Books on the LQL Shelf
281 books behind GW1, GW2, GW3, GW4, GW5, GW6. Notes by Vivek, the league setter.
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes is a book on cosmology by the physicist Stephen Hawking, first published in 1988.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0A Doll's House (Danish and Bokmål: Et dukkehjem; also translated as A Doll House) is a three-act play written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 20 December 1879, having been published earlier that month. The play is set in a Norwegian town c. 1879.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0A satirical poem Defoe wrote while awaiting the pillory for seditious libel, turning his punishment into an attack on those who put him there. Sold in the streets, it is said to have won over the crowd that came to watch.
The third of the three volumes of Jon Fosse's "Septology", translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls. Asle, an ageing painter and widower on the west coast of Norway, looks back on his life, while in nearby Bergen lives another Asle, also a painter, who may be another version of himself. The whole work unfolds as a single flowing sentence.
- A Series of Unfortunate EventsLemony SnicketChildren's literature199992% ANSWERED
- Uncles in Literature (GW2)
A Series of Unfortunate Events is a series of thirteen children's novels written by American author Daniel Handler under the pen name Lemony Snicket. The books follow the turbulent lives of orphaned siblings Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. After their parents' death in a fire, the children are placed under the care of a murderous villain, Count Olaf, who attempts to steal their inheritance and causes numerous disasters with the help of his accomplices as the children attempt to flee. Count Olaf pursues the children and their money throughout the books, wearing a different disguise each time. As the plot progresses, the Baudelaires gradually confront further mysteries surrounding their family and deep conspiracies involving a secret society, which also involves Olaf and Snicket, the author's own fictional self-insert.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 A Tale of Two Cities is a historical novel published in 1859 by English author Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris, and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie whom he had never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0A Thousand Splendid Suns is a 2007 novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, following the huge success of his bestselling 2003 debut The Kite Runner. Mariam, an illegitimate teenager from Herat, is forced to marry a shoemaker from Kabul after a family tragedy. Laila, born a generation later, lives a relatively privileged life, but her life intersects with Mariam's when a similar tragedy forces her to accept a marriage proposal from Mariam's husband.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (1739–40) is a book by Scottish philosopher David Hume, considered by many to be Hume's most important work and one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. The book has appeared in many editions since the death of the author in 1776.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian TrailBill BrysonEssays & non-fiction199850% ANSWERED
- Subtitles (GW3)
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail is a 1998 travel book by the writer Bill Bryson, chronicling his attempt to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail during the spring and summer of 1996. For much of his journey, Bryson was accompanied by his friend Matt Angerer (pseudonymously called "Stephen Katz" in the book), who had previously appeared in Bryson's 1991 book Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Annie Ernaux's short memoir of her mother, written after her death: a working-class woman from Normandy who ran a café-grocery, and the daughter whose education carried her away from that world. First published in French as "Une femme" in 1987.
Afterlives is a 2020 work of historical fiction by the Nobel Prize-winning Zanzibar-born British author Abdulrazak Gurnah. It was first published by Bloomsbury Publishing on 17 September 2020. Set mainly in the first half of the 20th century, the plot follows four protagonists living in an unnamed town on the Swahili coast of what is now Tanzania from the time of German colonial rule until a few years after independence. It was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize of Political Fiction.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Against the Day is an epic historical novel by Thomas Pynchon, published on November 21, 2006. The narrative takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I and features more than 280 characters spread across the United States, Europe, Mexico, Central Asia, Africa and, according to the book jacket blurb written by Pynchon, "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all." Like its predecessors, Against the Day is an example of historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance. At 1,085 pages, it is the longest of Pynchon's novels to date.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- All the Lives We Never LivedAnuradha RoyLiterary fiction201838% ANSWERED
- 21st c. Indian Women Writers (GW1)
- Indian Book Awards 2022 (GW2)
All the Lives We Never Lived is a novel by Anuradha Roy which was published on 14 May 2018 by Hachette India. In 2022, it was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 - All the President's MenBob Woodward and Carl BernsteinEssays & non-fiction197483% ANSWERED
- Non-fiction works (GW6)
All the President's Men is a 1974 non-fiction book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two Washington Post journalists who investigated the June 1972 break-in at the Watergate Office Building and the resultant political scandal. The book chronicles the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein from Woodward's initial report on the Watergate break-in through the resignations of Nixon Administration officials H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman in April 1973, and the revelation of the Oval Office Watergate tapes by Alexander Butterfield three months later. It relates the events behind the major stories the duo wrote for the Post, naming some sources who had previously refused to be identified for their initial articles, notably Hugh Sloan. It also gives detailed accounts of Woodward's secret meetings with his source Deep Throat, whose identity was kept hidden for over 30 years. Gene Roberts, the former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and former managing editor of The New York Times, has called the work of Woodward and Bernstein "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time."
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 American Psycho is a horror novel by American writer Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. The story is told in the first-person by Patrick Bateman, a wealthy, narcissistic, and vain Manhattan investment banker who lives a double life as a serial killer. Alison Kelly of The Observer notes that while "Some countries [deem it] so potentially controversial that it only to be sold as shrink-wrapped", "critics rave about it" and "academics revel in its transgressive and postmodern qualities".
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Animal Farm (originally Animal Farm: A Fairy Story) is a satirical allegorical dystopian novella, in the form of a beast fable, by George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945. It follows the mistreated anthropomorphic farm animals of Manor Farm as they rebel against their human master, and hope to create a utopian society. However, the rebellion is hijacked and betrayed, and under the dictatorship of the pigs, the farm ends up in a dystopian state nearly identical to what it had been before.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Anna Karenina (Russian: Анна Каренина, IPA: [ˈanːə kɐˈrʲenʲɪnə]) is a novel, first published in book form in 1878, by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Often considered to be among the greatest works of world literature, Tolstoy himself called it his first true novel. It was initially released in serial installments from 1875 to 1877, all but the last part appearing in the periodical The Russian Messenger. By the time he was finishing up the last installments, Tolstoy was in an anguished state of mind having come to hate it but finished it unwillingly.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The play was first performed around 1607, by the King's Men at either the Blackfriars Theatre or the Globe Theatre. Its first appearance in print was in the First Folio published in 1623, under the title The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Appointment in Samarra, published in 1934, is the first novel by American writer John O'Hara (1905–1970). It concerns the self-destruction of the fictional character Julian English, a wealthy car dealer who was once a member of the social elite of Gibbsville (O'Hara's fictionalized version of Pottsville, Pennsylvania). The book created controversy due to O'Hara's inclusion of sexual content.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- Around the World in Eighty DaysJules VerneClassic fiction1872100% ANSWERED
- Book Math (GW2)
- Who Created Them? (GW4)
Around the World in Eighty Days (French: Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours) is an adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, first published in French in 1872. In the story, Phileas Fogg of London and his newly employed French valet Jean Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a wager of £20,000 (equivalent to £2.5 million in 2024) set by his friends at the Reform Club. It is one of Verne's most acclaimed works.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Artemis is a 2017 science fiction novel by American writer Andy Weir. It takes place in the late 2080s in Artemis, the first and only city on the Moon. It follows the life of porter and smuggler Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara as she gets caught up in a conspiracy for control of the city. The book received mixed reviews from critics.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 and first published in the First Folio in 1623.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0A woman living in the big city survives a close shave with death, then realises the attempt is much more complicated than it first seemed. K. R. Meera's thriller was translated from the Malayalam by J. Devika.
- Astride the WheelChandrasekhar RathLiterary fiction0% ANSWERED
- Crossword Book Prize - Translation (GW4)
Chandrasekhar Rath's Odia novel about an ageing temple priest, worn down by poverty and the narrow world around him, and his slow inward journey toward spiritual freedom. Translated into English by Jatindra Kumar Nayak.
Laura Lippman's first novel and the first Tess Monaghan mystery, published in 1997. Tess, a former newspaper reporter in Baltimore, turns investigator when a friend is accused of murder.
Beowulf ( ; Old English: Bēowulf [ˈbeːo.wuɫf]) is an Old English poem, an epic in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines, contained in the Nowell Codex. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature. The date of composition is a matter of contention among scholars; the only certain dating is for the manuscript, which was produced between AD 975 and 1025. Scholars call the anonymous author the "Beowulf poet". The story is set in pagan Scandinavia in the 5th and 6th centuries. Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall Heorot has been under attack by the monster Grendel for twelve years. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother tries to take revenge and is in turn defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland and becomes king of the Geats. Fifty years later, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is mortally wounded in the battle. After his death, his attendants cremate his body and erect a barrow on a headland in his memory.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Betrayal is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1978. Critically regarded as one of the English playwright's major dramatic works, it features his characteristically economical dialogue, characters' hidden emotions and veiled motivations, and their self-absorbed competitive one-upmanship, face-saving, dishonesty, and (self-) deceptions.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse is an 1877 novel by English author Anna Sewell. It was written from a horse as main character's perspective. She wrote it in the last years of her life, during which she was bedridden and seriously ill. The novel became an immediate best-seller, with Sewell dying just five months after its publication, but having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success. With over fifty million copies sold, Black Beauty is one of the best-selling books of all time.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Bleeding Edge is a novel by the American author Thomas Pynchon, published by Penguin Press on September 17, 2013. The novel is a detective story, with its major themes being the September 11 attacks in New York City and the transformation of the world by the Internet.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Blindness (Portuguese: Ensaio sobre a cegueira, lit. 'Essay on Blindness') is a 1995 novel by Portuguese author José Saramago. It centers on an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in a nonspecific city, and follows multiple unnamed characters as they navigate the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The novel was translated into English by Giovanni Pontiero in 1997.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Bouvard et Pécuchet (French pronunciation: [buvaʁ e pekyʃɛ]) is an unfinished satirical novel by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1881 after his death in 1880.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Carrie is the debut horror novel by American author Stephen King, released in 1974. Set in the town of Chamberlain, Maine, the plot revolves around Carrie White, a friendless high school girl from an abusive religious household who has telekinetic powers. After a cruel prank pulled by one of her bullies on prom night, Carrie decides to take revenge.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Casino Royale is the first novel by the British author Ian Fleming. Published in 1953, it is the first James Bond book, and it paved the way for a further eleven novels and two short story collections by Fleming, followed by numerous continuation Bond novels by other authors.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Cat Among the Pigeons is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 2 November 1959, and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in March 1960 with a copyright date of 1959. The UK edition retailed at twelve shillings and sixpence (12/6), and the US edition at $2.95.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Cat's Cradle is a satirical postmodern novel, with science fiction elements, by American writer Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's fourth novel, it was first published on March 18, 1963, exploring and satirizing issues of science, technology, the purpose of religion, and the arms race, often through the use of morbid humor. The novel was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1964.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Cat's Eye is a 1988 novel by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood about fictional painter Elaine Risley, who vividly reflects on her childhood and teenage years. Her strongest memories are of Cordelia, who was the leader of a trio of girls who were both very cruel and very kind to her in ways that tint Elaine's perceptions of relationships and her world — not to mention her art — into her middle years. The novel unfolds in mid-20th century Canada, from World War II to the late 1980s, and includes a look at many of the cultural elements of that time period, including feminism and various modern art movements. The book was a finalist for the 1988 Governor General's Award and for the 1989 Booker Prize.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Catch-22 is a satirical war novel by American author Joseph Heller. It is his debut novel. He began writing it in 1953, and the book was first published in 1961. Often cited as one of the most significant novels of the 20th century, it uses a distinctive non-chronological third-person omniscient narration, describing events from the points of view of different characters. The separate storylines are out of sequence so the timeline develops along with the plot. The novel satirizes military bureaucracy and greed.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- Chain-Gang All-StarsNana Kwame Adjei-BrenyahSpeculative fiction20238% ANSWERED
- African-American (GW1)
Chain-Gang All-Stars is the debut novel of American author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, published by Pantheon Books on May 2, 2023. It was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, as well as other awards. The novel is set in an imagined America, where convicted wards of state are offered an alternative path to death row or 25-plus years sentences and participate in televised death matches under the “Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE)” program.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Cinder is the 2012 debut young adult science fiction novel of American author Marissa Meyer, published by Macmillan Publishers through their subsidiary Feiwel & Friends. It is the first book in The Lunar Chronicles and is followed by Scarlet. The story is loosely based on the classic fairytale Cinderella. Cinder was selected as one of IndieBound's Kids' Next List for winter 2012.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Circe is a 2018 mythic fantasy novel by American writer Madeline Miller. Set during the Greek Heroic Age, it is an original reimagining of various Greek myths, most notably the Odyssey, as told from the perspective of the witch Circe. While drawing on characters and episodes from ancient myths, the novel invents or substantially reinterprets many aspects of Circe's biography, including Circe's encounters with mythological figures such as Hermes, the Minotaur, Jason, and Medea and ultimately, her romance with Odysseus and his son Telemachus.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0City of Glass: The Graphic Novel, by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, is a comics adaptation of American author Paul Auster's novella City of Glass.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Clockwork Angel is the first installment of The Infernal Devices trilogy by Cassandra Clare. After the death of her aunt, Tessa Gray is sent a ticket to travel to London by her brother Nathaniel. On arrival, she is kidnapped and abused by two cruel sisters (Mrs. Black and Mrs. Dark) who work under the name of 'The Dark Sisters', until her eventual saving by a group of people who are referred to as Shadowhunters. The rest of the book is based around her discovering the Shadow world and making a life with the new people she encounters.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Cosmos is a popular science book written by astronomer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Sagan. It was published in 1980 as a companion piece to the PBS mini-series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage with which it was co-developed and intended to complement. Each of the book's 13 illustrated chapters corresponds to one of the 13 episodes of the television series.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. It is the second of Dostoevsky's full-length novels following his return from ten years of exile in Siberia. Crime and Punishment is considered the first great novel of his mature period of writing and is often cited as one of the greatest works of world literature.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Cup of Gold: A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History (1929) is John Steinbeck's first novel, a work of historical fiction based loosely on the life and death of 17th-century privateer Henry Morgan. It centres on Morgan's assault and sacking of Panama City (the "Cup of Gold"), and the woman (La Santa Roja, or the Red Saint) he seeks there, reputed to be fairer than the sun.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Eunice de Souza's first novel: a short, sharply observed and darkly funny portrait of a young woman making her way in Bombay, written with the economy and wit of her poetry.
De Profundis (Latin: "from the depths") is a letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to his friend and lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Death of a Salesman is a 1949 stage play written by the American playwright Arthur Miller. The play premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949, running for 742 performances. It is a two-act tragedy—the subtitle of the play is "Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem"—set in late 1940s Brooklyn and told through a montage of memories, dreams, and arguments of the protagonist Willy Loman, a traveling salesman who is despondent with his life and appears to be slipping into senility. The play addresses a variety of themes, such as the American Dream, the anatomy of truth, and infidelity. It won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play. Since its premiere, the play has been revived on Broadway five times, winning a to-this-day unprecedented four Tony Awards for Best Revival. It has been adapted for the cinema ten times. In 1999, New Yorker drama critic John Lahr said that with 11 million copies sold, it was "probably the most successful modern play ever published."
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Déjà Dead is the first novel by Kathy Reichs starring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?Philip K. DickSpeculative fiction1968100% ANSWERED
- A.I. in Books (GW4)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (retrospectively titled Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in some later printings) is a 1968 dystopian science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, where Earth's life has been greatly damaged by a nuclear global war. The main plot follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who has to "retire" (a euphemism for kill) six escaped Nexus-6 model androids, while a secondary plot follows John Isidore, a man of low IQ who aids the fugitive androids.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 - Don QuixoteMiguel de CervantesClassic fiction1605100% ANSWERED
- Abridged Classics (GW1)
- Art Inspired from Books (GW4)
Don Quixote is a novel by Miguel de Cervantes, written in Early Modern Spanish and published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. It is considered a founding work of Western literature and the first modern novel. It is also one of the most-translated books in the world and one of the best-selling books in history.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. The narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist and opens with English solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Revealing his true nature as a vampire, Dracula moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. Harker joins a group led by Abraham Van Helsing who hunt and kill the Count.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Endgame is an absurdist, tragicomic one-act play by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. First performed in London in 1957, it is about a blind, paralysed, domineering elderly man, his geriatric parents, and his servile companion in an abandoned house in a fictional post-apocalyptic wasteland, all of whom await an unspecified "end". Much of the play's content consists of terse, back and forth dialogue between the characters reminiscent of bantering, along with trivial stage actions. The plot is also supplanted by the development of a grotesque story-within-a-story that the character Hamm is relating. The play's title refers to chess and frames the characters as acting out a losing battle with each other or their fate.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Fen is a 1983 play by Caryl Churchill. While not as well known as Churchill works like Cloud 9 (1979) and Top Girls (1982), it has been praised by many critics. One of its inspirations was the 1975 book by Mary Chamberlain Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village which also provided the words for one of the songs and other phrases and images.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Muthu, an everyman, is cut adrift when his father divides up the family farmland and leaves him with almost nothing. His search for a new home pushes his family into uncharted territory. It won the 2023 JCB Prize for Literature.
Flowers for Algernon is a short novelette by American author Daniel Keyes, which he later expanded into a novel and adapted for film and other media. The novelette, written in 1958 and first published in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, won the Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction in 1960. The novel was published in 1966 and was joint winner of that year's Nebula Award for Best Novel, with Babel-17.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 Gothic novel written by English author Mary Shelley. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature from different body parts in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18 and staying in Bath, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in a French translation published in Paris in 1821.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Funeral in Berlin is a 1964 spy novel by Len Deighton set between Saturday 5 October and Sunday 10 November 1963. It was the third of Deighton's novels about an unnamed British agent. It was preceded by The IPCRESS File (1962) and Horse Under Water (1963), and followed by Billion-Dollar Brain (1966).
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Getting Lost (French: Se perdre) is a 2001 memoir by Annie Ernaux published by Seven Stories Press and distributed by Penguin Random House. Originally released in 2001 in its original French, it was re-released in 2022 translated into English. The book details an 18-month love affair between Ernaux and an unnamed Soviet diplomat that began in 1988. The narrative, consisting of diary entries by Ernaux, explores concepts including love, lust and the fear of abandonment. This was Ernaux's second work related to the relationship with the diplomat; with the other work being the semi-autobiographical novel Simple Passion (which was previously published in 1991 in France).
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Ghost World is a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes. It was serialized in issues #11–18 (June 1993 – March 1997) of Clowes's comic book series Eightball, and was published in book form in 1997 by Fantagraphics Books. It was a commercial and critical success and developed into a cult classic.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Giovanni's Room is a 1956 novel by James Baldwin. The book concerns the events in the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings and frustrations with his relationships with other men, particularly an Italian bartender named Giovanni whom he meets at a Parisian gay bar. While he deals with his difficulties with men, he is engaged to an American woman who is travelling in Spain.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Girl, Woman, Other is a novel by English writer Bernardine Evaristo. Published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, it follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Go Gentle is Maria Semple's fourth novel, published by Putnam and Sons in 2026. In the novel, the protagonist, Adora Hazzard has reinvented her life as a Stoic philosophy scholar. She is living in the historically famous Ansonia building in Manhattan. Adora's Stoic ideals are put to the test as her daily routine turns into a "madcap comedy" mystery involving museum bombings, a stolen statue, a strange European broker, and a chaotic trip to Paris. Go Gentle was selected by Oprah Winfrey as an Oprah's Book Club pick. It was also a New York Times bestseller.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by the English author Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. The novel is a bildungsroman and depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman & Hall published the novel in three volumes.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Greek Lessons (Korean: 희랍어 시간, romanized: Huirabeo Sigan) is a 2011 novel by South Korean author Han Kang. Published in South Korea on November 10, 2011, the book received an English-language release on April 18, 2023 by Hogarth Press. The novel was translated into English by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play. Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his attempts to exact revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0A short essay on New York City, written by E. B. White in the summer of 1948 and published as a small book the following year. It is often read as one of the great portraits of the city.
Alif, a history teacher at a Delhi school, would rather lose himself in the past than argue about it, but the present keeps intruding. Anjum Hasan's novel of faith, belonging and a changing India.
Hollywood, Ending is a novel by American author John Green, published on September 22, 2026, by Dutton Books. It follows Green's nonfiction book Everything Is Tuberculosis (2025) and is his first novel since Turtles All the Way Down (2017). The story centers on two young actors and how their lives change from the fame gained from their roles in a biopic about Andy Warhol. The book debuted as a number one New York Times Best Seller and received positive reviews.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Home is the tenth novel by the American author Toni Morrison, originally published in 2012 by Alfred A. Knopf. Set in the 1950s, Morrison's Home rewrites the narrative of the time period. The novel tells the story of 24-year-old war veteran Frank Money as he navigates America amidst his trauma from serving in the Korean War. After receiving a letter that alerts him of the danger his younger sister, Cee, has found herself in, he sets out on a journey back home to rural Georgia.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Horton Hears a Who! is a children's book written and illustrated by Theodor Seuss Geisel under the pen name Dr. Seuss. It was published in 1954 by Random House. This book tells the story of Horton the Elephant and his adventures saving Whoville, a tiny town located on a clover, from animals who mock him (namely a kangaroo). The animals attempt to steal the clover from Horton, so Horton goes to great lengths to save Whoville from being placed into a boiling pot of Beezlenut Oil.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0How Green Was My Valley is a 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn, narrated by Huw Morgan, the main character, about his Welsh family and the mining community in which they live. The author had claimed that he based the book on his own experiences, but this was found after his death to be doubtful; Llewellyn was English-born and spent little time in Wales, though he was of Welsh descent. Llewellyn gathered material for the novel from conversations with local mining families in the village of Gilfach Goch, in southeast Wales.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Human Acts (Korean: 소년이 온다; RR: Sonyeoni onda; lit. A Boy Comes) is a South Korean novel written by Han Kang. The novel draws upon the suppression of the Gwangju Uprising in May 1980 by the recently installed government of coup d'état leader Chun Doo-hwan. In the novel, the death of a young boy, Dong-ho, and its defining role in the lives of his friends and family members, allows for a multidimensional analysis of the long-term impact of the crisis on the residents of Gwangju. Human Acts won Korea's Manhae Prize for Literature and Italy's Premio Malaparte.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0I Am Legend is a 1954 post-apocalyptic horror novel by American writer Richard Matheson. The novel inspired the modern development of zombie and vampire literature as a new genre, the narrative trope of a scientific explanation for vampires, and the popularity of a worldwide apocalypse due to disease. The novel was a success and was adapted into the films The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007). It was also an inspiration for George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968).
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The second of the three volumes of Jon Fosse's "Septology", translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls. Asle, an ageing painter and widower on the west coast of Norway, looks back on his life, while in nearby Bergen lives another Asle, also a painter, who may be another version of himself. The whole work unfolds as a single flowing sentence.
- I Named My Sister SilenceManoj RupdaLiterary fiction20238% ANSWERED
- Indian Lit - Translation 2023 (GW6)
A brother searches for his sister, who vanished into the jungles of Chhattisgarh to join the Naxals. Manoj Rupda's Hindi novel Kaale Adhyaye was translated into English by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar.
Ice Station Zebra is a 1963 thriller novel written by Scottish author Alistair MacLean. It marked a return to MacLean's classic Arctic setting. After completing this novel, whose plot line parallels real-life events during the Cold War, MacLean retired from writing for three years. In 1968 it was loosely adapted into a film of the same name.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Ambai's short stories, translated from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström: women of different ages and backgrounds navigate family, marriage, desire and the search for a space of their own, in prose that breaks with conventional ways of telling.
In Cold Blood is a non-fiction novel by the American author Truman Capote, first published in 1966. It details the 1959 Clutter family murders in the small farming community of Holcomb, Kansas, who were murdered by home intruders during a failed home invasion.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0In Search of Lost Time (French: À la recherche du temps perdu), first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, and sometimes referred to in French as La Recherche (IPA: [la ʁə.ʃɛʁʃ]; lit. 'The Search'), is a novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust. This early twentieth-century work is his most prominent, known for both its length and its theme of involuntary memory.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Inkheart (German: Tintenherz) is a 2003 young adult fantasy novel by Cornelia Funke, and is the first book of the Inkheart series, with Inkspell (2005) and Inkdeath (2007) succeeding it. The novel became one of the finalists of 2004 BookSense Book of the Year Award for Children's Literature and won the Flicker Tale Children's Book Award in 2006. Based on a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association listed the book as one of its "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children".
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster is a 1997 bestselling nonfiction book written by Jon Krakauer. It details Krakauer's experience in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, in which eight climbers were killed and several others were stranded by a storm. Krakauer's expedition was led by guide Rob Hall. Other groups were trying to summit on the same day, including one led by Scott Fischer, whose guiding agency, Mountain Madness, was perceived as a competitor to Hall's agency, Adventure Consultants.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0"Investigations of a Dog" (German: "Forschungen eines Hundes") is a short story by Franz Kafka written in 1922. It was published posthumously in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer (Berlin, 1931). The first English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir was published by Martin Secker in London in 1933. In 1946 it was published by Schocken Books in The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections. Told from the perspective of a dog, the story concerns the nature and limits of knowledge, by way of the dog's inquiries into the practices of his culture.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison's first novel, and the only one published during his lifetime. It was first published by the British magazine Horizon in 1947, and addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early 20th century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Jazz is a 1992 historical novel by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning American author Toni Morrison. The majority of the narrative takes place in Harlem during the 1920s; however, as the pasts of the various characters are explored, the narrative extends back to the mid-19th-century American South.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0John of John is a 2026 novel by Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart. Well received by critics, it is a finalist for the 2026 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and was longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Jonathan Livingston Seagull is an allegorical fable in novella form written by American author Richard Bach and illustrated with black-and-white photographs shot by Russell Munson. It is about a seagull who is trying to learn about flying, personal reflection, freedom, and self-realization. It was first published in book form in 1970 with little advertising or expectations; by the end of 1972, over a million copies were in print, the book having reached the number-one spot on bestseller lists mostly through word of mouth recommendations.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0A novel by the Czech dissident writer Ivan Klíma, set in communist Czechoslovakia and first circulated in samizdat. Its protagonist is a judge whose work forces him to weigh his conscience against the state.
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (First Folio title: The Tragedie of Ivlivs Cæsar), often shortened to Julius Caesar, is a historical tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written and first performed in 1599. The play portrays the political conspiracy that led to the assassination of the Roman dictator Julius Caesar and Rome's subsequent civil war. Drawing primarily (with deviations in various aspects) from Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Parallel Lives by Plutarch, Shakespeare presents a dramatised account of Caesar's growing power, his murder by a group of senators led by Cassius and Brutus, and the defeat of the conspirators by the forces of Mark Antony and Octavius at the Battle of Philippi.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Kalevala (IPA: [ˈkɑleʋɑlɑ]) is a 19th-century compilation of epic poetry, compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish, Karelian and Ingrian folklore and mythology, telling a story about the Creation of the Earth, describing the controversies and retaliatory voyages between the peoples of the land of Kalevala called Väinölä and the land of Pohjola and their various protagonists and antagonists, as well as the construction and robbery of the mythical wealth-making machine Sampo.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- KappaRyūnosuke AkutagawaLiterary fiction192750% ANSWERED
- Partial Bibliography - Japanese Novelists (GW4)
Kappa (Japanese: 河童, Hepburn: Kappa) is a 1927 novella written by the Japanese author Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Bama's autobiography, first published in Tamil in 1992 and widely seen as the first by a Dalit woman in Tamil. Named after the saw-edged palmyra leaves she handled as a child, it tells of growing up Dalit and Christian in a Tamil Nadu village, and of her decision to leave the convent where she had become a nun.
Katabasis is a 2025 fantasy novel by American writer R. F. Kuang. It was released on August 26, 2025. The novel follows two magicians, doctoral candidates, who must venture into hell to save their thesis advisor in order to receive letters of recommendation.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Kidnapped is a historical fiction adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, written as a boys' novel and first published in the magazine Young Folks from May to July 1886. The novel has attracted the praise and admiration of writers as diverse as Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and Hilary Mantel. A sequel, Catriona, was published in 1893.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBIDavid GrannEssays & non-fiction2017100% ANSWERED
- Subtitles (GW3)
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is a 2017 nonfiction book by American journalist David Grann about the Osage murders. Time magazine listed it as one of its top ten nonfiction books of 2017.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Kin is a 2026 novel by American author Tayari Jones. Her fifth novel, it follows the lives of two motherless girls from the fictional town of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, from childhood in the 1950s through adulthood. The book was published on February 24, 2026, by Knopf. It was selected for Oprah's Book Club, marking Jones's second appearance in the book club following An American Marriage (2018).
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- King LearWilliam ShakespeareDrama17% ANSWERED
- "O" Shakespeare (GW1)
- Name that Shakespeare Character (GW5)
The Tragedy of King Lear, often shortened to King Lear, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare in late 1605 or early 1606. Set in pre-Roman Britain, the play depicts the consequences of King Lear's love-test, in which he divides his power and land according to the praise of his daughters. The play is known for its dark tone, complex poetry, and prominent motifs concerning blindness, madness and human nature.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Klara and the Sun is the eighth novel by the Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published on 2 March 2021. It is a dystopian science fiction story.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Kokoro (こゝろ; or in modern kana usage こころ) is a 1914 Japanese novel by Natsume Sōseki, and the final part of a trilogy starting with To the Spring Equinox and Beyond and followed by The Wayfarer (both 1912). Set in the Meiji era, the novel tells of the acquaintance between a young man and an older man called "Sensei" ("teacher" or "master"), who holds a secret from his past regarding the death of a friend.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Kosala (English: Cocoon), sometimes spelled Kosla, is a Marathi novel by Indian writer Bhalchandra Nemade, published in 1963. Regarded as Nemade's Masterpiece, and accepted as a modern classic of Marathi literature, the novel uses the autobiographical form to narrate the journey of a young man, Pandurang Sangvikar, and his friends through his college years.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by American poet Walt Whitman. After self-publishing it in 1855, he spent most of his professional life writing, revising, and expanding the collection until his death in 1892. Either six or nine separate editions of the book were produced, depending on how one defines a new edition. The continual modifications to Leaves of Grass resulted in vastly different copies of it circulating in Whitman's lifetime. The first edition was a slim tract of twelve poems, and the last was a compilation of over 400 poems.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Les Misérables (, French: [le mizeʁabl] ) is a French epic historical novel by Victor Hugo, first published on 31 March 1862, that is considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. Les Misérables has been popularized through numerous adaptations for film, television, and the stage, including a musical.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, commonly referred to as Leviathan, is a work of social and political theory by the English empiricist philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), published in 1651 (revised Latin edition 1668). Its name derives from the chaotic Leviathan sea serpent of the Hebrew Bible and earlier mythologies.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Life of Pi is a Canadian philosophical novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist is Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, who explores issues of spirituality and metaphysics from an early age. After a shipwreck, he survives 227 days while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, raising questions about the nature of reality and how it is perceived and told.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Little Women is a coming-of-age novel written by American novelist Louisa May Alcott, originally published in two volumes, in 1868 and 1869. The story follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—and details their passage from childhood to womanhood. Loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, it is classified as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Little Wonder is a 2026 novel by Sophie Chen Keller. Published by Jenna Bush Hager's Thousand Voices imprint, the book was selected as an Oprah's Book Club pick in June 2026.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Lolita is a 1955 novel written by the Russian and American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. The protagonist and unreliable narrator is a French literature professor who moves to New England and writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert. He details his obsession with and victimization of a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, whom he describes as a "nymphet". Humbert becomes sexually obsessed with Dolores after becoming her stepfather, and romanticizes his obsession. Privately, he calls her "Lolita", the Spanish diminutive for Dolores. The novel was written in English, but fear of censorship in the U.S. (where Nabokov lived) and Britain led to its being first published in Paris, France, in 1955 by Olympia Press.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Love (2003) is the eighth novel by Toni Morrison. Written in Morrison's non-linear style, the novel tells of the lives of several women and their relationships to the late Bill Cosey.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman is Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The Wrongs of Woman was published posthumously in 1798 by her husband, William Godwin, and is often considered her most radical feminist work.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- MatildaRoald DahlChildren's literature1988100% ANSWERED
- One-Line Descriptions of Childrens' Books (GW1)
Matilda is a 1988 children's novel by British author Roald Dahl. It was published by Jonathan Cape. The story features Matilda Wormwood, a precocious child with uncaring parents, and her time in a school run by the tyrannical headmistress Miss Trunchbull.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Mildred Pierce is a psychological hardboiled novel by James M. Cain published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1941.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 epic novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book centers on the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a Great American Novel was established only in the 20th century, after the 1919 centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written". Its opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Montage of a Dream Deferred is a book-length poem suite published by Langston Hughes in 1951. Its jazz poetry style focuses on scenes over the course of a 24-hour period in Harlem (a neighborhood of New York City) and its mostly African-American inhabitants. The original edition was 75 pages long and comprised 91 individually titled poems, which were intended to be read as a single long poem. Hughes' prefatory note for the book explained his intentions in writing the collection: In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it progressed—jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop—this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of a jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of the music of a community in transition.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a wealthy woman in post-First World War London.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0My Mother Said I Never Should is a play in three acts written by Charlotte Keatley and first staged in Manchester in 1987. The play is about the relationships between mothers and daughters and explores the themes of independence, growing up and secrets. It addresses the issues of teenage pregnancy, career prioritization, and single motherhood. It is also about how the different generations break free from their parents' traditions and culture.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- NaomiJun'ichirō TanizakiLiterary fiction192450% ANSWERED
- Partial Bibliography - Japanese Novelists (GW4)
Naomi (痴人の愛, Chijin no Ai; lit. A Fool's Love) is a novel by Japanese author Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965). Writing of the novel began in 1924, and from March to June, Osaka's Morning News (大阪朝日新聞, Osaka Asahi Shinbun) published the first several chapters of the serial. Four months later, the periodical Female (女性, Josei) started to publish the remaining chapters. The novel was first published in book form, by Kaizosha, in 1925.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 A Marathi play by Kusumagraj, the pen name of Vishnu Vaman Shirwadkar, about an ageing stage actor famed for his Shakespearean roles who retires, gives his wealth to his children and finds himself unwanted in their homes. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1974 and remains a landmark of the Marathi stage.
Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by William Gibson. Set in the near future, the narrative follows Case, a computer hacker enlisted into a crew by a powerful artificial intelligence and a traumatised former soldier to complete a high-stakes heist. It was Gibson's debut novel and, after its success, served as the first entry in the Sprawl trilogy, followed by Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984) is a dystopian and speculative fiction novel by the English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final completed book. Thematically, it centres on totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours. Nineteen Eighty-Four has often been regarded as a classic and has been acknowledged for its impact on 20th-century literature.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- No Longer HumanOsamu DazaiLiterary fiction194858% ANSWERED
- Partial Bibliography - Japanese Novelists (GW4)
No Longer Human (Japanese: 人間失格, Hepburn: Ningen Shikkaku), also translated as A Shameful Life, is a 1948 novel by Japanese author Osamu Dazai. It tells the story of a troubled man incapable of revealing his true self to others, and who, instead, maintains a façade of hollow jocularity, later turning to a life of alcoholism and drug abuse before his final disappearance. The original title translates as "Disqualified as a human being" or "A failed human". The book was published one month after Dazai's suicide at the age of 38. No Longer Human is considered a classic of postwar Japanese literature and Dazai's masterpiece. It enjoys considerable popularity among younger readers and ranks as the second-best-selling novel by publishing house Shinchōsha, behind Sōseki Natsume's Kokoro.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Normal People is a 2018 novel by the Irish author Sally Rooney. Normal People is Rooney's second novel, published after Conversations with Friends (2017). It was first published by Faber & Faber on 30 August 2018. The book became a bestseller in the United States, selling almost 64,000 copies in hardcover in its first four months of release. It was also a bestseller in China, where its coming of age theme was popular with younger readers. A critically acclaimed and Emmy nominated television adaptation of the same name aired from April 2020 on BBC Three and Hulu. A number of publications ranked it one of the best books of the 2010s.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens. It was originally published as a serial from 1837 to 1839 and as a three-volume book in 1838. The story follows orphan Oliver Twist, who, after being raised in a workhouse, escapes to London, where he meets a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin, discovers the secrets of his parentage, and reconnects with his remaining family.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0On a Sunbeam is a science fiction webcomic, later released as a graphic novel, by American cartoonist Tillie Walden. Set in a spacefaring science fiction world, the plot follows the development of the protagonist Mia, who joins the crew of the maintenance ship Aktis and attempts to reconnect with a lost love. It was nominated for the 2017 Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic and the graphic novel won the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is the debut novel by Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong, published by Penguin Press on June 4, 2019. An epistolary novel, it is written in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother. It was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- One Day in the Life of Ivan DenisovichAleksandr SolzhenitsynClassic fiction1962100% ANSWERED
- Book Math (GW2)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian: Один день Ивана Денисовича, romanized: Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha, IPA: [ɐˈdʲin ˈdʲenʲ ɪˈvanə dʲɪˈnʲisəvʲɪtɕə]) is a short novel by the Russian writer and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir (New World). The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the early 1950s and features the day of prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a novel by Ken Kesey published in 1962. Set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, the narrative serves as a study of institutional processes and the human mind, including a critique of psychiatry and a tribute to individualistic principles. It was adapted into the Broadway (and later off-Broadway) play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Dale Wasserman in 1963. Bo Goldman adapted the novel into a 1975 film of the same name directed by Miloš Forman, which won five Academy Awards.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0One for the Money is the first novel by Janet Evanovich featuring the bounty hunter Stephanie Plum. It was published in 1994 in the United States and in 1995 in Great Britain. Like its successors, Two for the Dough and Three to Get Deadly, One for the Money is a long-time best-seller, appearing for 75 consecutive weeks on the USA Today list of 150 best-selling novels, peaking at number 13.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0One Hundred Years of Solitude (Spanish: Cien años de soledad, Latin American Spanish: [sjen ˈaɲos ðe soleˈðað]) is a 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the fictitious town of Macondo. The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in world literature. It was recognized as one of the most important works of the Spanish language during the 4th International Conference of the Spanish Language held in Cartagena de Indias in March 2007.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- Open Book: Not Quite a MemoirKubbra SaitMemoir & letters202217% ANSWERED
- Indian Book Awards 2022 (GW2)
The actor and presenter Kubbra Sait writes candidly about her life so far: growing up, her body, her relationships, and finding her way in film and television.
Our Man in Havana (1958) is a novel set in Cuba by the English author Graham Greene. Greene uses the novel to mock intelligence services, especially the British MI6, and their willingness to believe reports from their local informants.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Pachinko is the second novel by Harlem-based author and journalist Min Jin Lee. Published in 2017, Pachinko is an epic historical fiction novel following a Korean family who immigrates to Japan. The story features an ensemble of characters who encounter racism, discrimination, stereotyping, and other aspects of the 20th-century Korean experience of Japan.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Lila Majumdar's memoir, written in Bengali. She recalls her childhood in Shillong, her years at Santiniketan and her time at All India Radio.
Paradise is a historical novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Zanzibar-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, first published in 1994 by Hamish Hamilton in London. The novel was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, often known simply as Peter Pan, is a work by British novelist J. M. Barrie, in the form of a 1904 play and a 1911 novel titled Peter and Wendy. Both versions tell the story of Peter Pan, a mischievous little boy who can fly, and has many adventures on the island of Neverland that is inhabited by mermaids, fairies, Native Americans and pirates. The Peter Pan stories also involve the characters Wendy Darling and her two younger brothers John and Michael, Peter's fairy Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys, and the pirate Captain Hook. The play and novel were inspired by Barrie's friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- Philosophy and PoetryMaría ZambranoEssays & non-fiction19398% ANSWERED
- Miguel de Cervantes Prize (GW2)
María Zambrano's essay on the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry: philosophy's pursuit of systematic truth set against poetry's closeness to lived experience, and a case for bringing the two back together. Drafted as she went into exile at the end of the Spanish Civil War, it was first published in Mexico in 1939.
Poodle Springs is the eighth Philip Marlowe novel. It was started in 1958 by Raymond Chandler, who left it unfinished at his death in 1959. The four chapters he had completed, which bore the working title The Poodle Springs Story, were subsequently published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962), a collection of excerpts from letters and unpublished writings. In 1988, on the occasion of the centenary of Chandler's birth, the crime writer Robert B. Parker was asked by the estate of Raymond Chandler to complete the novel.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Postmortem is a 1990 crime fiction novel by author Patricia Cornwell and her debut novel. The first novel of the Kay Scarpetta series, it received the 1991 Edgar Award for Best First Novel.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Practical Magic is a 1995 novel by Alice Hoffman. The book went on to spawn a media franchise of the same name, which consists of a 1998 film adaption of the same name by Warner Bros., a 2004 television pilot (Sudbury), two prequel (The Rules of Magic (2017) and Magic Lessons (2020)) and sequel (The Book of Magic (2021)) novels written by Hoffman, and a 2026 film sequel based on The Book of Magic.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The first novel of Ashapurna Debi's Bengali trilogy, followed by "Subarnalata" and "Bakul Katha". It follows Satyabati, married as a child, who questions the customs that bind the women around her. Translated into English by Indira Chowdhury as "The First Promise".
The third of David Gemmell's Rigante novels, set long after the tribe's first war with the Stone empire. With the Highlands under the rule of the Varlish, the young Kaelin Ring and the outlaw Jaim Grymauch take up the fight for their people.
Ready Player One is a 2011 science fiction novel, and the debut novel of American author Ernest Cline. The story, set in a dystopia in 2045, follows protagonist Wade Watts on his search for an Easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game, the discovery of which would lead him to inherit the game creator's fortune and the game itself. Cline sold the rights to publish the novel in June 2010, in a bidding war to the Crown Publishing Group (a division of Random House). The book was published on August 16, 2011. An audiobook narrated by Wil Wheaton was released the same day.Ch. 20 In 2012, the book received an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association division of the American Library Association and won the 2011 Prometheus Award.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Red Dragon is a psychological horror novel by American author Thomas Harris, first published in 1981. The story follows former FBI profiler Will Graham, who comes out of retirement to find and apprehend an enigmatic serial killer, at first nicknamed "the Tooth Fairy", before being referred to as The Dragon. The novel introduces the character Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer to whom Graham reluctantly turns for advice and with whom he has a dark past.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Red, White & Royal Blue is an LGBT romance novel by American author Casey McQuiston, originally published on May 14, 2019, by St. Martin's Griffin. It centers on the character of Alex Claremont-Diaz, the first son of the United States, and his romantic relationship with Prince Henry George Edward James Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor, a British prince. Upon release, the novel received positive reviews with praise given to the representation of a queer male relationship. The film adaptation was released on August 11, 2023.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Tragedy of Richard the Third, often shortened to Richard III, is a play by William Shakespeare, which depicts the Machiavellian rise to power and subsequent short reign of King Richard III of England.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, often shortened to Romeo and Juliet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare about the romance between two young Italians from feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed. The title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Sakina's Kiss is a novel by the Indian writer Vivek Shanbhag, written in Kannada and translated into English by Srinath Perur. It is narrated by Venkat, a middle-class man in Bengaluru whose ordered life is upended when two strangers come looking for his daughter and she later goes missing, a turn that pulls him back to a long-buried family secret. It is Shanbhag's second novel to appear in English, after Ghachar Ghochar, and was again translated by Perur. The English translation was published in India in 2023 and in the United Kingdom and the United States in 2025. It was shortlisted for the 2026 James Tait Black Prize for fiction.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Shadow Ticket is a novel by the American author Thomas Pynchon. It was announced by Penguin Press in April 2025 and published in October the same year. The novel, which is set in 1932, centers on a Milwaukee private investigator who is set adrift in Hungary while tracking the heiress to a Wisconsin cheese fortune.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Shahnameh, also romanized Shahnama (lit. 'Book of Kings'), is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Consisting of some 50,000 distichs or couplets (two-line verses), the Shahnameh is one of the world's longest epic poems, and the longest epic poem created by a single author. It tells of the mainly mythical but to some extent historical past of Iran from the creation of the world until the Muslim conquest in the seventh century. Iran, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and the greater region influenced by Persian culture such as Armenia, Dagestan, Georgia, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan celebrate this national epic. It took Ferdowsi 33 years to complete the Shahnameh in its entirety.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Joy Harjo's 1983 poetry collection, whose incantatory title poem and pieces such as "New Orleans" explore memory, displacement and the history of the Muscogee (Creek) people.
Ship of Destiny is a book by American writer Robin Hobb, the third and last in her Liveship Traders Trilogy.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Sign of the Unicorn is a fantasy novel by American writer Roger Zelazny, the third book in the Chronicles of Amber series. It was first published in serial format in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Silent Spring is an environmental science book by Rachel Carson. Published on September 27, 1962, the book documented the environmental harm caused by the indiscriminate use of DDT, a pesticide used by soldiers during World War II. Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation and public officials of accepting the industry's marketing claims unquestioningly.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Annie Ernaux's brief account of her affair with a married foreign diplomat, and of the months in which she did little but wait for him. First published in French as "Passion simple" in 1991.
Sing, Unburied, Sing is the third novel by the American author Jesmyn Ward and published by Scribner in 2017. It focuses on a family in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. The novel received overwhelmingly positive reviews, and was named by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017. The novel won the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Slow Horses is an espionage novel by British writer Mick Herron, published in 2010. It is the first novel in the Slough House series, following River Cartwright and a group of disgraced MI5 officers as they attempt to escape their desk jobs.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Soldiers' Pay is the first novel published by the American author William Faulkner. It was originally published by Boni & Liveright on February 25, 1926. It is unclear if Soldiers' Pay is the first novel written by Faulkner. It is however the first novel published by the author. Faulkner was working on two manuscripts while finishing Soldiers' Pay.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Some Bright Nowhere is a 2025 novel by American author Ann Packer. Published by Harper, the book was selected as Oprah Winfrey's 120th Book Club pick in November 2025.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Something Wicked This Way Comes is a 1962 dark fantasy novel by Ray Bradbury, and the second book in his Green Town Trilogy. It is about two 13-year-old best friends, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway, and their nightmarish experience with a traveling carnival that comes to their Midwestern home, Green Town, Illinois, on October 24. In dealing with the creepy figures of this carnival, the boys learn how to combat fear. The carnival's leader is the mysterious "Mr. Dark", who seemingly wields the power to grant the townspeople's secret desires. In reality, Dark is a malevolent being who, like the carnival, lives off the life force of those it enslaves. Mr. Dark's presence is countered by that of Will's father, Charles Halloway, the janitor of the town library, who harbors his own secret fear of growing older because he feels he is too old to be Will's father.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeRobert Louis StevensonClassic fiction1886100% ANSWERED
- League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (GW6)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an 1886 Gothic horror novella by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. It follows Gabriel John Utterson, a London-based legal practitioner who investigates a series of strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and a murderous criminal named Edward Hyde.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Sula is a 1973 novel by American author Toni Morrison, her first novel published after The Bluest Eye (1970). The novel tells the story of two girls, Sula and Nel, and their friendship and coming of age in a black community in Ohio.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Vinda Karandikar's first collection of Marathi poems, published in 1949. Its title means "River of Sweat", and the poems speak for working people and the new republic in a plain, muscular voice that broke with the romantic verse of the time.
Tender Buttons is a 1914 book by the American writer Gertrude Stein consisting of three sections titled "Objects", "Food", and "Rooms". The short book consists of multiple poems covering the everyday mundane. Stein's experimental use of language renders the poems unorthodox and their subjects unfamiliar.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman is the twelfth published novel by English author Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic in 1891, then in book form in three volumes in 1891, and as a single volume in 1892. Although now considered a major novel of the 19th century, Tess of the d'Urbervilles received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the morals of late Victorian England.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Chitra Deb's Bengali history of the women of the Tagore family of Jorasanko and their part in Bengal's cultural and social life. Published in English as "Women of the Tagore Household".
The Absolute at Large (Továrna na absolutno in the original Czech, literally translated as The Factory for the Absolute), is a science fiction novel written by Czech author Karel Čapek in 1922. The first sentence opens the story on New Year's Day 1943—a future date at the time of writing—and describes the fundamental transformations in society as the result of a new mystical source of virtually free energy.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Adventures of Tom SawyerMark TwainClassic fiction187692% ANSWERED
- League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (GW6)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (also simply known as Tom Sawyer) is a novel by Mark Twain (1835–1910) published on June 9, 1876, about a boy, Tom Sawyer, growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1830s–1840s in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy. In the novel, Sawyer has several adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn. Originally a commercial failure, the book ended up being the best-selling of Twain's works during his lifetime.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Arrival is a wordless graphic novel written by Shaun Tan and published by Hodder Children's Books in 2006.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Black Book (Kara Kitap in Turkish) is a novel by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. It was published in Turkish in 1990 and first translated by Güneli Gün and published in English in 1994. In 2006, it was translated into English again by Maureen Freely.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin OlympicsDaniel James BrownEssays & non-fiction201350% ANSWERED
- Subtitles (GW3)
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics is a non-fiction book written by Daniel James Brown and published on June 4, 2013.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 - The Brothers KaramazovFyodor DostoevskyClassic fiction1880100% ANSWERED
- First Names Only, Please (GW2)
The Brothers Karamazov (Russian: Братья Карамазовы, romanized: Brat'ya Karamazovy, IPA: [ˈbratʲjə kərɐˈmazəvɨ]), also translated as The Karamazov Brothers, is the sixteenth and final novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. Dostoevsky died less than four months after its publication. It has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 "The Call of Cthulhu" is a cosmic horror short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Canterbury Tales (Middle English: Tales of Caunterbury) is an anthology of twenty-four short stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. They are mostly in verse, and are presented as part of a fictional storytelling contest held by a group of pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury in order to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Cat in the HatDr. SeussChildren's literature195783% ANSWERED
- One-Line Descriptions of Childrens' Books (GW1)
The Cat in the Hat is a 1957 children's book written and illustrated by American author Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel. The story centers on a tall anthropomorphic cat who wears a red and white-striped top hat and a red bow tie. The Cat shows up at the house of Sally and her brother one rainy day when their mother is away. Despite the repeated objections of the children's fish, the Cat shows the children a few of his tricks in an attempt to entertain them. In the process, he and his companions, Thing One and Thing Two, take over the house.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Cat Inside is an autobiographical novella written by William S. Burroughs and illustrated by Brion Gysin. The book was first published by Grenfell Press in 1986 in an edition of only 133 copies; it was later reissued by Viking Press in 1992 in a mass market hardcover edition.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Cat Who Walks Through WallsRobert A. HeinleinSpeculative fiction198592% ANSWERED
- Literary Cats (GW2)
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, published in 1985. Like many of his later novels, it features Lazarus Long and Jubal Harshaw as supporting characters.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 American coming-of-age novel by American author J. D. Salinger. It was partially published in serial form in 1945–1946 before being novelized in 1951.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Club Dumas (original Spanish title: El Club Dumas) is a 1993 novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The book is set in a world of antiquarian booksellers, echoing his previous 1990 work The Flanders Panel.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Code of the Woosters is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published on 7 October 1938, in the United Kingdom by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States by Doubleday, Doran, New York. It was previously serialised in The Saturday Evening Post (US) from 16 July to 3 September 1938, illustrated by Wallace Morgan, and in the London Daily Mail from 14 September to 6 October 1938.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker that won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Condition of the Working Class in EnglandFriedrich EngelsEssays & non-fiction1845100% ANSWERED
- Non-Fiction (GW3)
The Condition of the Working Class in England (German: Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England) is an 1845 book by the German philosopher Friedrich Engels, a study of the industrial working class in Victorian England. It was Engels' first book and had originally been written in German, but an English translation was published in 1887. It was written during Engels' 1842–1844 stay in Salford and Manchester, the city at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, and compiled from Engels' own observations and detailed contemporary reports.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Corrections is a 2001 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to "one last Christmas" together near the turn of the millennium. The novel was awarded the National Book Award in 2001 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2002.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Crying of Lot 49Thomas PynchonLiterary fiction196692% ANSWERED
- Reclusive Writers (GW5)
- Thomas Pynchon (GW6)
The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel by the American author Thomas Pynchon. It was published by J. B. Lippincott & Co. on April 27, 1966. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, the plot follows Oedipa Maas, a young Californian woman who begins to embrace a conspiracy theory as she possibly unearths a centuries-old feud between two mail distribution companies. One of these companies, Thurn and Taxis, actually existed; operating from 1806 to 1867, Thurn and Taxis was the first private firm to distribute postal mail. Like most of Pynchon's writing, The Crying of Lot 49 is often described as postmodernist literature. Time magazine included the book in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Disappearers is a 2026 novel by Jamaican writer Marlon James, published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton. It is his sixth novel overall and the first since 2015's A Brief History of Seven Killings to be set in Jamaica. It focuses on a group of gay men in the 1980s and was on the longlist for the 2026 Booker Prize.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Dragon Reborn is a fantasy novel by American writer Robert Jordan, the third in his series The Wheel of Time. It was published by Tor Books and released on September 15, 1991. The unabridged audio book is read by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. The Dragon Reborn consists of a prologue and 56 chapters.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0A novel by the Czech writer Josef Škvorecký, who lived in Toronto from 1968 and taught at York University. It merges history, the present and a lot of personal reminiscence.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, then included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story, a work of Gothic fiction, includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Farther Adventures of Robinson CrusoeDaniel DefoeClassic fiction17190% ANSWERED
- Literary Sequels (GW3)
The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (now more commonly rendered as The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719. Just as in its significantly more popular predecessor, Robinson Crusoe (1719), the first edition credits the work's fictional protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author. It was published under the considerably longer original title: The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of His Life, And of the Strange Surprising Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe. Although intended to be the last Crusoe tale, the novel is followed by a non-fiction book involving Crusoe by Defoe entitled Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World (1720).
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 - The Feast of the GoatMario Vargas LlosaLiterary fiction92% ANSWERED
- Nobel Prize Winning Authors (GW6)
The Feast of the Goat (Spanish: La Fiesta del Chivo) is a 2000 novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. The book is set in the Dominican Republic and portrays the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and its aftermath, from two distinct standpoints a generation apart: during and immediately after the assassination itself, in May 1961; and thirty-five years later, in 1996. Throughout, there is also extensive reflection on the heyday of the dictatorship, in the 1950s, and its significance for the island and its inhabitants.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Fencing Master is a 1988 historical novel by Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte set in Madrid, Spain in 1868. Amid the political turmoil of the Glorious Revolution where conspiracy and intrigue are commonplace, fencing master Don Jaime Astarloa tries to live as he always has. Subsisting on meager funds gained through teaching fencing to the sons of the nobility, the anachronistic Don Jaime lives by one universal code: "to be honest, or at least honorable--anything, indeed, that has its roots in the word honor."
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0A 2023 novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. In 1960, a storm strands a handful of guests at a hotel on a small Greek island; when one of them is found dead in a room locked from the inside, an ageing actor once famous for playing Sherlock Holmes on screen is asked to investigate.
The Firm is a 1991 legal thriller by American writer John Grisham. It was his second book and the first that gained wide popularity. In 1993, after selling 1.5 million copies, it was adapted into a film of the same name starring Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman and Jeanne Tripplehorn. Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, came into prominence afterwards due to this novel's success.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The First Man (French: Le Premier homme) is Albert Camus' unfinished final novel.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Flanders Panel (original Spanish title La tabla de Flandes) is a novel written by Spanish author Arturo Pérez-Reverte in 1990, telling of a mystery hidden in an art masterpiece spanning from the 15th century to the present day.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Garden of Eden is the second posthumously released novel of Ernest Hemingway, published in 1986. Hemingway started the novel in 1946 and worked on the manuscript for the next 15 years, during which time he also wrote The Old Man and the Sea, The Dangerous Summer, A Moveable Feast, and Islands in the Stream.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Godfather is a crime novel by Italian American author Mario Puzo. Originally published on 10 March 1969 by G. P. Putnam's Sons, the novel details the story of a fictional Mafia family in New York City and Long Island, headed by Vito Corleone, the Godfather. The novel covers the years 1945 to 1955 and includes the backstory of Vito Corleone from early childhood to adulthood.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Good Soldier Švejk (pronounced [ˈʃvɛjk]) is an unfinished satirical novel by Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, published in 1921–1923, about a good-humored, simple-minded, middle-aged man who appears to be enthusiastic to serve Austria-Hungary in World War I.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Grandmother (Czech: Babička) is a novella written by Czech writer Božena Němcová in 1853–1854 and first published in 1855. It is her most popular work and is regarded as a classic piece of Czech literature. This most frequently read book of the Czech nation was published more than 300 times in Czech alone and translated into 21 other languages.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Grapes of WrathJohn SteinbeckClassic fiction193996% ANSWERED
- Abridged Classics (GW1)
- Songs Inspired by Books (GW6)
The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Graveyard Book is a young adult novel written by the English author Neil Gaiman, simultaneously published in the United Kingdom and in the United States in 2008. The Graveyard Book traces the story of the boy Nobody "Bod" Owens, who is adopted and reared by the supernatural occupants of a graveyard after his family is brutally murdered.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Great GatsbyF. Scott FitzgeraldClassic fiction1925100% ANSWERED
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The Great Gatsby is a 1925 tragedy novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire obsessed with reuniting with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 - The Handmaid's TaleMargaret AtwoodSpeculative fiction1985100% ANSWERED
- Novels to Graphic Novels (GW4)
The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. The protagonist, a woman named Offred, occupies the role of a "Handmaid": women who are forcibly assigned to bear children for high status men.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Haunting of Hill House is a 1959 gothic horror novel by American author Shirley Jackson. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and has been made into two feature films (The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, and its remake), a play, and is the basis of a Netflix series.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Heart Has Its ReasonsKrishna SobtiLiterary fiction0% ANSWERED
- Crossword Book Prize - Translation (GW4)
Krishna Sobti's Hindi novel of 1920s Delhi: the prosperous lawyer Kripanarayan is torn between his wife, Kutumb, and his mistress, Mehak Bano, as the lives of all three slowly unravel.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a novel by American writer James McBride. It was released in 2023 to critical success. The novel tells the story of Black and Jewish residents of the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s and '30s.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Hive (Spanish: La colmena) (also translated as The Beehive) is a novel written by the Spanish author Camilo José Cela, first published in 1950.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Hound of the BaskervillesArthur Conan DoyleCrime & thriller1902100% ANSWERED
- Who Created Them? (GW4)
The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third of the four crime novels by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the detective Sherlock Holmes. Originally serialised in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902, it is set largely on Dartmoor, Devon, in England's West Country and follows Holmes and Watson investigating the legend of a fearsome, diabolical hound of supernatural origin. This was the first appearance of Holmes since his apparent death in The Final Problem and the success of The Hound of the Baskervilles led to the character's eventual revival.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 - The Invention of MorelAdolfo Bioy CasaresSpeculative fiction194033% ANSWERED
- Miguel de Cervantes Prize (GW2)
La invención de Morel (Latin American Spanish: [lajmbenˈsjon de moˈɾel]; 1940) — translated as The Invention of Morel or Morel's Invention — is a novel by Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. It was Bioy Casares' breakthrough effort, for which he won the 1941 First Municipal Prize for Literature of the City of Buenos Aires. He considered it the true beginning of his literary career, despite being his seventh book. The first edition cover artist was Norah Borges, sister of Bioy Casares' lifelong friend Jorge Luis Borges.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 - The Invisible ManH. G. WellsSpeculative fiction1897100% ANSWERED
- League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (GW6)
The Invisible Man is an 1897 science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. Originally serialised in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man to whom the title refers is Griffin, an optical scientist who invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light. He carries out this procedure on himself and renders himself invisible, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. A practitioner of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an iconic character in horror fiction.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Ivory Tower is an unfinished novel by Henry James, posthumously published in 1917. The novel is a brooding story of Gilded Age America. It centers on the riches earned by a pair of dying millionaires and ex-partners, Abel Gaw and Frank Betterman, and their possibly corrupting effect on the people around them.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Jungle Book is an 1894 collection of stories by the English author Rudyard Kipling. Most of the characters are animals such as Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear, though a principal character is the boy or "man-cub" Mowgli, who is raised in the jungle by wolves. Most stories are set in a dry forest in India; one place mentioned repeatedly is "Seeonee" (Seoni), in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Kingdom of This WorldAlejo CarpentierLiterary fiction194917% ANSWERED
- Miguel de Cervantes Prize (GW2)
The Kingdom of This World (Spanish: El reino de este mundo) is a novel by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier, published in 1949 in his native Spanish and first translated into English in 1957. A work of historical fiction, it tells the story of Haiti before, during, and after the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint Louverture, as seen by its central character, Ti Noel, who serves as the novel's connecting thread. Carpentier's work has been influenced by his multi-cultural experience and his passion for the arts, as well as by authors such as Miguel de Cervantes. The novel stems from the author's desire to retrace the roots and history of the New World, and is embedded with what Carpentier calls "lo real maravilloso" or "the marvelous real"—a concept he introduced to the world of literature (not to be confused with magical realism).
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 - The Lion, the Witch and the WardrobeC. S. LewisChildren's literature1950100% ANSWERED
- Appears in (GW4)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a portal fantasy novel written by British author C. S. Lewis, published by Geoffrey Bles in 1950. It is the first published and best known of seven novels in The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956). Among all the author's books, it is also the most widely held in libraries. It was the first of The Chronicles of Narnia to be written and published, but is marked as volume two in recent editions that are sequenced according to the stories' internal chronology. Like the other Chronicles, it was illustrated by Pauline Baynes, and her work has been retained in many later editions.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 "The Lottery" is a short story by Shirley Jackson that was first published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948. The story describes a fictional small American community that observes an annual tradition known as "the lottery", which is intended to ensure a good harvest and purge the town of bad omens. The lottery, its preparations, and its execution are all described in detail, though it is not revealed until the end what actually happens to the person selected by the random lottery: the selected member of the community is stoned to death by the other townspeople.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Love Hypothesis is a romance novel by Ali Hazelwood, published September 14, 2021 by Berkley Books. Originally published online in 2018 as Head Over Feet, a Star Wars fan fiction work about the "Reylo" ship between Rey and Kylo Ren, the novel follows a Ph.D. candidate and a professor at Stanford University who pretend to be in a relationship.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Maltese Falcon is a 1930 detective novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett, originally serialized in the magazine Black Mask beginning with the September 1929 issue. The story is told entirely in external third-person narrative; there is no description whatsoever of any character's thoughts or feelings, only what they say and do, and how they look. The novel has been adapted several times for the cinema. It is considered part of the hardboiled genre, which Hammett played a major part in popularizing.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Marvelous Land of Oz: Being an Account of the Further Adventures of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, commonly shortened to The Land of Oz, published in July 1904, is the second book in L. Frank Baum's Oz series, and the sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). This and the following 34 books in the series were illustrated by John R. Neill. It was followed by Ozma of Oz (1907).
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Master and MargaritaMikhail BulgakovLiterary fiction196767% ANSWERED
- Songs Inspired by Books (GW6)
The Master and Margarita (Russian: Мастер и Маргарита, romanized: Master i Margarita) is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, written in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1940. A censored version, with several chapters cut by editors, was published posthumously in Moscow magazine in 1966–1967 by his widow Elena Bulgakova. The manuscript was first published as a book in 1967, in Paris, France. A samizdat version circulated that included parts cut out by official censors, and these were incorporated in a 1969 version published in Frankfurt. The novel has since been published in several languages and editions. It satirizes Soviet bureaucracy and atheism.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 - The Merchant of VeniceWilliam ShakespeareDrama63% ANSWERED
- "O" Shakespeare (GW1)
- Shakespeare play in few words (GW6)
The Merchant of Venice is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. A merchant in Venice named Antonio defaults on a large loan taken out on behalf of his dear friend, Bassanio, and provided by a Jewish moneylender, Shylock, with seemingly inevitable fatal consequences.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 "The Monkey's Paw" is a horror short story by English author W. W. Jacobs. It first appeared in Harper's Monthly in September 1902, and was reprinted in his third collection of short stories, The Lady of the Barge, later that year. In the story, three wishes are granted to the owner of an enchanted monkey's paw, but the wishes come with an enormous price for interfering with fate.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Moon Is a Harsh MistressRobert A. HeinleinSpeculative fiction196683% ANSWERED
- A.I. in Books (GW4)
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a 1966 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein about a 2075 revolt by a lunar penal colony against Earth's rule. Three million "Loonies" (lunar inhabitants) live in underground cities where a virtually anarcho-capitalist society has developed. When the Federated Nations threaten the colony's resources, computer technician Manuel "Mannie" O'Kelly-Davis, political agitator Wyoming Knott, and rational-anarchist Professor Bernardo de la Paz join forces with "Mike," a self-aware supercomputer, to plan an independence movement timed to culminate on July 4, 2076.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Moonstone: A Romance by Wilkie Collins is an 1868 British epistolary novel. It is an early example of the modern detective novel, and established many of the ground rules of the modern genre. Its publication was started on 4 January 1868 and was completed on 8 August 1868. The story was serialised in Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round. Collins adapted The Moonstone for the stage in 1877.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Moviegoer is the debut novel by Walker Percy, first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in 1961. It won the U.S. National Book Award. Time included the novel in its "Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Moviegoer sixtieth on its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. It is published in the UK by Methuen.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Old Man and the Sea is a 1952 novella by the American author Ernest Hemingway. Written between December 1950 and February 1951, it was the last major fictional work Hemingway published during his lifetime. It tells the story of Santiago, an aging fisherman, and his long struggle to catch a giant marlin.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The first of the three volumes of Jon Fosse's "Septology", translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls. Asle, an ageing painter and widower on the west coast of Norway, looks back on his life, while in nearby Bergen lives another Asle, also a painter, who may be another version of himself. The whole work unfolds as a single flowing sentence.
Khalid Jawed's Urdu novel follows one man's life through the kitchen of his family home, where food, hunger and appetite open onto memory, family and the violence of the world outside. Translated by Baran Farooqi, it won the 2022 JCB Prize for Literature.
The Pickup is a 2001 novel by South African writer Nadine Gordimer. It tells the story of a couple: Julie Summers, a white woman from a financially secure family, and Abdu, an illegal Arab immigrant in South Africa. After Abdu's visa is refused, the couple returns to his unnamed homeland, where she is the alien. Her experiences and growth as an alien in another culture form the heart of the work. The Pickup considers the issues of displacement, alienation, and immigration, class and economic power, religious faith, and the ability of people to see and love across these divides.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Picture of Dorian GrayOscar WildeClassic fiction1890100% ANSWERED
- League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (GW6)
The Picture of Dorian Gray is an 1890 philosophical fiction and Gothic horror novel by Irish author Oscar Wilde. A shorter novella-length version was published in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, while the novel-length version was published in April 1891. As the only novel written by Wilde, it is widely regarded as a classic of both Gothic and English literature, having been adapted many times for films, stage, plays, and other forms of art performances.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come is a 1678 Christian allegory written by the English nonconformist preacher John Bunyan. It is commonly regarded as one of the most significant works of Protestant devotional literature and of wider early modern English literature. It has been translated into more than 200 languages and has never been out of print. It appeared in Dutch in 1681, in German in 1703 and in Swedish in 1727. The first North American edition was issued in 1681. It has also been cited as the first novel written in English. According to literary editor Robert McCrum, "there's no book in English, apart from the Bible, to equal Bunyan's masterpiece for the range of its readership, or its influence on writers as diverse as William Hogarth, C. S. Lewis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, George Bernard Shaw, William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and Enid Blyton." The lyrics of the hymn "To be a Pilgrim" are based on the novel.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The Polar ExpressChris Van AllsburgChildren's literature1985100% ANSWERED
- One-Line Descriptions of Childrens' Books (GW1)
The Polar Express is a 1985 fantasy children's picture book written and illustrated by American author Chris Van Allsburg. Critics and various educators have described the book as a landmark in children's Christmas literature, and it is widely praised for its atmospheric illustrations by Van Allsburg himself and how it is a book about having faith. It was praised for its detailed illustrations and calm, relaxing storyline. For the work, Van Allsburg won the annual Caldecott Medal for illustration of an American children's picture book in 1986, his second after Jumanji.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Red Badge of Courage is an 1895 war novel by American author Stephen Crane. The novel was published on 3 October 1895. Taking place during the American Civil War, the story is about a young private of the Union Army, Henry Fleming, who flees from the field of battle. Overcome with shame, he longs for a wound, a "red badge of courage", to counteract his cowardice. When his regiment once again faces the enemy, Henry acts as flag-bearer, carrying the regimental colors.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0A woman finds that her bathroom has been remodelled into a prison cell, with herself as the inmate. Kenan Orhan's surreal debut is a novel of exile, grief, memory and migration.
The Rover is the last complete novel by Joseph Conrad, written between 1921 and 1922. It was first published in 1923, and adapted into the 1967 film of the same name.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is a historical novel by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. Set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married and then struggles to lead a new life of repentance and dignity. As punishment, she must wear a scarlet letter 'A' (for "adultery"). Containing a number of religious and historic allusions, the book explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Secret Garden is a children's novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett first published in book form in 1911, after serialisation in The American Magazine (November 1910 – August 1911). Set in England, it is seen as a classic of English children's literature. The American edition was published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company with illustrations by M. L. Kirk, and the British edition by Heinemann with illustrations by Charles Robinson. Several stage and film adaptations have been made of The Secret Garden.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Secret History is the first novel by the American author Donna Tartt, published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 1992. A campus novel, it tells the story of a closely knit group of six Classics students at Hampden College, a small, elite liberal arts college in Vermont.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Selfish Gene is a 1976 popular science book by Richard Dawkins that espouses the gene-centred view of evolution. It builds upon the thesis of George Christopher Williams's Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966) and W. D. Hamilton's work on kin selection. From the gene-centred view, it follows that the more genes two individuals share, the more sense it makes for them to co-operate.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Shining is a 1977 horror novel by American author Stephen King. It is King's third published novel and first hardcover bestseller; its success firmly established King as a preeminent author in the horror genre. The setting and characters are influenced by King's personal experiences, including his visit to The Stanley Hotel in 1974 and his struggle with alcoholism. The novel was adapted into a 1980 film and a 1997 miniseries. The book was followed by a sequel, Doctor Sleep, published in 2013, which in turn was adapted into a 2019 film.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Silence of the Lambs is a 1988 psychological horror crime thriller novel by Thomas Harris. Published August 29, it is the sequel to Harris's 1981 novel Red Dragon, and both novels feature the cannibalistic serial killer and brilliant psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter. This time, however, he is pitted against FBI trainee Clarice Starling as she works to solve the case of the "Buffalo Bill" serial killer. St. Martin’s Press also issued uncorrected proof copies in 1988, which are considered scarce by collectors. It is the most well-known installment of Harris's Hannibal Lecter series, selling over 10 million copies.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Song of Roland (French: La Chanson de Roland) is an 11th-century chanson de geste based on the deeds of the Frankish military leader Roland at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in AD 778, during the reign of Charlemagne. It is the oldest surviving major work of French literature. It exists in various manuscript versions, which testify to its enormous and enduring popularity in Medieval and Renaissance literature from the 12th to the 16th centuries.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Sound and the Fury is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, published in 1929. Faulkner's fourth novel, it is the second to be set in Yoknapatawpha County and the first featuring the Compson family, both of which would reappear in his later fiction. The novel's highly experimental style, including its use of stream of consciousness and multiple different unreliable narrators, are hallmarks of modernist literature. Its bleak and candid portrait of Southern life in the early 20th century is paradigmatic of the Southern Gothic genre.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1963 Cold War spy novel by the British author John le Carré. It depicts Alec Leamas, a British intelligence officer, being sent to East Germany as a faux defector to sow disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer. As with le Carré's previous novels Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, the novel features the fictitious British intelligence organisation, "The Circus", and its agents George Smiley and Peter Guillam.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, probably written in 1610–1611, and thought to be one of the last plays he wrote alone. After the first scene, which takes place on a ship at sea during a storm, the rest of the play is set on a remote island, where Prospero, a magician, lives with his daughter Miranda and his two servants: Caliban, a savage monster figure, and Ariel, an airy spirit. The play contains music and songs that evoke the spirit of enchantment on the island. It explores many themes, including magic, betrayal, revenge, forgiveness, and family. In Act IV, a wedding masque serves as a play-within-a-play and contributes spectacle, allegory, and elevated language.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Things We Never Say is a 2026 novel by American author Elizabeth Strout. It marks a departure from the interconnected settings and recurring characters of her previous works, instead introducing a new protagonist in a standalone narrative. The novel was published on May 5, 2026, by Random House.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Vanishing Half is a historical fiction novel by American author Brit Bennett. It is her second novel and was published by Riverhead Books in 2020. The novel debuted at number one on The New York Times fiction best-seller list. HBO acquired the rights to develop a limited series with Bennett as executive producer. The Vanishing Half garnered acclaim from book critics, and Emily Temple of Literary Hub noted that in 2020 it was the book most frequently listed among the year's best, making 25 lists.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The White Book (Korean: 흰, romanized: Huin, lit. 'White') is a 2016 novel by the Korean novelist Han Kang which was short-listed for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. The English translation by Deborah Smith was first published by Portobello Books in 2017.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- The World as Will and RepresentationArthur SchopenhauerEssays & non-fiction181883% ANSWERED
- Non-Fiction (GW3)
The World as Will and Representation (WWR; German: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), sometimes translated as The World as Will and Idea, is the central work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The first edition was published in late 1818, with the date 1819 on the title page. A second, two-volume edition appeared in 1844: volume one was an edited version of the 1818 edition, while volume two consisted of commentary on the ideas expounded in volume one. A third expanded edition was published in 1859, the year before Schopenhauer's death. In 1948, an abridged version was edited by Thomas Mann.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Theft is the eleventh novel written by Abdulrazak Gurnah, who was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel examines and chronicles the lives of three Tanzanians and their relationships with each other at the beginning of the 21st century. This book was published by Riverhead Books in March 2025.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- Thinking, Fast and SlowDaniel KahnemanPopular science2011100% ANSWERED
- Non-Fiction Science Books (GW1)
Thinking, Fast and Slow is a 2011 popular science book by the Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Its main thesis is a differentiation between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 - Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found ThereLewis CarrollChildren's literature1871100% ANSWERED
- Literary Sequels (GW3)
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is a novel published in December 1871 by Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. It is the sequel to his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which many of the characters were anthropomorphic playing cards. In this second novel the theme is chess. As in the earlier book, the central figure, Alice, enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a large looking-glass (a mirror) into a world that she can see beyond it. There she finds that, just as in a reflection, things are reversed, including logic (for example, running helps one remain stationary, walking away from something brings one towards it, chessmen are alive and nursery-rhyme characters are real).
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a 1974 spy novel by the author and former secret intelligence officer John le Carré. It follows the endeavours of the taciturn, ageing spymaster George Smiley to uncover a Soviet mole in the British Secret Intelligence Service. The novel has received critical acclaim for its complex social commentary—and, at the time, relevance, following the defection of Kim Philby. It was followed by The Honourable Schoolboy in 1977 and Smiley's People in 1979. The three novels together make up the "Karla Trilogy", named after Smiley's long-time nemesis Karla, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence and the trilogy's overarching antagonist.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, often shortened to Titus Andronicus, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1588 and 1593. It is thought to be Shakespeare's first tragedy and is often seen as his attempt to emulate the violent and bloody revenge plays of his contemporaries, which were extremely popular with audiences throughout the 16th century.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- To Kill a MockingbirdHarper LeeClassic fiction1960100% ANSWERED
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To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1960 Southern Gothic novel by American author Harper Lee. It became instantly successful after its release; in the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize a year after its release, and it has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centres on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Treasure Island (originally titled The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys) is an adventure and historical novel by Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. It was published as a book in 1883, but is set in the 18th century, and tells a story of "buccaneers and buried gold". It is considered a coming-of-age story, and is noted for its atmosphere, characters, and action.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0True Grit is a 1968 novel by Charles Portis that was first published as a 1968 serial within The Saturday Evening Post. The novel is told from the perspective of an elderly spinster named Mattie Ross, who recounts the time a half century earlier when she was 14 and sought retribution for the murder of her father by a scoundrel, Tom Chaney. It is considered by some critics to be "one of the great American novels". True Grit is included in the Library of America of Portis' Collected Works.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Turtles All the Way Down is a young adult drama novel written by American author John Green published on October 10, 2017, by Dutton Books. It is Green's fifth solo novel and his seventh overall. The novel debuted at number 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list in the category of "Young Adult Hardcover Books" and stayed at the top for 15 weeks and remained on the list for 62 weeks.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- Twelfth NightWilliam ShakespeareDrama53% ANSWERED
- "O" Shakespeare (GW1)
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- Shakespeare play in few words (GW6)
Twelfth Night, or What You Will is a romantic comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around 1601–1602 as a Twelfth Night entertainment for the close of the Christmas season. The play centres on the twins Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck. Viola (disguised as a page named Cesario) falls in love with the Duke Orsino, who in turn is in love with Countess Olivia. Upon meeting Viola, Countess Olivia falls in love with her, thinking she is a man.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Twenty Years After (French: Vingt ans après) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, first serialized from January to August 1845. A book of The d'Artagnan Romances, it is a sequel to The Three Musketeers (1844) and precedes the 1847–1850 novel The Vicomte de Bragelonne (which includes the sub-plot Man in the Iron Mask).
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- UlyssesJames JoyceClassic fiction192296% ANSWERED
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Ulysses is a modernist novel by the Irish writer James Joyce. Partially serialised in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and a classic of the genre, having been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement".
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 - Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and RedemptionLaura HillenbrandEssays & non-fiction201025% ANSWERED
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Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is a 2010 non-fiction book by Laura Hillenbrand. Unbroken is a biography of World War II veteran Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic track star who survived a plane crash in the Pacific Theater, spent 47 days drifting on a raft, and then survived more than two and a half years as a prisoner of war (POW) in three Japanese POW camps.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Vampire Academy is the first out of six books in the worldwide bestselling series Vampire Academy by American author Richelle Mead.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Vanity Fair is a satirical novel by the English author William Makepeace Thackeray, which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial (the last containing parts 19 and 20) from 1847 to 1848, carrying the subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, which reflects both its satirisation of early 19th-century British society and the many illustrations drawn by Thackeray to accompany the text. It was published as a single volume in 1848 with the subtitle A Novel without a Hero. It is sometimes considered the "principal founder" of the Victorian domestic novel.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0A funny verse by Dorothy Parker, who owned close to 20 dogs over her life, dedicated to all of them.
Vineland is a 1990 postmodern novel by Thomas Pynchon set in California in 1984, the year of President Ronald Reagan's reelection. Through flashbacks, its characters, who lived through the 1960s, account for the free spirit of rebellion of that decade, and describe the traits of the "fascistic Nixonian repression" and the war on drugs that clashed with it. The book portrays transformations in U.S. society from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Waiting for Godot is a play by Irish playwright and author Samuel Beckett. It was written (1948–1949), first published (1952), and first performed (1953) in French as En attendant Godot. The play is Beckett's own English-language adaptation of the original. Subtitled "tragicomedy in two acts", it is his best-known literary work and is regarded by critics as "one of the most enigmatic plays of modern literature". In a public poll conducted by London's Royal National Theatre in the year 1998, Waiting for Godot was voted as "the most significant English-language play of the 20th century".
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Walden (; first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is an 1854 book by American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon the author's simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and—to some degree—a manual for self-reliance.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Watership Down is an adventure novel by English author Richard Adams. Set in Hampshire in southern England, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural wild environment, with burrows, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home (the hill of Watership Down), encountering perils and temptations along the way.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- Where the Wild Things AreMaurice SendakChildren's literature196375% ANSWERED
- One-Line Descriptions of Childrens' Books (GW1)
Where the Wild Things Are is a 1963 children's picture book written and illustrated by American author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, originally published in hardcover by Harper & Row. The story follows Max, a mischievous boy in a wolf suit who causes havoc at home and is sent to his room without supper, where his imagination transforms the room into a jungle and carries him across the sea to an island inhabited by large, monstrous creatures called Wild Things.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 White Noise is the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, published by Viking Press in 1985. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0White Teeth is the 2000 debut novel by British author Zadie Smith. It focuses on the later lives of two wartime friends—the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones—and their families in London. The novel centres on Britain's relationship with immigrants from the British Commonwealth.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- Whole Numbers and Half TruthsRukmini SEssays & non-fiction20218% ANSWERED
- Indian Book Awards 2022 (GW2)
The data journalist Rukmini S uses surveys and official statistics to test common assumptions about how Indians live, work, marry, vote and pray, looking past media narratives to what the numbers actually show.
Winnie-the-Pooh is a 1926 children's book by English author A. A. Milne and English illustrator E. H. Shepard. The book is set in the fictional Hundred Acre Wood, with a collection of short stories following the adventures of an anthropomorphic teddy bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, and his friends Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, Kanga, and Roo. It is the first of two story collections by Milne about Winnie-the-Pooh, the second being The House at Pooh Corner (1928). Milne and Shepard collaborated previously for English humour magazine Punch, and in 1924 created When We Were Very Young, a poetry collection. Among the characters in the poetry book was a teddy bear Shepard modelled after his son's toy. Following this, Shepard encouraged Milne to write about his son Christopher Robin Milne's toys, and so they became the inspiration for the characters in Winnie-the-Pooh.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0A collection of short, true stories from Sudha Murty's travels and her work with the Infosys Foundation, full of people she met across India and the lessons they taught her.
As a child, a girl hides beneath the floor while armed men kill her family, and one of them chooses to spare her. Decades later she finds him. Alessandro Baricco's spare novel of war, vengeance and forgiveness.
Wives and Daughters, An Every-Day Story is a novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell, first published in the Cornhill Magazine as a serial from August 1864 to January 1866. It was partly written whilst Gaskell was staying with the salon hostess Mary Elizabeth Mohl at her home on the Rue du Bac in Paris.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0Woyzeck (German pronunciation: [ˈvɔʏtsɛk]) is a stage play written by Georg Büchner. Büchner wrote the play between July and October 1836, yet left it incomplete at his death in February 1837. The play first appeared in 1877 in a heavily edited version by Karl Emil Franzos, and was first performed at the Residence Theatre in Munich on 8 November 1913.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0- YayatiVishnu Sakharam KhandekarLiterary fiction195917% ANSWERED
- Jnanpith Awards - Marathi Writers (GW3)
Yayati is a 1959 Marathi-language mythological novel by Indian writer V. S. Khandekar. One of Khandekar's best-known works, it retells the story of the mythological Hindu king, Yayati, from the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. The novel has multiple narrators, and poses several questions on the nature of morality. Scholars have analysed its hero, Yayati, as a representation of modern man. Accepted as classic of Marathi literature, Yayati has won several awards, including the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960 and the Jnanapith Award in 1974.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
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