Chilean writer Isabel Allende's classic novel is both a richly symbolic family saga and the riveting story of an unnamed Latin American country's turbulent history.
In a triumph of magic realism, Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it ... More details on The House of the Spirits
Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivi...
A poignant meditation on the nature of desire, and the enduring power of love, Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman in Penguin Modern Classics.
Florentino Ariza is a hopeless romantic w... More details on Love in the Time of Cholera
IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on ...
The iconic masterpiece of India that introduced the world to "a glittering novelist-one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling" (The New Yorker)
Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on Augu... More details on Midnight's Children
I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time...
A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America's most enduring authors
In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set ... More details on East of Eden
I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked an...
Suppressed in the Soviet Union for twenty-six years, Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece is an ironic parable of power and its corruption, good and evil, and human frailty and the strength of love. Featuring Satan, accompanied by a retinue that includes t... More details on The Master and Margarita
At the hour of sunset, on a hot spring day, two citizens appeared in the Patriarchs’ Ponds Park. One, about forty, in a gray summer suit, was short, plump, dark-haired and partly bald. He carried his ...
A masterpiece of the surreal, this stunning novel from Mexico depicts a man's strange quest for his heritage. Beseeched by his dying mother to locate his father, Pedro P"ramo, whom they fled from years ago, Juan Preciado sets out for Comala. Comala i... More details on Pedro Paramo
I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo lived there. It was my mother who told me. And I had promised her that after she died I would go see him. I squeezed h...
Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world's great storytellers at the peak of his powers.
Here we meet a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who is on the run, and Nakata, an aging simpleton who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their... More details on Kafka on the Shore
Cash isn't the only thing I take from my father's study when I leave home. I take a small, old gold lighter—I like the design and feel of it—and a folding knife with a really sharp blade. Made to skin...
"Gabriel García Márquez meets Umberto Eco meets Jorge Luis Borges for a sprawling magic show."-The New York Times Book Review
"One gorgeous read." -Stephen King
A New York Times Bestseller
Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the ... More details on The Shadow of the Wind
THERE ARE NO SECOND CHANCES IN LIFE, EXCEPT TO FEEL remorse. Julián Carax and I met in the autumn of 1933. At that time I was working for the publisher Toni Cabestany, who had discovered him in 1927 i...
The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, and reason, set against a modernizing Russia. ... More details on The Brothers Karamazov
Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor PavlovitchKaramazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, andstill remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death...
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force-and one of Haruki Murakami's most acclaimed and beloved novels.
In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat-and then for his wife as well-in a netherworld beneath t... More details on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for...