Middlemarch
Interwoven lives in a provincial English town reveal the pressures that marriage, ambition and social change place on private hopes.
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The Guardian: The 100 Best Novels of All Time (2026)
A reading list spanning centuries, languages and lives. Explore all 100 novels in The Guardian’s 2026 ranking, with notes on each work and links to fine editions from our shelves.
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Beloved
A formerly enslaved woman's household is haunted by a presence that brings an unbearable history into the present.
Available nowEditions of Beloved
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Beloved - Toni Morrison - Folio Society - 2015View edition
Ulysses
A single day in Dublin becomes an expansive experiment in language, following ordinary encounters through shifting forms of consciousness.
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Ulysses - James Joyce - Folio Society - 2017 1st EditionView edition
To the Lighthouse
A family's seaside holidays frame a meditation on perception, artistic ambition and the changes wrought by passing time.
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In Search of Lost Time
Memory opens onto an immense reconstruction of childhood, desire, society and the making of an artistic vocation.
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In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust - Folio Society - 2000 1st EditionView sold edition
Anna Karenina
An aristocratic woman's love affair unfolds alongside a landowner's search for meaning, exposing the contradictions of Russian society.
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Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - Folio Society - 2008View edition
War and Peace
Russian families experience love, upheaval and loss as Napoleon's campaigns transform their country and their lives.
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Jane Eyre
An orphan's determination to live on her own terms is tested by work, love and the secrets of Thornfield Hall.
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Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Folio Society - 2021View sold edition
Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet's encounters with the reserved Mr Darcy unsettle her judgements about character, money and marriage.
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Three Classic Novels - Jane Austen - Folio Society - 1997Included in a larger publicationView sold edition
Madame Bovary
Dissatisfied with provincial marriage, Emma Bovary pursues romantic ideals whose promises collide with the realities of money and desire.
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The Great Gatsby
A mysterious millionaire's pursuit of a lost love exposes the hopes and deceptions beneath Jazz Age prosperity.
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Great Gatsby, The - F Scott Fitzgerald - Folio Society - 2022View sold edition
Bleak House
A seemingly endless inheritance lawsuit draws together lives across London in a portrait of institutional failure and private generosity.
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Bleak House - Charles Dickens - Folio Society - 2005View edition
Emma
A confident young matchmaker discovers how badly she can misread other people's feelings, and her own.
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Mrs Dalloway
Preparations for a London party open onto memories, social expectations and the lasting effects of the First World War.
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Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf - Folio Society - 2011 1st EditionView edition
Moby-Dick
Ishmael joins a whaling voyage consumed by Captain Ahab's pursuit of the white whale that injured him.
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Nineteen Eighty-Four
Winston Smith attempts a private rebellion in a society where the state controls information, language and memory.
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Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) - George Orwell - Folio Society - 2014 1st EditionView sold edition
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The fortunes of the Buendía family and the town of Macondo unfold through generations of desire, upheaval and repetition.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Folio Society - 2006 1st EditionView edition
Persuasion
Anne Elliot encounters the naval officer she once rejected, reopening questions of judgement, regret and the possibility of renewed love.
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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
A narrator repeatedly postpones his own life story through digressions about his family, language and the business of storytelling.
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Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne - Folio Society - 2020 Limited EditionView edition
Wuthering Heights
Heathcliff's attachment to Catherine Earnshaw drives a story of thwarted love and revenge across two Yorkshire families.
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Complete Novels, The - Charlotte Bronte - Folio Society - 2004 Jane Eyre WutheringIncluded in a larger publicationView sold edition
The Portrait of a Lady
An independent young American's inheritance promises freedom but draws her into relationships shaped by manipulation and competing expectations.
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Things Fall Apart
An Igbo community's established life comes under pressure as colonial power and Christian missionaries arrive in Nigeria.
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Midnight's Children
A man born at the moment of Indian independence recounts a life entangled with the nation's turbulent history.
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Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - Folio Society - 2009View edition
The Remains of the Day
An English butler looks back on his service, confronting the personal costs of loyalty, restraint and misplaced trust.
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Lolita
An unreliable narrator attempts to justify his abuse of a child through a disturbing performance of literary sophistication.
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Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - Folio Society - 2015View edition
Don Quixote
An idealistic reader of chivalric romances sets out with Sancho Panza to remake ordinary life as knightly adventure.
Available nowEditions of Don Quixote
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Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes - Folio Society - 1995 1st EditionView edition
The Trial
A bank official faces an unexplained prosecution, struggling to understand an authority whose rules remain beyond his reach.
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The Brothers Karamazov
Conflict within a Russian family becomes an investigation of faith, responsibility, desire and the limits of human freedom.
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Brothers Karamazov, The - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Folio Society - 2008 1st EditionView edition
Pale Fire
A poem and its increasingly eccentric commentary create a puzzle about interpretation, obsession and the ownership of another person's life.
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Frankenstein
A scientist's creation of a living being raises questions about ambition, abandonment and responsibility for the lives we bring into being.
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Frankenstein or Modern Prometheus - Mary Shelley - Folio Society - 2004 1st EditionView sold edition
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
An influential Edinburgh schoolteacher's hold over her pupils reveals the complicated relationship between education, loyalty and personal power.
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The God of Small Things
The lives of twins in Kerala expose how caste, family expectations and forbidden love shape the possibilities of childhood.
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David Copperfield
A boy's difficult upbringing becomes a story of friendship, work, love and the gradual formation of a writer.
Available nowEditions of David Copperfield
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David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - Folio Society - 2004View edition
Wolf Hall
Thomas Cromwell navigates Henry VIII's court as political ambition, religious change and royal desire reshape Tudor England.
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Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel - Folio Society - 2022 1st EditionView edition
Great Expectations
An unexpected fortune encourages Pip to reinvent himself, testing his assumptions about gentility, loyalty and the sources of kindness.
Available nowEditions of Great Expectations
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Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - Folio Society - 2004View edition
The Handmaid's Tale
A woman forced into reproductive servitude records daily life under a theocracy built on the systematic removal of women's rights.
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The Handmaid's Tale AE - Margaret Atwood - Suntup Editions - 2022 1st EditionView edition
Invisible Man
An unnamed Black narrator moves through competing promises of belonging while struggling to make himself visible on his own terms.
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The Age of Innocence
An impending society marriage is unsettled by a woman's return to New York, exposing the constraints beneath polished social rituals.
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Age of Innocence, The - Edith Wharton - Folio Society - 2009 1st EditionView edition
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford's search for a self-directed life unfolds through love, work and the communities of the American South.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston - Folio Society - 2022 1st EditionView edition
Song of Solomon
A young man's investigation of his family history becomes a journey through inheritance, identity and the meanings of freedom.
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Heart of Darkness
A voyage into the Congo forces a European traveller to confront the violence concealed beneath imperial claims of civilisation.
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Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - Folio Society - 2014 1st EditionView sold edition
The Magic Mountain
A visit to an Alpine sanatorium extends into an education in illness, time and the competing ideas of prewar Europe.
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The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann - Folio Society - 2000 1st EditionView sold edition
Housekeeping
Two sisters grow up beside a remote lake, where an unconventional guardian unsettles the boundaries between belonging and wandering.
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Giovanni's Room
An American in Paris struggles with desire and self-deception as his relationship with an Italian man exposes his deepest fears.
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The Golden Notebook
A writer's divided notebooks explore political disappointment, intimate relationships and the difficulty of making a coherent account of experience.
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The Leopard
A Sicilian aristocrat watches his family's world change during Italian unification, weighing survival against the appearance of continuity.
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Vanity Fair
Two women's contrasting fortunes expose the ambitions, bargains and hypocrisies of a society preoccupied with status.
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The Metamorphosis
A travelling salesman wakes in a transformed body, forcing his family to renegotiate its dependence, affection and obligations.
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Metamorphosis and Other Stories - Franz Kafka - Folio Society - 2010 1st EditionIncluded in a larger publicationView containing edition
A Fine Balance
Four lives converge in an Indian city during the Emergency, where friendship offers fragile protection against political and social violence.
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Wide Sargasso Sea
A Caribbean woman's story reimagines the history behind Jane Eyre's imprisoned wife, examining colonial power and the loss of identity.
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My Brilliant Friend
Two girls grow up in a poor Neapolitan neighbourhood, beginning a friendship shaped by rivalry, opportunity and the desire to escape.
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The Golden Bowl
Two marriages become entangled in a finely observed study of betrayal, knowledge and the costs of maintaining appearances.
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The Transit of Venus
Two Australian sisters' lives intersect with the loves, ambitions and accidents that shape their futures in postwar England.
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Orlando
A protagonist who changes sex and lives across centuries unsettles conventional accounts of gender, biography and literary history.
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The Waves
Six voices follow the changing rhythms of friendship and consciousness from childhood through the passage of adult life.
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Mansfield Park
A poor relation grows up within a wealthy household, learning to trust her own moral judgement amid social pressure.
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The Sound and the Fury
The decline of a Southern family emerges through fractured perspectives, revealing how memory and loss disrupt chronological storytelling.
Available nowEditions of The Sound and the Fury
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Sound and the Fury, The - William Faulkner - Folio Society - 2017 1st EditionView edition
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Sound and The Fury, The - William Faulkner - Folio Society - Limited EditionView edition
Disgrace
A disgraced professor's retreat to his daughter's farm exposes conflicts over power, vulnerability and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa.
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Never Let Me Go
Friends recall their secluded English childhood as the purpose of their upbringing gradually comes into focus.
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Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro - Folio Society - 2012 1st EditionView edition
Howards End
The lives of three families intersect around a country house, revealing divisions of class, culture and personal responsibility.
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The Rings of Saturn
A walk through Suffolk becomes a chain of reflections on memory, destruction and the traces history leaves in landscapes.
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Half of a Yellow Sun
Interconnected lives reveal the hopes and devastating consequences of the Biafran struggle for independence.
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White Teeth
Two London families negotiate migration, friendship and generational change, as their children question the identities inherited from their parents.
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The Good Soldier
A narrator revisits the lives of two apparently respectable couples, uncovering the deceptions behind his earlier certainties.
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The Color Purple
A Black woman's letters chart her struggle against abuse and her gradual discovery of solidarity, independence and love.
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The Master and Margarita
The Devil's arrival in Moscow intersects with a writer's fate, a woman's devotion and a parallel account of Pontius Pilate.
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The Man Without Qualities
An intellectually restless man surveys the contradictions of an Austro-Hungarian society approaching its historical breaking point.
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Blood Meridian
A teenage runaway joins a scalp-hunting expedition in a violent exploration of conquest and the American borderlands.
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Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy - Folio Society - 2022View sold edition
Crime and Punishment
A young man's attempt to justify murder becomes a sustained examination of guilt, isolation and moral responsibility.
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Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Folio Society - 2016View edition
Jude the Obscure
A working man's aspirations to education and an unconventional relationship collide with the institutions and prejudices of Victorian society.
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The Outsider
An emotionally detached man's involvement in a killing leads to a confrontation with society's demand for recognisable motives and remorse.
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Outsider, The - Albert Camus - Folio Society - 2011 1st EditionView sold edition
Kindred
A Black woman is repeatedly transported from modern California to a slaveholding Maryland plantation, where her family's history endangers her survival.
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Kindred - Octavia E. Butler - Folio Society - 2019View edition
Our Mutual Friend
An inheritance draws together lives along the Thames in a study of money, social ambition and the possibility of transformation.
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Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens - Folio Society - 2005View edition
Austerlitz
A displaced man's search for his childhood becomes a meditation on architecture, memory and the aftermath of the Holocaust.
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Nervous Conditions
A Zimbabwean girl's pursuit of education reveals the pressures of colonial expectations, gender and obligations to family.
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The Bluest Eye
A Black girl's longing for blue eyes exposes the damage inflicted by racialised ideals of beauty and belonging.
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Dracula
Letters and diaries trace a vampire's arrival in England and the increasingly desperate efforts to stop him.
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Dracula - Bram Stoker - Folio Society - 2009View sold edition
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Dracula - Bram Stoker - Folio Society - 2008View sold edition
My Ántonia
A narrator remembers an immigrant girl's life on the Nebraska prairie, tracing endurance, friendship and the shaping power of landscape.
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The Rainbow
Three generations of a Nottinghamshire family seek fuller lives amid changing relationships, work and social expectations.
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A House for Mr Biswas
A man's determination to own a house becomes a search for independence within the complex family life of colonial Trinidad.
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
A teenager's religious awakening unfolds alongside the histories, desires and wounds of his Harlem family.
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Rebecca
A young bride enters a country house still dominated by the memory of her husband's first wife.
Available nowEditions of Rebecca
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Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier - Folio Society - 2017View edition
Buddenbrooks
The changing fortunes of a German merchant family reveal the tensions between commercial success, social respectability and artistic temperament.
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The End of the Affair
A novelist revisits a wartime love affair whose abrupt ending leads him into questions of jealousy, faith and commitment.
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A Farewell to Arms
An ambulance driver's love affair with a nurse unfolds against the disillusionment and upheaval of the First World War.
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A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway - Folio Society - 2015 1st EditionView edition
The Talented Mr Ripley
A young American's envy of an affluent acquaintance develops into a dangerous experiment in impersonation and reinvention.
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Ripley Novels, The - Patricia Highsmith - Folio Society - 2011 1st EditionIncluded in a larger publicationView containing edition
The Vegetarian
A woman's refusal to eat meat destabilises her household and exposes increasingly coercive struggles over her body and autonomy.
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The Turn of the Screw
A governess believes her young charges are threatened by supernatural presences, in a narrative that unsettles the boundaries of perception.
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Turn of the Screw, The - Henry James - Folio Society - 2022View edition
The Line of Beauty
A young man's entry into a wealthy political household reveals the attractions and exclusions of 1980s British privilege.
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Ragtime
Fictional families and historical figures intersect in a panorama of early twentieth-century American ambition, inequality and social change.
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The Left Hand of Darkness
An envoy to a world whose inhabitants change sex confronts his assumptions about identity while negotiating a precarious political mission.
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Left Hand of Darkness, The - Ursula K Le Guin - Folio Society - 2018 1st EditionView edition
Jacob's Room
Fragments of other people's perceptions create a portrait of a young man whose life remains elusive even to those closest to him.
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Life and Fate
Lives across the Eastern Front reveal the pressures of totalitarian power and the persistence of ordinary human attachments.
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Sentimental Education
A young man's romantic and social ambitions unfold against the upheavals and disappointments of nineteenth-century France.
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Invisible Cities
Imagined conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan turn descriptions of cities into reflections on desire, memory and human possibility.
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The Known World
The intertwined lives of enslaved people and slaveholders complicate familiar assumptions about race, ownership and moral responsibility in Virginia.
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The Return of the Native
Conflicting desires and expectations entangle the inhabitants of Egdon Heath in a tragedy shaped by character, community and landscape.
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Pedro Páramo
A man's journey to his mother's hometown opens into a world of voices, memories and the unresolved lives of the dead.
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Catch-22
An American airman's attempts to escape dangerous missions expose the circular logic and institutional absurdity of war.
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Catch-22 - Joseph Heller - Folio Society - 2004View edition
The Road
A father and son travel through a devastated landscape, trying to preserve both their lives and a sense of moral responsibility.
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