What are the top book recommendations for 'very flowery prose'?

'Completely blew me away.' Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under

'One of the most dazzling debuts I've ever read.' Taiye Selasi, author of Ghana Must Go

'I'm urging everyone to read it.' Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure

Ada has always... Read more about Freshwater

We were three and she was a snake, coiled up on the tile in the bathroom, waiting. But we had spent the last few years believing our body—thinking that our mother was someone different, a thin human w...

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Nawal El Saadawi's books are known for their powerful denunciation of patriarchy in its many forms: social, political, and religious. Set in an insane asylum, The Innocence of the Devil is a complex and chilling novel that recasts the relationships o... Read more about The Innocence of the Devil

"The Darker Nations reconstructs the prehistory of the Third World, recalling the now-forgotten 1927 Brussels conclave of the League Against Imperialism, an international effort that brought Albert Einstein together with Jawaharlal, Nehru, Madame Sun... Read more about The Darker Nations

In 1945–46, thousands of French troops returned to the Red River delta in Indochina, and Ho Chi Minh and his comrades retreated to the highlands of the Viet Bac to regroup for an extended war of liber...

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Literary Nonfiction. CALIBAN AND THE WITCH is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalis... Read more about Caliban and the Witch

Caliban and the Witch presents the main themes of a research project on women in the "transition" from feudalism to capitalism that I began in the mid-1970s, in collaboration with an Italian feminist,...

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Bint Allah knows herself only as the Daughter of God. Born in a stifling male-dominated state, ruled by the Imam and his coterie of ministers, she dreams of one day reaching the top of a distant hill visible through the bars of the orphanage window. ... Read more about The Fall of the Imam

The darkness was impenetrable, an opaque black without sun or moon. They could not tell whether it was night, or day without daylight, in a forest thick with overgrown trees hemming them in from every...

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Something exciting has been happening in modern SF. After decades of confusion, many of the field's best writers have been returning to the subgenre called, roughly, "hard SF"-science fiction focused on science and technology, often with strong adven... Read more about The Hard SF Renaissance

Paul McAuley (born 1955) is a British writer who often writes hard SF, one of the group (along with Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton, lain M. Banks, and others) responsible for the UK part of the hard S...

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A lush and vivid story steeped in Indian folklore and mythology, Roshani Chokshi's The Star-touched Queen is a novel that no reader will soon forget. An instant New York Times Bestseller!

Fate and fortune. Power and passion. What does it take to be ... Read more about The Star-Touched Queen

Staring at the sky in Bharata was like exchanging a secret. It felt private, like I had peered through the veil of a hundred worlds. When I looked up, I could imagine—for a moment—what the sky hid fro...

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The author of The Untouchable ("contemporary fiction gets no better than this"-Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.

The narrator is Max Morden, a middl... Read more about The Sea

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parche...

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Awe and exhiliration-along with heartbreak and mordant wit-abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lo... Read more about Lolita

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh whe...

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When the young Ishmael gets on board Captain Ahab's whaling ship, little does he suspect that the mission on which he is about to embark is the fulfilment of his master's obsessive desire for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale who has already claime... Read more about Moby Dick

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the w...

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