Showing titles in Literary Fiction

Emma can be enjoyed as a charming love story, a detective story, and a comic and lively picture of English life 200 years ago. Austen's beautiful, clever, wilful but fallible heroine Emma Woodhouse believes she knows best. Perfectly content with her life she sees no need for either love or marriage, yet nothing pleases her more than meddling in the romantic lives of others.

Come with us to an Enchanted Place, a forest where Winnie-the-Pooh lived with Piglet, Rabbit, Owl, Eeyore, Kanga, and Little Roo. The stories are about Christopher Robin and these good companions having wonderful times getting in and out of trouble. It is all very exciting and, really, quite thrilling no matter how young or old you may be. It is painful to try and imagine what the world would be like without them.

As Wodehouse himself once noted, "Blandings has impostors like other houses have mice." On this particular occasion, there are two imposters, both intent on a dangerous enterprise. Lord Emsworth's secretary, the Efficient Baxter, is on the alert and determined to discover what is afoot - despite the distractions caused by the Honorable Freddie Threepwood's hapless affair of the heart.

In Purple Hibiscus, she recounts the story of a young Nigerian girl searching for freedom. Although her father is greatly respected within their community, 15-year-old Kambili knows a frighteningly strict and abusive side to this man. In many ways, she and her family lead a privileged life, but Kambili and her brother, Jaja, are often punished for failing to meet their father’s expectations. After visiting her aunt and cousins, Kambili dreams of being part of a loving family.

Challenged to retrieve a fallen star, Tristran Thorn leaves the sleepy English village of Wall and crosses into the land of Faerie and the realm of Stormhold. Locating the star, he discovers it is no meteorite but a young woman, Yvaine. When Yvaine evades him and escapes, Tristran discovers he is not the only one in pursuit of the star: there are dark forces in this magical land, and he must find Yvaine before she falls into their clutches.

Heathcliff, an orphan, is brought to Wuthering Heights, where he is raised alongside Catherine. They soon become lovers and inseparable soul mates. However, Catherine chooses to marry Edgar Linton, an antithesis to Heathcliff, mainly out of her desire for social status. This leads to Heathcliff being consumed by revenge. Heathcliff leaves the moors, only to return later as a wealthy and polished man. What follows is a series of tragic events.

Written at the request of Charles Dickens, North and South is a book about rebellion that poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Gaskell expertly blends individual feeling with social concern and her heroine, Margaret Hale, is one of the most original creations of Victorian literature. When Margaret Hale's father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience she is forced to leave her comfortable home in the tranquil countryside of Hampshire....

Hailed as a bold foray into new literary territory, Kawakami’s novel is told in the voice of a 14-year-old student subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy chooses to suffer in complete resignation. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormenters.

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding.

UP 65 is Nikhil Sachan's third book after remarkable success of Namak Swadanusar and Zindagi Aais Pais. As Nikhil says, the book is a giveback to Banaras and BHU for all that these two places have given him. The story revolves around how Nishant, an IIT BHU student, finds his love, friends and purpose in his life.The book is a laugh riot and is a pause resistor. It promises to let you relive your best years of college, friendship and lost-and-found and love.

War and Peace is at once an epic war chronicle and an exploration of everything that make us all human: love and hate, ambition and despair, life and death. Allow yourself to get lost in the lives of three Russian aristocratic families, whose triumphs and challenges are every bit as resonant to today’s listener as they were to original readers. Thandiwe Newton inhabits each character with such flair that it is easy to forget that you are listening to one voice. 

Persuasion, Jane Austen's last novel, is a tale of love and marriage told with irony and insight. Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth have met and seperated years before. Their reunion, after the passage or irrecoverable years of their youth, forces a recognition of the false values that drove them apart.

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'; so the recording begins and ends with some of Dickens's best-known words, and between those lines is every Briton's view of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. Set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, the audiobook tells the story of a French doctor who is imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille in Paris. Upon his release, he moves to London with his daughter, Lucie, whom he had never met.

Sitting alone, overlooking the still and blue lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach surveys the men of the hotel bar. She is happily married and has no reason to escape the world she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover. Amid sultry days and tropical downpours, lotharios and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire, and the fear that sits quietly at her heart.

Vladimir Nabokov called Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina "one of the greatest love stories in world literature." Set in imperial Russia, Anna Karenina is a rich and complex meditation on passionate love and disastrous infidelity. Married to a powerful government minister, Anna Karenina is a beautiful woman who falls deeply in love with a wealthy army officer, the elegant Count Vronsky.

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. The taverna is the only place that Kostas and Defne can meet in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic and chilli peppers, creeping honeysuckle, and in the centre, growing through a cavity in the roof, a fig tree. The fig tree witnesses their hushed, happy meetings; their silent, surreptitious departures. The fig tree is there, too, when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, when the teenagers vanish.

It is a popular belief that the Ramayana is idealistic while the Mahabharata is realistic. Yet these two epics have identical building blocks, identical themes, and identical history. In this groundbreaking book, Devdutt Pattanaik, India’s most popular mythologist, explores the similarities and dissimilarities between the two epics in a ‘playful analaysis’. Whether it is the family structure, forest exile, or war, the comparison between the two epics prove a startling point - the Mahabharata is in fact a reaction to the events in the Ramayana.

It was a small island set in the middle of the big river, yet large enough for Sita and her grandparents to live there, together with their three goats, their hens, their vegetable patch, and the peepul tree.

A collection of 17 wonderful short stories showing that Tom Hanks is as talented a writer as he is an actor. A gentle Eastern European immigrant arrives in New York City after his family and his life have been torn apart by his country's civil war. A man who loves to bowl rolls a perfect game - and then another and then another and then many more in a row until he winds up ESPN's newest celebrity, and he must decide if the combination of perfection and celebrity has ruined the thing he loves.

Big Swiss. That's Greta's nickname for her - she is tall, and she is from Switzerland. Greta can see her now: dressed top to toe in white, that adorable gap between her two front teeth, her penetrating blue eyes. She's a head-turner: including the heads of infants and dogs. Well that's how Greta imagines seeing her; they haven't actually ever met in person. Nor has Greta actually ever been to Switzerland. Greta and Big Swiss are not in the same room, or even the same building.