The spirited adventures of an eccentric American millionaire who finds a home in deepest Africa.

Aging actress Elfrida Phipps agrees to accompany recent widower Oscar Blundell to his estate in rural Scotland, where they, along with an assortment of visitors, including Elfrida's relative Carrie Sutton, Carrie's teenage niece Lucy, and textile executive Sam Howard, help each other heal their broken hearts in the days before Christmas.

Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. It begins with six children--three boys and three girls--playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their...

Xuela Claudette Richardson grows up in the care of her father's laundress obsessed with trying to piece together a portrait of her Carib mother who died at the moment of Xuela's birth.

Caught in the grip of forces he does not understand, a quiet, ordinary clerk in Algiers commits a murder.

Sage Singer becomes friends with an old man who is particularly beloved in her community after they strike up a conversation at the bakery where she works. Josef Weber is everyone's favorite retired teacher and Little League coach. One day he asks Sage for a favor, to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses, but then he tells her he deserves to die. Once he reveals his secret, Sage wonders if he is right. Can someone who has committed a truly heinous act...

"A play about the tensions and explosive drama in a middle-class Negro family in Chicago, when they come into possession of a legacy." Pub W.

"The only hardcover edition of Jane Smiley's most famous novel--King Lear on an Iowa farm--which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. With a new introduction. This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare's King Lear centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm among his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will, which sets in motion a chain of events that brings dark truths to light. Ambitiously...

Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life, but not her memory. Ever since 1944 when her husband left her, she has raised her three very different children on her own. Now grown, they have gathered together--with anger, with hope, and with a beautiful, harsh, and dazzling story to tell ...

A 110-year-old black woman reminisces about her life, which has stretched from the days of slavery to the black militancy and civil rights movements of the 1960's.