Award Winning Books

As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable secrets about the family of...

Soon after the end of World War II, a disillusioned veteran and U.S. Army major named Aldred Leith travels to a Japanese island, hoping to understand the impact of the war on the place. Meanwhile, his friend Peter Exley is investigating war crimes....

Max Morden is an aging art historian whose wife has recently died of cancer. In his grief, he takes a trip to the seaside, to the "rubble of the past," where he and his family spent holidays as a child. Here grief and memory coincide as he...

In this black comedy by an Australian, set in Texas, Vernon, a poor-white 15-year-old, is accused of perpetrating the high-school massacre that was actually the work of his friend, Jesus, who dies in the process. Panicked, Vernon takes off, becomes a...

The year is l854. In Paris, Francisco Solano -- the future dictator of Paraguay -- begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and ahorse named Mathilde. Ella follows Franco to...

Chronicles the life of America's second president, including his youth, his career as a Massachusetts farmer and lawyer, his marriage to Abigail, his rivalry with Thomas Jefferson, and his influence on the birth of the United States.

It's the 1980s, and Margaret Thatcher is Britain's PM. A Henry James scholar named Nick Guest, just down from Oxford, is staying with his friend Gerald at the posh home of Gerald's father, a Tory member of Parliament. There he befriends a suicidal...

[A]n impressively researched, challenging novel debut....The particulars and consequences of the 'right' of humans to own other humans are dramatized with unprecedented ingenuity and intensity, in a harrowing tale that scarcely ever raises its...

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicidesthe astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl. In the spring of 1974,...

From his first novel, Mohawk, to his most recent, Straight Alan, Richard Russo has demonstrated great affinity for the tragicomic human condition, and here he expands his geographical and psychological claims on the small town, blue-collar heart...