This novel tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, the Cornish son of a Plymouth Brethren minister who becomes an Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory. They meet on the ship over to Australia, and discover that they are both gamblers, one obsessive the other compulsive. Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot

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.