of most of our newspapers--if one were the editor of such a column, he might crystallize the remarks I have been making this morning into a warning--never marry a man with a passion for principles." | Buy | |
| The Rebel | Albert Camus | What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he mean by saying "no"? | Buy | |
| The Rebel Angels | Robertson Davies | "Parlabane is back." | 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 | |
| The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn | Henry Kingsley | Near the end of February 1857, I think about the 20th or so, though it don't much matter; I only know it was near the latter end of summer, burning hot, with the bushfires raging like volcanoes on the ranges, and the river reduced to a slender stream of water, almost lost upon the broad white flats of quartz shingle. | Buy | |
| The Rector of Justin | Louis Auchincloss | September 10, 1939. I have always wanted to keep a journal, but whenever I am about to start one, I am dissuaded by the idea that it is too late. | Buy | |
| The Red Badge of Courage | Stephen Crane | The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. | Buy | |
| The Red Badge of Courage | Stephen Crane | The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills. | Buy | |
| The Red Planet | William John Locke | "Lady Fenimore's compliments, sir, and will you be so kind as to step round to Sir Anthony at once?" | Buy | |
| The Red Rover | James Fenimore Cooper | No one, who is familiar with the bustle and activity of an American commercial town, would recognise, in the repose which now reigns in the ancient mart of Rhode Island, a place that, in its day, has been ranked amongst the most important ports along the whole line of our extended coast. | Buy | |
| The Red Tent | Anita Diamant | Their stories began with the day that my father appeared. Rachel came running into camp, knees flying, bellowing like a calf separated from its mother. But before anyone could scold her for acting like a wild boy, she launched into a breathless yarn about a stranger at the well, her words spilling out like water into sand. | Buy | |
| The Redemption of David Corson | Charles Frederic Goss | Hidden away in this worn and care-encumbered world, scarred with its frequent traces of a primeval curse, are spots so quiet and beautiful as to make the fall of man seem incredible, and awaken in the breast of the weary traveler who comes suddenly upon them. a vague and dear delusion that he has stumbled into Paradise. | Buy | |
| The Reef | Edith Newbold Wharton (nee Jones) | "Unexpected obstacle. Please don't come till thirtieth. Anna." | Buy | |
| The Regulators | Richard Bachman | Poplar Street/3:45 P.M./July 15, 1996 Summer's here. Not just summer, either, not this year, but the apotheosis of summer, the avatar of summer, high green perfect central Ohio summer dead-smash in the middle of July, white sun glaring out of that fabled faded Levi's sky, the sound of kids hollering back and forth through the Bear Street Woods at the top of the hill, the tink! of Little League bats from the ballfield on the other side of the woods, the sound of powermowers, the sound of muscle-cars out on Highway 19, the sound of Rollerblades on the cement sidewalks and smooth macadam of Poplar Street, the sound of radios--Cleveland Indians baseball (the rare day game) competing with Tina Turner belting out "Nutbush City Limits," the one that goes "Twenty-five is the speed limit, motorcycles not allowed in it"--and surrounding everything like an auditory edging of lace, the soothing, silky hiss of lawn sprinklers. Summer in Wentworth, Ohio, oh boy, can you dig it. | Buy | |
| The Reign of Law | James Lane Allen | The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold, freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral Britain. | Buy | |
| The Reivers | William Faulkner | GRANDFATHER SAID: This is the kind of a man Boon Hogganbeck was. Hung on the wall, it could have been his epitaph, like a Bertillon chart or a police poster; any cop in north Mississippi would have arrested him out of any crowd after merely reading the date. | Buy | |
| The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro | It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. | Buy | |
| The Remnant | Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins | Rayford Steele had endured enough brushes with death to know that the cliche was more than true: Not only did your life flash before your mind's eye, but your senses were also on high alert. | Buy | |
| The Removers | Donald Hamilton | To get to Reno, Nevada, from the southeast, in summer, if you don't have an air-conditioned car, you first sleep all day in Las Vegas. | Buy | |
| The Reptile Room | Lemony Snicket | The stretch of road that leads out of the city, past Hazy Harbor and into the town of Tedia, is perhaps the most unpleasant in the world. | Buy | |
| The Rescue | Joseph Conrad | The shallow sea that foams and murmurs on the shores of the thousand islands, big and little, which make up the Malay Archipelago has been for centuries the scene of adventurous undertakings. | Buy | |
| The Rescue | Nicholas Sparks | Why had this happened? Why, of all the children, was Kyle the one? | Buy | |
| The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe | Douglas Adams | There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. | Buy | |
| The Retaliators | Donald Hamilton | I was unexpectedly rich and I didn't like it. | Buy | |
| The Return of the Great Brain | John D Fitzgerald | During the first week of August in the year 1898 a trial was held in Adenville, Utah. | Buy | |
| The Return of the King | J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien) | Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf's cloak. He wondered if he was awake or still sleeping, still in the swift-moving dream in which he had been wrapped so long since the great ride began. The dark world was rushing by and the wind sang loudly in his ears. He could see nothing but the wheeling stars, and away to his right vast shadows against the sky where the mountains of the South marched past. Sleepily he tried to reckon the time and stages of their journey, but his memory was drowsy and uncertain. | Buy | |
| The Return of the Native | Thomas Hardy | A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twighlight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. | Buy | |
| The Return of the Native | Thomas Hardy | A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor. The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. | Buy | |
| The Rich Part of Life | Jim Kokoris | The day we won the lottery I was wearing wax lips that my father had bought for the Nose Picker and me at a truck stop. | Buy | |
| The Riddle of the Sands | Erskine Childers | I have read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long periods in utter solitude save for a few black faces - have made it a rule to dress regularly for dinner in order to maintain their self-respect and prevent a relapse into barbarism | Buy | |
| The Riddle of the Travelling Skull | Harry Stephen Keeler | I knew full well, when the Chinaman stopped me in the street that night and coolly asked me for a light for his cigarette, that a light for his cigarette was the last thing in the world he really wanted! | Buy | |
| The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri | Harry Stephen Keeler | Clifford Carson, seated this sunny morning before the mail that covered his desk in the tiny office of his rather unique two-room suite on the twenty-fourth floor of an American skyscraper, found himself for some strange reason reflecting that it was a long, long call indeed from East India Dock Road, London, to this dignified niche high up in the 333 Building on Michigan Boulevard, Chicago. | Buy | |
| The Right of Way | Sir Gilbert Parker | "Not guilty, your honor!" | Buy | |
| The River | Rumer Godden | The river was in Bengal, India, but for the purpose of this book, these thoughts, it might as easily have been a river in America, in Europe, in England, France, New Zealand or Timbuctoo, though they do not of course have rivers in Timbuctoo. | Buy | |
| The River Road | Frances Parkinson Keyes | "There's no use going to the window yet, Merry. It's barely five, and you know these things never start on time. I don't believe the parade's left the campus yet." | Buy | |
| The River's End | James Oliver Curwood | Between Conniston, of His Majesty's Royal Northwest Mounted Police, and Keith, the outlaw, there was a striking physical and facial resemblance. | Buy | |
| The Road Back | Erich Maria Remarque | What is still left of Number 2 Platoon is quartered in a stretch of battered trench behind the line, and most of them are dozing. | Buy | |
| The Road from Coorain | Jill Ker Conway | The western plains of New South Wales are grasslands. Their vast expanse flows for many hundreds of miles beyond the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee rivers until the desert takes over and sweeps inland to the dead heart of the continent. In a good season, if the eyes are turned to the earth on those plains, they see a tapestry of delicate life--not the luxuriant design of a book of hours by any means, but a tapestry nonetheless, designed by a spare modern artist. What grows there hugs the earth firmly with its extended system of roots above which plant life is delicate but determined. After rain there is an explosion of growth. | Buy | |
| The Road Less Traveled | Morgan Scott Peck | Life is difficult. | Buy | |
| The Road to Understanding | Eleanor Hodgman Porter | If Burke Denby had not given all the frosted cakes and toy shotguns he wanted at the age of ten, it might not have been so difficult to convince him at the age of twenty that he did not want to marry Helen Barnet. | Buy | |
| The Road to Wellville | T. Coraghessan Boyle | Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the cornflake and peanut butter, not to mention caramel-cereal coffee, Bromose, Nuttolene and some seventy-five other gastronomically correct foods, paused to level his gaze on the heavyset women in front of him. | Buy | |
| The Robe | Lloyd Cassell Douglas | Because she was only fifteen and busy with her growing up, Lucia's periods of reflection were brief and infrequent; but this morning she felt weighted with responsibility. | Buy | |
| The Rockpile | James Baldwin | Other boys were to be seen there each afternoon after school and all day Saturday and Sunday. | 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 | |
| The Romance of War | James Grant | In the Highlands of Perthshire, a deadly feud had existed from time immemorial, between the Lisles of Inchavon and the Stuarts of Lochisla. In the days when the arm of the law was weak, the proprietors had often headed their kinsmen and followers in encounters with the sword, and for the last time during the memorable civil war of 1745-6. | Buy | |
| The Rosary | Florence L Barclay | The peaceful stillness of an English summer after-noon brooded over the park and gardens at Overdene. A hush of moving sunlight and lengthening shadows lay upon the lawn, and a promise of refreshing coolness made the shade of the great cedar tree a place to be desired. | Buy | |
| The Rover | Joseph Conrad | After entering at break of day the inner roadstead of the Port of Toulon, exchanging several loud hails with one of the guardboats of the Fleet, which directed him where he was to take up his berth, Master-Gunner Peyrol let go the anchor of the sea-worn and battered ship in his charge, between the arsenal and the town, in full view of the principal quay. The course of his life, which in the opinion of any ordinary person might have been regarded as full of marvellous incidents (only he himself had never marvelled at them), had rendered him undemonstrative to such a degree that he did not even let out a sign of relief at the rumble of the cable. | Buy | |
| The Royal Box | Frances Parkinson Keyes | Police Constable Fergus Gilpin, one of several P.C.'s taking incoming calls in the underground "nerve center" of New Scotland Yard, leaned forward and spoke pleasantly into the telephone of his individual headset. | Buy | |
| The Royal Box | Frances Parkinson Keyes | "It's no use, Althea. I've tried and tried to figure out some way of keeping it. But we'll have to give up the telephone." | Buy | |
| The Rubaiyat | Omar Khayyam ("The Tent-Maker") | Although I have a handsome face and colour. Cheek like the tulips, form like the cypress, It is not clear why the Eternal Painter Thus tricked me out for the dusty show-booth of earth. | Buy | |
| The Ruby | Christina Skye | She gasped, realizing she'd have to stop | Buy | |
| The Ruby in the Smoke | Philip Pullman | On a cold, fretful afternoon in early October, 1872, a hansom cab drew up outside the offices of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents, in the financial heart of London, and a young girl got out and paid the driver. | Buy | |
| The Rum Diary | Hunter S. Thompson | My apartment in New York was on Perry Street, a five minute walk from the White Horse. I often drank there, but I was never accepted because I wore a tie. The real people wanted no part of me. | Buy | |
| The Rum Diary | Hunter S. Thompson | In the early Fifties, when San Juan first became a tourist town, an ex-jockey named Al Arbonito built a bar in the patio behind his house on Calle O'Leary. | Buy | |
| The Runagates Club | John Buchan | A London dining-club is a curious organism, for it combines great tenacity of life with a chameleon-like tendency to change its colour. | Buy | |
| The Runaway Jury | John Grisham | The face of Nicholas Easter was slightly hidden by a display rack filled with slim cordless phones, and he was looking not directly at the hidden camera but somewhere off to the left, perhaps at a customer, or perhaps at a counter where a group of kids hovered over the latest electronic games from Asia. | Buy | |
| The Russia House | John Le Carre | In a broad Moscow street not two hundred yards from the Leningrad station, on the upper floor of an ornate and hideous hotel built by Stalin in the style known to Muscovites as Empire During the Plague, the British Council's first ever audio fair for the teaching of the English language and the spread of British culture was grinding to its excruciating end. | Buy | |
| The Sacred Fount | Henry James | It was an occasion, I felt - the prospect of a large party - to look out at the station for others, possible friends and even possible enemies, who might be going | Buy | |
| The Salamander | Owen McMahon Johnson | The day was Thursday; the month, October, rushing to its close; and the battered alarm-clock on the red mantel stood at precisely one o'clock. | Buy | |
| The Salt Eaters | Toni Cade Bambara | "Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?" | Buy | |
| The Salzburg Connection | Helen MacInnes | The lake was cold, black, evil, no more than five hundred yards in length, scarcely two hundred in breadth, a crooked stretch of glassy calm shadowed by the mountainsides that slipped steeply into its dark waters and went plunging down. There were no roads, no marked paths around it; only a few tracks, narrow ribbons, wound crazily along its high sides, sometimes climbing up and around the rough crags, sometimes dropping to the sparse clumps of fir at its water line. The eastern tip of the lake was closed off by a ridge of precipices. The one approach was by its western end. | Buy | |
| The Sand Pebbles | Richard Milton McKenna | "Hello, ship," Jake Holman said under his breath. | Buy | |
| The Sands of Time | Sidney Sheldon | If the plan goes wrong, we will all die. He went over it again in his mind for the last time, probing, testing, searching for flaws. He could find none. The plan was daring, and it called for careful, split-second timing. If it worked, it would be a spectacular feat, worthy of the great El Cid. If it failed . . . | Buy | |
| The Saracen Blade | Frank Yerby | From where they stood, they could see the castle. | Buy | |
| The Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie | "To be born again " sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." | Buy | |
| The Scapegoat | Daphne du Maurier | I left the car by the side of the cathedral, and then walked down the steps into the Place des Jacobins. | Buy | |
| The Scarlet Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne | A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. | Buy | |
| The Scarlet Pimpernel | Baroness Emmuska Orczy | A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation's glory and his own vanity. | Buy | |
| The Scarlet Plague | Jack London | The way led along upon what had once been the embankment of a railroad. | Buy | |
| The Schoolboy's Story | Charles Dickens | Being rather young at present - I am getting on in years, but still I am rather young - I have no particular adventures of my own to fall back upon. | Buy | |
| The Score | Richard Stark | When the bellboy left, Parker went over to the house phone and made his call. | Buy | |
| The Scorpio Illusion | Robert Ludlum | Sundown. The distressed sloop, its mainmast shattered by lightning, its sails ripped by the winds of the open sea, drifted into the small, quiet beach of a private island in the Lesser Antilles. During the past three days, before the dead calm descended, this section of the Caribbean had suffered not only a hurricane with the force of the infamous Hugo, but sixteen hours later a tropical storm whose bolts of lightning and earthshaking thunder had set fire to a thousand palms and caused a hundred thousand residents of the island chain to look to their gods for deliverance. | Buy | |
| The Scottish Chiefs | Jane Porter | Bright was the summer of 1296. The war which had desolated Scotland was then at an end. | Buy | |
| The Screaming Mimi | Frederic Brown | You can never tell what a drunken Irishman will do. | Buy | |
| The Screwtape Letters | C S Lewis | My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. | Buy | |
| The Sea Wolf | Jack London | I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place the cause of it all to Charley Furuseth's credit. | Buy | |
| The Sea-Hawk | Rafael Sabatini | Sir Oliver Tressilian sat at his ease in the lofty dining-room of the handsome house of Penarrow, which he owned to the enterprise of his father of lamented and lamentable memory and to the skill and invention of an Italian engineer named Bagnolo who had come to England half a century ago as one of the assistants of the famous Torrigiani. | Buy | |
| The Search for God | Marchette Gaylord Chute | Job was not a patient man. | Buy | |
| The Search for my Great-Uncle's Head | Jonathan Latimer | With a hollow rattle of its muffler the Greyhound bus disappeared down the cement road and left me in the darkness. | Buy | |
| The Second Saladin | Stephen Hunter | Reynoldo Ramirez, moderately prosperous by the standards of his time and place, imagined himself beyond surprise. | Buy | |
| The Secret Agent | Joseph Conrad | Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr. Verloc cared little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was ion charge of his brother-in-law. | Buy | |
| The Secret Garden | Frances Hodgson Burnett | When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. | Buy | |
| The Secret History | Donna Tartt | The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. | Buy | |
| The Secret Life of Bees | Sue Monk Kidd | At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam. | Buy | |
| The Secret of Santa Vittoria | Robert Crichton | The hour this story begins is known. The minute is known; the exact moment is recorded. Even the state of the weather is known. To some this might not appear to be remarkable, but when it is considered that there are entire generations in the history of Santa Vittoria about which nothing at all is known, the statement becomes remarkable. | Buy | |
| The Secret People | John Beynon Harris | Late one September afternoon the inhabitants of Algiers discovered that they could suffer from a new kind of noise in their sky. | Buy | |
| The Secret Woman | Victoria Holt | When my Aunt Charlotte died suddenly many people believed that I had killed her and that if it had not been for Nurse Loman's evidence at the inquest, the verdict would have been one of murder by some person or persons unknown; there would have been a probing into the dark secrets of the Queen's House, and the truth would have come out. | Buy | |
| The Settlers in Canada | Captain Maryatt | It was in the year 1794, that an English family went out to settle in Canada. | Buy | |
| The Seven Minutes | Irving Wallace | By eleven o'clock in the morning the sun had come out, and now the women of Oakwood, most of them housewives in summer attire and most of them at the wheels in their own cars, were converging on the business district to do their shopping. | Buy | |
| The Seven Poor Travellers | Charles Dickens | Strictly speaking, there were only six Poor Travellers;but, being a Traveller myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as I hope to be, I brought the number up to seven. | Buy | |
| The Seven-Per-Cent Solution | Nicholas Meyer | For many years it was my good fortune to witness, chronicle, and in some instances assist my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, in a number of cases which were submitted to him in his unique capacity as a consulting detective. | Buy | |
| The Seven-Per-Cent Solution | John H. Watson, M.D., and Nicholas Meyer, editor | As I stated in the preamble to "The Final Problem," my marriage and my subsequent start in private practise wrought a subtle but definite alteration in the pattern of my friendship with Sherlock Holmes. At first his visits to my new home were regular and it was not infrequent that I repaid these calls with brief sojourns at my old Baker Street digs, where we sat before the fire, smoked a pipe or two, and Holmes caught me up on his latest investigations. | Buy | |
| The Seventh | Richard Stark | When he didn't get any answer the second time he knocked, Parker kicked the door in. | Buy | |
| The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme | Colin Wilson | For me, there is simply one objection to novels: they get nowhere. | Buy | |
| The Shadow of the Wind | Carlos Ruiz Zafon | I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. | Buy | |
| The Shadow-Line | Joseph Conrad | Only the young have such moments. | Buy | |
| The Shadowers | Donald Hamilton | When I came hurriedly out of the hotel, the car was waiting for me. | Buy | |
| The Shape of Things to Come | H G Wells | The unexpected death of Dr. Philip Raven at Geneva in November 1930 was a very grave loss to the League of Nations Secretariat. | Buy | |
| The Shapes Of Sleep | J B Priestly | The Madison-Mayfair Agency was in a new building, just off Curzon Street, that Sterndale had never seen before. | Buy | |
| The Sheik | Edith Maude Hull | "Are you coming in to watch the dancing, Lady Conway?" | Buy | |
| The Shell Seekers | Rosamunde Pilcher | She sometimes thought that for her, Nancy Chamberlain, the most straightforward or innocent occupation was doomed to become, inevitably, fraught with tedious complication. | Buy | |
| The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families | Mary Bray Pipher | We have a six-foot corn plant in our office waiting room. It's not a good environment for a plant. There are no windows, little kids tear off its leaves, and we therapists, who are known for our nurturing abilities, keep forgetting to water it and dust its leaves. Sometime in the late 1980s we gave it plant food. But month after month, as old leaves turn brown and drop off, fresh green leaves sprout from its center. The corn plant is a good metaphor for families--it's plain, not at all exotic or even attractive, and it's in a hostile environment. But its surviving. | Buy | |
| The Sheltered Life</ |