Recommendations based on "Purity"

The Instant New York Times Bestseller A Guardian Best Fiction Book Of 2021 An Independent Book Of The Year A White Review Book Of The Year A Lit Hub Best Book Of The Year 'his Best Novel Yet ... A Middlemarch-like Triumph' Telegraph Set In A Historical Moment Of Moral Crisis, Crossroads Is The Stunning Foundation Of A Sweeping Investigation Of Human Mythologies, As The Hildebrandt Family Navigate The Political And Social Crosscurrents Of The Past Fifty Years It's December 23, 1971, And Heavy Weather Is Forecast For Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, The Associate Pastor Of A Liberal Suburban Church, Is On The Brink Of Breaking Free Of A Marriage He Finds Joyless - Unless His Wife, Marion, Who Has Her Own Secret Life, Beats Him To It. Their Eldest Child, Clem, Is Coming Home From College On Fire With Moral Absolutism, Having Taken An Action That Will Shatter His Father. Clem's Sister, Becky, Long The Social Queen Of Her High-school Class, Has Sharply Veered Into The Counterculture, While Their Brilliant Younger Brother Perry, Who's Been Selling Drugs To Seventh-graders, Has Resolved To Be A Better Person. Each Of The Hildebrandts Seeks A Freedom That Each Of The Others Threatens To Complicate. Jonathan Franzen's Novels Are Celebrated For Their Unforgettably Vivid Characters And Their Keen-eyed Take On The Complexities Of Contemporary America. Now, For The First Time, In Crossroads, Franzen Explores The History Of A Generation. With Characteristic Humour And Complexity, And With Even Greater Warmth, He Conjures A World That Feels No Less Immediate. A Tour De Force Of Interwoven Perspectives And Sustained Suspense, Crossroads Is The Story Of A Midwestern Family At A Historical Moment Of Moral Crisis. Jonathan Franzen's Gift For Melding The Small Picture And The Big Picture Has Never Been More Dazzlingly Evident.

'So the club rose, the blood came down, and his bitterness and his anguish and his guilt were compounded'Drawing on Baldwin's own experiences of prejudice in an America violently divided by race, these searing essays blend the intensely personal with the political to envisage a better world.Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

“one of the most important plays of our time” --Howard Taubman, The New York TimesIn Vichy France in 1942, eight men and a boy are seized by the collaborationist authorities and made to wait in a building that may be a police station. Some of them are Jews. All of them have something to hide—if not from the Nazis, then from their fellow detainees and, inevitably, from themselves. For in this claustrophobic antechamber to the death camps, everyone is guilty. And perhaps none more so than those who can walk away alive.In Incident at Vichy, Arthur Miller re-creates Dante's hell inside the gaping pit that is our history and populates it with sinners whose crimes are all the more fearful because they are so recognizable.

In Vichy France, 1942, a group of men sit outside an office, waiting to be interviewed. The reason they have been pulled off the street and taken there is obvious enough. They are, for the most part, Jews. But how serious an offence this is, and how they are to suffer for it, is not clear, and they hope for the best. But as rumours pass between them of trains full of people locked from the outside and furnaces in Poland, and although they reassure themselves that nothing so monstrous could be true, their panic rises. Arthur Miller's claustrophobic play of how the inconceivable becomes allowed to pass, Incident at Vichy is one of the most indispensable, moving pieces of art about the Holocaust.

USA Today BestsellerCalled “a Russian Thorn Birds,” The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons is a sweeping saga of love and war that has been a monumental bestseller all over the world. The acclaimed author of Tully, Simons has written a stirring tale of devotion, passion, secrets, betray, and sacrifice. “A love story both tender and fierce” (Publishers Weekly )that “Recalls Dr. Zhivago” (People Magazine), The Bronze Horseman is rich and vivid historical fiction at its finest.The golden skies, the translucent twilight, the white nights, all hold the promise of youth, of love, of eternal renewal. The war has not yet touched this city of fallen grandeur, or the lives of two sisters, Tatiana and Dasha Metanova, who share a single room in a cramped apartment with their brother and parents. Their world is turned upside down when Hitler's armies attack Russia and begin their unstoppable blitz to Leningrad.Yet there is light in the darkness. Tatiana meets Alexander, a brave young officer in the Red Army. Strong and self-confident, yet guarding a mysterious and troubled past, he is drawn to Tatiana—and she to him. Starvation, desperation, and fear soon grip their city during the terrible winter of the merciless German siege. Tatiana and Alexander's impossible love threatens to tear the Metanova family apart and expose the dangerous secret Alexander so carefully protects—a secret as devastating as the war itself—as the lovers are swept up in the brutal tides that will change the world and their lives forever.

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Evelyn Waugh's masterful depiction of World War II, with an introduction by Martin StannardWaugh's own unhappy experience of being a soldier is superbly re-enacted in this story of Guy Crouchback, a Catholic and a gentleman, commissioned into the Royal Corps of Halberdiers during the war years 1939-45. High comedy - in the company of Brigadier Ritchie-Hook or the denizens of Bellamy's Club - is only part of the shambles of Crouchback's war. When action comes in Crete and in Yugoslavia, he discovers not heroism, but humanity. Sword of Honour combines three volumes: Officers and Gentlemen, Men at Arms and Unconditional Surrender, which were originally published separately. Extensively revised by Waugh, they were published as the one-volume Sword of Honour in 1965, in the form in which Waugh himself wished them to be read.'Marvellous ... one of the masterpieces of the century'John Banville, Irish Times

'Listen, Švejk, are you really God's prize oaf?''Humbly report, sir,' Švejk answered solemnly. 'I am!'Drunkard, malingerer, oaf and possible genius - the story of Czech soldier Svejk and his misadventures in the First World War is one of the most hilarious and subversive satires on war ever written.A new series of twenty distinctive, unforgettable Penguin Classics in a beautiful new design and pocket-sized format, with coloured jackets echoing Penguin's original covers.

ESPIONAGE & SPY THRILLER FICTION. March 1938. The Germans take Vienna without a shot being fired. Covering Austria for the English press is a young journalist named Rod Troy. Back home his younger brother joins the CID as a detective constable. November 1938. Kristallnacht. The Jews leave Vienna - Sigmund Freud with an American escort on a sleeper train, Josef Hummel tied to the underside of a boxcar. June 1940. Sergeant Troy is seconded to Special Branch to help in the round-up of 'enemy' aliens, among whom are Hummel and his brother Rod. Rod and Hummel are interned on the Isle of Man ... meanwhile a lunatic is killing rabbis in the East End of London. Troy asks for time off from Special Branch to return to his true calling ... Murder. London is now under siege, from German bombers, from its own prejudices and paranoias. Is London any better than Vienna?

For Bernard Samson, the end is near.In the concluding volume of Len Deighton's superb trilogy that began with Faith and Hope, Bernard Samson continues to peel away the mystery surrounding the cold-blooded murder of his sister-in-law, Tessa, on the streets of Berlin. Although his wife, Fiona, has come back from the cold and is now in the West, his family is in tatters, and Samson has no where to turn for answers. Only his childhood friend Werner Volkman seems to offer the charity that Samson craves, but Volkmann is reluctant to get involved with any quest for the truth, no matter who is doing the asking. And as always, hovering above all Samson does and tries to be is the persistent memory of his father -- a deadly force to be reckoned with, even now.Deighton's back and better than ever. Packed with action, incident and intrigue, Charity brings to a triumphant conclusion a series of 10 novels that represents one of the greatest achievements in modern fiction.