With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929....

Thomas Mann regarded his monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus. He conceived of the four parts-The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider-as a unified narrative, a \\\"mythological novel\\\" of Joseph\"s fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt....

It is the autobiography of Giorgio Bassani, told in a time span of around 15 years, a time where the ambiguous and mysterious female figure of Micol was a central part of his life....

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was for half a century America\"s dominant wildlife artist. His seminal Birds of America, a collection of 435 life-size prints, is still a standard work, and the name Audubon remains synonymous with birds and bird conservation the world over....

We begin - at the turn of the century, in an unnamed South American country - in the childhood home of the woman who will be the mother and grandmother of the clan, Clara del Valle....

From his birth in 1923 to his belated paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in 1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next....

The brevity of Muriel Spark\"s novels is equaled only by their brilliance. These four novels, each a miniature masterpiece, illustrate her development over four decades. Despite the seriousness of their themes, all four are fantastic comedies of manners, bristling with wit....

Three classic crime novels by a master of the macabre – The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, and Ripley\"s Game – appear here together in hardcover for the first time. Suave, agreeable, and completely amoral, Patricia Highsmith’s hero, the inimitable Tom Ripley, stops at nothing – not even murder – to accomplish his goals....

The only complete collection of shorter fiction by the undisputed master of detective literature, assembled here for the first time in one volume, includes stories unavailable for decades....

There are novels, like journeys, which you never want to end: this is one of them. One seventh of July at six in the afternoon, a woman of 71 and a man of 78 ascend a gangplank and begin one of the greatest adventures in modern literature....

Samuel Beckett is the greatest Irish novelist of the later twentieth century, and this trilogy of novels is his masterpiece -which makes it perhaps the outstanding literary work of our time....

Tolstoy is said to have called Les Miserables the greatest novel ever written, and it exerted a powerful influence on the creation of War and Peace....

Hardy described the theme of The Woodlanders as \"the immortal puzzle -given the man and woman, how to find a basis for their sexual relation\". Set in the familiar Dorset landscape, this time on the wooded outskirts of Blackmoor Vale, it tells the story of two women who love the same man....

Published to Coincide with the Becentenary of Horace Walpole\"s Death Horace Walpole was letter writer so energetic and fertile that his collected correspondence occupies forty volumes....

Scott Fitzgerald\"s first novel, written when the author was twenty-four, appeared in 1920 and immediately established him as a leading literary figure in the brilliant and dangerous world of 1920s America. The novel tells the story of a spoilt child in search of happiness....