Taking Care of Terrific

Taking Care of Terrific

Lois Lowry

Children's Books / Literature & Fiction / Young Adult

Fourteen-year-old Enid Crowley can't stand her name. When she takes a summer job baby-sitting young Joshua W. Cameron IV, Enid decides it's time for a change: she calls herself Cynthia, and Joshua becomes Tom Terrific. Every day they're off to Boston's Public Garden, where Enid hopes to meet people and find excitement. It doesn't take long before Enid and her new park friends - Hawk, the saxophone player, and the old bad lady - are involved in the wildest adventure the park has ever seen. Their project is top secret. Nothing can go wrong. Or can it?
Read online
  • 884
First Among Equals

First Among Equals

Jeffrey Archer

Mystery & Thrillers

Playing for the highest stakes of all . . . In the 1960s, four ambitious new MPs take their seats at Westminster. Over three decades they share the turbulent passions of the race for power with their wives and families, men and women caught up in a dramatic game for the higest stakes of all. But only one man can gain the ultimate goal - the office of Prime Minister.
Read online
  • 882
Life and Times of Michael K

Life and Times of Michael K

J. M. Coetzee

Literature & Fiction

In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. Life and Times of Michael K goes to the centre of human experience - the need for an interior, spiritual life, for some connections to the world in which we live, and for purity of vision.
Read online
  • 806
The Place of Dead Roads

The Place of Dead Roads

William S. Burroughs

Literature & Fiction

A good old-fashioned shoot-out in the American West of the frontier days serves as the springboard for this hyperkinetic adventure in which gunslingers, led by Kim Carson, fight for galactic freedom. The Place of Dead Roads is the second novel in the trilogy with Cities of the Red Night and The Western Lands.
Read online
  • 790
The Day the Leader Was Killed

The Day the Leader Was Killed

Naguib Mahfouz

Literature & Fiction / Short Stories

AN ANCHOR PAPERBACK ORIGINAL From the Nobel Prize laureate and author of the acclaimed Cairo Trilogy, a beguiling and artfully compact novel set in Sadat's Egypt. "[Mahfouz] is not only a Hugo and a Dickens, but also a Galsworthy, Zola and a Jules Romain."--Edward Said The time is 1981, Anwar al-Sadat is president, and Egypt is lurching into the modern world. Set against this backdrop, The Day the Leader Was Killed relates the tale of a middle-class Cairene family. Rich with irony and infused with political undertones, the story is narrated alternately by the pious and mischievous family patriarch Muhtashimi Zayed, his hapless grandson Elwan, and Elwan's headstrong and beautiful fiancee Randa.  The novel reaches its climax with the assassination of Sadat on October 6, 1981, an event around which the fictional plot is skillfully woven. The Day the Leader Was Killed brings us the essence of Mahfouz's genius and is further proof that he has, in the words of the Nobel citation, "formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind." From the Trade Paperback edition.
Read online
  • 766
Lord of the Trees

Lord of the Trees

Philip José Farmer

Science Fiction & Fantasy

"Having lived long enough with the charming fairy tale created by my biographer, I feel the time has come for the truth to be known. I propose to tell all; of the origins of The Nine, the elixir that gives us nearly eternal youth and superhuman strength, the struggles between us that set the world atremble." The follow-up to Jose Farmer's shocking and controversial A Feast Unknown. A brand-new edition of the classic novel.
Read online
  • 746
Sweetbriar

Sweetbriar

Jude Deveraux

Romance / Contemporary / Historical Fiction

Linnet plunged into the Kentucky wilderness, leaving behind the remnants of her life in London. But a savage Indian attack on the wagon train wiped out her fellow travelers, and left her alone in a harsh land...at the mercy of a fierce Shawnee tribe. When handsome young brave claimed her, in perfect English, as his own, Linnet knew she was safe. Until the jealousy of his powerful chief forced them to flee on a hazardous journey, fraught with peril and treachery...a journey that threatened both their lives, and their very special love!
Read online
  • 742
Hot Water Music

Hot Water Music

Charles Bukowski

Fiction / Contemporary / Poetry

With his characteristic raw and minimalist style, Charles Bukowski takes us on a walk through his side of town in Hot Water Music.  He gives us little vignettes of depravity and lasciviousness, bite sized pieces of what is both beautiful and grotesque. The stories in Hot Water Music dash around the worst parts of town – a motel room stinking of sick, a decrepit apartment housing a perpetually arguing couple, a bar tended by a skeleton – and depict the darkest parts of human existence.  Bukowski talks simply and profoundly about the underbelly of the working class without raising judgement.  In the way he writes about sex, relationships, writing, and inebriation, Bukowski sets the bar for irreverent art – his work inhabits the basest part of the mind and the most extreme absurdity of the everyday.
Read online
  • 738
Forty Thousand in Gehenna

Forty Thousand in Gehenna

C. J. Cherryh

Science Fiction & Fantasy

When forty thousand human colonists are abandoned on a planet called Gehenna for political reasons, and re-supply ships fail to arrive, collapse seems imminent. Yet over the next two centuries, the descendants of the original colonists survive despite all odds by entering a partnership with the planet's native intelligence, the lizardlike burrowing calibans.
Read online
  • 734
The Black Stallion Legend

The Black Stallion Legend

Walter Farley

Children's / Fiction

Alec Ramsey has fled Hopeful Farm in order to alleviate his grief over Pam’s sudden death. He and the Black are aimlessly wandering through the Arizona desert when they hear an amazing Native American legend: The end of the world is near, but help is promised from a rider on a black horse. Alec shrugs off the wild tale–until disaster strikes from the sky. Suddenly the fate of an entire native tribe is in his hands . . . and the mighty Black is faced with a challenge greater than any race! From the Trade Paperback edition.
Read online
  • 733
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

Walker Percy

Literature & Fiction

Walker Percy's mordantly funny and wholly original contribution to the self-help book craze deals with the Western mind's tendency toward heavy abstraction. This favorite of Percy fans continues to charm and beguile readers of all tastes and backgrounds. Lost in the Cosmos invites us to think about how we communicate with our world.
Read online
  • 729
Cathedral

Cathedral

Raymond Carver

Literature & Fiction / Poetry

Raymond Carver’s third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another.  These twelve stories mark a turning point in Carver’s work and “overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life. . . . Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty. . . . his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart” (Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World).
Read online
  • 725
216