Author name: Scott

A soldier wounded in the Civil War, Inman turns his back on the carnage of the battlefield and begins the treacherous odyssey home to Cold Mountain, and to Ada, the woman he loved before the war began. As he attempts to make his way across the mountains, through the devastated landscape of a soon-to-be-defeated South, Ada struggles […]

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. Briony badly misconstrues this and another

An ingenious parody of all those dreary best-sellers one buys at the airport. The narrative is about a reader trying to read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveler. Every odd-numbered chapter is in the second person, and tells the reader what he is doing in preparation for reading the next chapter. The

Over a hundred years before Martin Amis published Money (1984), Anthony Trollope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Trollope) published The Way We Live Now (1875) This is a biting satire and social commentary on the greed, dishonesty and corruption of Trollope’s day. The vices are personified in financier Augustus Melmotte. In view of our knowledge of the naked greed that

In 1954 a fisherman is found dead and a local Japanese-American man is charged with his murder. In the course of his trial, it becomes clear that more is at stake than one man’s guilt. For San Piedro is haunted by memories: of a past love affair between a white boy and a Japanese girl;

E. Annie Proulx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Proulx) gives us the character of Quoyle, a hack journalist, whose wife Petal leaves him and is shortly after killed in a car accident. He moves with his two young daughters to his ancestral home in Newfoundland in search of a new beginning. This novel of 1993 deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize and The U.S.

Could any of us face the stark indifference of the universe courageously and alone? Camus offers us the character of Meursault in this novel of 1942, who attempts exactly that. Meursault is short on any kind of emotion and reacts (if at all) to the world with a kind of deadpan indifference. The novel is an

After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful young man’s portrait, his subject’s frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray’s picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, ‘as surely as if I had cut her little throat