
novels of sorts
Items in this hypelist
favourite classics

Dracula
Bram Stoker · 2011

Stoner: A Novel
John L. Williams · 2012

Villete
Charlotte Brontë · 2021

Voyage in the Dark
Jean Rhys · 1994

Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories (The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Vol. 1)
M. R. James · 2005

Frankenstein
Mary Shelley · 2003

The Stranger by Albert Camus: classic novels
Albert Camus · 2022

The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 1966

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1989
Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in <b>Lolita</b>, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. <b>Lolita</b> is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

The Trial (Dover Thrift Editions)
Franz Kafka · 2012

The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts and an Epilogue
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 2003

The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood · 2002

Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 2003

Anna Karenina (Wordsworth Classics)
Leo Tolstoy · 1997

White Nights
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 2017

The Idiot (Everyman's Library)
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 2002

Wuthering Heights (Penguin Classics)
Emily Brontë, Pauline Nestor · 2002
<b>Coming soon to the big screen is Emerald Fennell’s feature film “<i>Wuthering Heights</i>,” which captures the spirit of this epic love story and stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Catherine and Heathcliff.<br></b><br>Emily Brontë's only novel endures as a work of tremendous and far-reaching influence. The Penguin Classics edition is the definitive version of the text, edited with an introduction by Pauline Nestor.<br><br>Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, situated on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before. What unfolds is the tale of the intense love between the gypsy foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine, forced to choose between passionate, tortured Heathcliff and gentle, well-bred Edgar Linton, surrendered to the expectations of her class. As Heathcliff's bitterness and vengeance at his betrayal is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past. <br><br>In this edition, a new preface by Lucasta Miller, author of <i>The Brontë Myth</i>, looks at the ways in which the novel has been interpreted, from Charlotte Brontë onwards. This complements Pauline Nestor's introduction, which discusses changing critical receptions of the novel, as well as Emily Brontë's influences and background.
favourite shakespeare

Shakespeare Sonnets: The Sonnets of Shakespeare
William Shakespeare · 2010

The Taming of the Shrew (Folger Shakespeare Library)
William Shakespeare · 2004

The Winter’s Tale (Collins Classics)
William Shakespeare · 2013

Romeo and Juliet (Dover Thrift Editions: Plays)
William Shakespeare · 1993
One of Shakespeare's most popular and accessible plays, Romeo and Juliet tells the story of two star-crossed lovers and the unhappy fate that befell them as a result of a long and bitter feud between their families. The play contains some of Shakespeare's most beautiful and lyrical love poetry and is perhaps the finest celebration of the joys of young love ever written. This inexpensive edition includes the complete, unabridged text with explanatory footnotes. Ideal for classroom use, it is a wonderful addition to the home library of anyone wanting to savor one of literature's most sublime paeans to love.

Othello
William Shakespeare · 2020

Hamlet
William Shakespeare · 1997
favourite poetry

Selected Poems of John Keats
John Keats · 2011

Seamus Heaney Collected Poems
Seamus Heaney · 2019

The Romantic Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe · 2019

Time Is a Mother
Ocean Vuong · 2023
"Take your time with these poems, and return to them often.” —The Washington Post<br/><br/>The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from the award-winning writer Ocean Vuong<br/><br/>How else do we return to ourselves but to fold<br/>The page so it points to the good part<br/><br/>In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.<br/><br/>The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellowship, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Ocean Vuong · 2016
<p>The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016 <br> New York Times, Critics Pick<br> Boston Globe, Best Books listing<br> Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books<br> San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year<br> Library Journal, Best Books of 2016</p><br><p>"There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong's sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things."-New York Times</p><br><p>"From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion."--New Yorker</p><br><p>"Extraordinary."--Los Angeles Times</p><br><p>"Ecstatic, bawdy, haunted, and brilliant with the pressures of its arrival."--Boston Globe</p><br><p>Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"--and very human--subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant."</p><br><p>Torso of Air</p><br><p>Suppose you do change your life.<br> & the body is more than<br> a portion of night--sealed<br> with bruises. Suppose you woke<br> & found your shadow replaced<br> by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful<br> & gone. So you take the knife to the wall<br> instead. You carve & carve<br> until a coin of light appears<br> & you get to look in, at last, <br> on happiness. The eye<br> staring back from the other side--<br> Waiting.</p>

The Orange and other poems
Wendy Cope · 2024

Sylvia Plath
Jon Rosenblatt · 2018

The Odyssey
Homer · 2018

Paradise Lost (Penguin Classics)
John Milton · 2003

The Divine Comedy: Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso (Everyman's Library)
Dante Alighieri · 1995
This beautiful hardcover edition–containing all three cantos, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso–includes an introduction by Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale, a chronology, notes, and a bibliography. Also included are forty-two drawings selected from Botticelli's marvelous late-fifteenth-century series of illustrations.<br/><br/>The Divine Comedy begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity.<br/><br/>Allen Mandelbaum’s astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece of that genius whom our greatest poets have recognized as a central model for all poets.<br/><br/>Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Everyman’s Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
other

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution
R. F. Kuang · 2022
Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller from the author of The Poppy War “Absolutely phenomenal. One of the most brilliant, razor-sharp books I've had the pleasure of reading that isn't just an alternative fantastical history, but an interrogative one; one that grabs colonial history and the Industrial Revolution, turns it over, and shakes it out.” -- Shannon Chakraborty, bestselling author of The City of Brass From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire. Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization. For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide… Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?

Atonement
Ian McEwan · 2002
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from the acclaimed Booker Prize–winning, internationally bestselling author.<br/><br/>On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives.<br/><br/>As it follows that crime’s repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.<br/><br/>Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.

Yellowface: A Novel
R. F. Kuang · 2023

A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara · 2016
<b><i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (<i>NPR</i>) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.<br></b><br><b><b><b><b><b><b><b>NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST <b><b><b>•</b></b></b></b> MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST <b>• <b><b><b><b><b> WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE</b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b><br><br><i>A Little Life</i> follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.

A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini · 2018
Rare Book

Normal People: A Novel
Sally Rooney · 2020
<b>NOW AN EMMY-NOMINATED HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • “A stunning novel about the transformative power of relationships” (<i>People</i>) from the author of <i>Conversations with Friends,</i> “a master of the literary page-turner” (J. Courtney Sullivan).</b><br> <br><b>“[A] novel that demands to be read compulsively, in one sitting.”—<i>The Washington Post</i></b><br><br><b>ONE OF <i>ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY</i>’S TEN BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE</b><br><br><b>TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: <i>People, Slate,</i> The New York Public Library, <i>Harvard Crimson</i></b><br><br>Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation—awkward but electrifying—something life changing begins.<br><br>A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.<br><br><i>Normal People</i> is the story of mutual fascination, friendship, and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find that they can’t.<br> <br><b>WINNER: The British Book Award, The Costa Book Award, The An Post Irish Novel of the Year, <i>Sunday Times </i>Young Writer of the Year Award</b><br><br><b>BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: <i>The New York Times</i>, <i>The New York Times Book Review, Oprah Daily, Time,</i> NPR, <i>The Washington Post, Vogue, Esquire, Glamour, Elle, Marie Claire, Vox, The Paris Review, Good Housekeeping, Town & Country</i></b>

Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2007

Recitatif
Morrison Toni · 2022

The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger · 2004

Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami · 2006

Looking for Alaska
John Green · 2006
The award-winning, genre-defining debut from John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and The Fault in Our Stars<br/><br/>Winner of the Michael L. Printz Award • A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist • A New York Times Bestseller • A USA Today Bestseller • NPR’s Top Ten Best-Ever Teen Novels • TIME magazine’s 100 Best Young Adult Novels of All Time • A PBS Great American Read Selection • Millions of copies sold!<br/><br/>First drink. First prank. First friend. First love.<br/><br/>Last words.<br/><br/>Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words—and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet François Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.” Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young, who will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.<br/><br/>Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another. A modern classic, this stunning debut marked #1 bestselling author John Green’s arrival as a groundbreaking new voice in contemporary fiction.<br/><br/>Newly updated edition includes a brand-new Readers' Guide featuring a Q&A with author John Green

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky · 2009






