All Time 100 Best Novels

Time Magazine

Time Magazine critics, Lev Grossman & Richard Lacayo, make their picks for the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present.

	Saul Bellow. The Adventures of Augie Marsh
	Robert Penn Warren. All the King's Men This classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on american politics. It describes the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power.
	Philip Roth. American Pastoral American Pastoral presents a vivid portrait of how the innocence of Swede Levov is swept away by the times - of how everything industriously created by his family in America over three generations is left in a shambles by the explosion of a bomb in his own bucolic backyard.
	Theodore Dreiser. An American Tragedy A story of a poor boy whose ambition for wealth and social prestige leads him to commit murder.
	George Orwell. Animal Farm Farm is a devastating satire of the Soviet Union by the man V. S. Pritchett called "the conscience of his generation". A fable about an uprising of farm animals against their human masters, it illustrates how new tyranny replaces old in the wake of revolutions and power corrupts even the noblest of causes.
	John O'Hara. Appointment in Samarra In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville social circuit is electrified with parties and dances, where the music plays late into the night and the liquor flows freely. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English - the envy of friends and strangers alike. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction.
	Judy Blume. Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret  Faced with the difficulties of growing up and choosing a religion, a twelve-year-old girl talks over her problems with her own private God.
	Bernard Malamud. The Assistant In a novel distinguished by unparalleled emotional power and authenticity, Malamud draws a penniless Italian-American drifter with a troubled conscience an a violent personal history into the world of a Jewish grocer struggling to eke out a living in a crumbling Brooklyn neighborhood. In the despair--and ultimately in the love--of the grocer's beautiful but unfulfilled daughter, Frank Alpine finds the motivation to confront his past and seek his own redemption, even if it costs him everthing he has gained.
	Flann O'Brien. At Swim-Two-Birds The story of an Irish college student who -- half to amuse himself and half to avoid work -- writes an irreverent novel about the figures of Irish myth and legend in which characters come to life and riot against their author. At Swim-Two-Birds is a wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture and has had a major influence on writers coming after O'Brien.
	Ian McEwan. Atonement A young girl unwittingly tells a tale that turns her family upside down. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, "Atonement" is at its center a profound--and profoundly moving--exploration of shame and forgiveness, of atonement and the difficulty of absolution.
	Toni Morrison. Beloved Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade.
	Christopher Isherwood. The Berlin Stories "A man named Christopher Isherwood, who is and is not the author, writes a story of exile, combining the best of Isherwood's real life with the best of the life he imagined." - Amazon.com
	Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep  Chandler's first novel, published in 1939, introduces Philip Marlowe, a 38-year-old P.I. moving through the seamy side of Los Angeles in the 1930s. This classic case involves a paralyzed California millionaire, his two psychotic daughters, blackmail, and murder.
	Margaret Atwood. The Blind Assassin Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms of the 1940s, the book starts with the death of Laura--who drives her car off a bridge ten days after the end of World War II--and then moves to a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers.
	Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridianbrilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
	Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited Waugh tells the story of the Marchmain family. Aristocratic, beautiful and charming, the Marchmains are indeed a symbol of England and her decline in this novel of the upper class of the 1920s and the abdication of responsibility in the 1930s.
	Thornton Wilder. The Bridge of San Luis Rey The Bridge of San Luis Rey opens in the aftermath of an inexplicable tragedy-- a tiny foot-bridge in Peru breaks, and five people hurtle to their deaths. For Brother Juniper, a humble monk who witnesses the catastrophe, the question in inescapable. Why those five? Suddenly, Brother Juniper is committed to discover what manner of lives they led-- and whether it was divine intervention or a capricious fate that took their lives.
	Henry Roth. Call It Sleep The magnificent story of David Schearl, the "dangerously imaginative" child coming of age in the slums of New York.
	Joseph Heller. Catch-22 Catch-22 is like no other novel we have ever read. It has its own style, its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting.
	J.D. Salinger. The Catcher In The Rye Holden, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.
	Anthony Burgess. A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess's modern classic of youthful violence and social redemption, reissued to include the controversial last chapter not previously published in this country, with a new introduction by the author. This disturbing novel creates an alarming futuristic vision of violence, high technology, and authoritarianism.
	William Styron. The Confessions of Nat Turner Set in 1831, "The Confessions Of Nat Turner" tells--in his own words--of a black man who awaits death in a Virginia jail cell. His name is Nat Turner and he is a slave, a preacher, and the leader of the only effective slave revolt in the history of that "peculiar institution."
	Jonathan Franzen. The Corrections Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed.
	Thomas Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49 The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.
	Anthony Powell. A Dance to the Music of Time The book opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art.
	Nathanael West. The Day of the Locust A novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathaniel West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some desparing, all twisted by their by their own desires-from the ironically romantic artist narrator to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America's heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be-star whom they all lust after.
	Willa Cather. Death Comes for the Archbishop Death Comes for the Archbishop is Willa Cather's best-known novel, a narrative whose spare beauty achieves epic--and even mythic--qualities as it recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.
	James Agee. A Death in the Family In its lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee has created an overwhelmingly powerful novel of innocence, tenderness, and loss that should be read aloud for the sheer music of its prose.
	Elizabeth Bowen. The Death of the Heart In this piercing story of innocence betrayed set in the thirties, the orphaned Portia is stranded in the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of her wealthy half-brother's home in London.There she encounters the attractive, carefree cad Eddie. To him, Portia is at once child and woman, and her fears her gushing love. To her, Eddie is the only reaason to be alive. But when Eddie follows Portia to a sea-side resort, the flash of a cigarette lighter in a darkened cinema illuminates a stunning romantic betrayal--and sets in motion one of the most moving and desperate flights of the heart in modern literature.
	James Dickey. Deliverance A canoe trip down a wild North Georgia river turns into a primitive nightmare that will leave one man dead--and three men changed forever.
	Robert Stone. Dog Soldiers In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional killers - and the price of survival was dangerously high.
	John Cheever. Falconer In a nightmarish prison a convict named Farragut struggles to remain a man. Out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation, Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction.
	John Fowles. The French Lieutenant's Woman A woman, ostracized by Victorian society and abandoned by her French lieutenant lover, fascinates a man who resolves to unravel the mystery of her clandestine past. The French Lieutenant's Woman is a feat of seductive storytelling that effectively invents anew the Victorian novel.
	Doris M. Lessing. The Golden Notebook The experiences of two women provide the framework for an intense literary study of liberated womanhood.
	James Baldwin. Go Tell it on the Mountain With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America. Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghetto, starkly contrasting the attitudes of two generations of an embattles family, Go Tell It On The Mountain is an unsurpassed portrayal of human beings caught up in a dramatic struggle and of a society confronting inevitable change.
	Margaret Mitchell. Gone with the Wind A monumental classic considered by many to be not only the greatest love story ever written, but also the greatest Civil War saga.
	John Steinbeck. The Grapes Of Wrath Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, "The Grapes of Wrath" is also the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California.
	Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow A convoluted, allusive novel about a metaphysical quest.
	F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby Gatsby embodies the naive American notion that it is possible to invent oneself and persuade the world to accept that definition. Gatsby's youthful neighbor, Nick Carraway, fascinated by both the display of enormous wealth and the essential integrity that he perceives in Gatsby 's vision, becomes his confidante and accomplice in his plan to recapture the heart of Daisy Buchanan.
	Evelyn Waugh. A Handful of Dust Laced with cynicism and truth, "A Handful of Dust" satirizes a certain stratum of English life where all the characters have money, but lack practically every other credential. Murderously urbane, it depicts the breakup of a marriage in the London gentry, where the errant wife suffers from terminal boredom, and becomes enamoured of a social parasite and professional luncheon-goer.
	Carson McCullers. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter A sensitive teenage girl discovers the meaning of loneliness.
	Graham Greene. The Heart of the Matter Scobie, a police officer serving in a war-time West African state, is distrusted, being scrupulously honest and immune to bribery. But then he falls in love, and in doing so is forced to betray everything he believes in, with tragic consequences.
	Saul Bellow. Herzog A multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption.
	Marilynne Robinson. Housekeeping The story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience.
	V.S. Naipaul. A House for Mr. Biswas In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous-and endless-struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own.
	Robert Graves. I, Claudius Considered an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings of the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and the Mad Caligula to become emperor in 41 A.D. A masterpiece.
	David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest
	Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man An African-American man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.
	William Faulkner. Light In August The story od Lena Grove's search for the father of her unborn child, and features one of Faulkner's most memorable characters: Joe Christmas, a desperate drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.
	C.S. Lewis. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe  Four English schoolchildren find their way through the back of a wardrobe into the magic land of Narnia and assist Aslan, the golden lion , to triumph over the White Witch , who has cursed the land with eternal winter.
	Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita Lolita tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is aroused to erotic desire only by a young girl.
	William Golding. Lord Of The Flies The classic tale of a group of English school boys who are left stranded on an unpopulated island, and who must confront not only the defects of their society but the defects of their own natures.
	J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard, Merry, Pippin, and Sam, Gimli the Dwarf, Legolas the Elf, Boromir of Gondor, and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider.
	Henry Green. Loving Contrasts the lives of servants and masters in an Irish castle during World War II.
	Kingsley Amis. Lucky Jim Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red-brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand.
	Christina Stead. The Man Who Loved Children Every family lives in an evolving story, told by all its members, inside a landscape of portentous events and characters. Their view of themselves is not shared by people looking from outside in--visitors, and particularly not relatives--for they have to see something pretty humdrum, even if, as in this case, the fecklessness them complain of is extreme.
	Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children A fascinating family saga about the birth and maturity of a land and its people - a brilliant incarnation of the human comedy.
	Martin Amis. Money
	Walker Percy. The Moviegoer Kate's desperate struggle to maintain her sanity forces her cousin Binx to relinquish his dreamworld.
	Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway Direct and vivid in its telling of the details of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the novel manages ultimately to deliver much more. It is the feelings that loom behind those daily events--the social alliances, the shopkeeper's exchange, the fact of death--that give Mrs. Dalloway texture and richness.
	William S. Burroughs. Naked Lunch Hustler-addict Bill Lee travels from New York to Tangiers, running from the police and searching for a place to take drugs, until he enters the hallucinatory fantasy world of Interzone, where individual freedom confronts the forces of totalitarianism.
	Richard Wright. Native Son Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny: by chance, it was for murder and rape. "Native Son" tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.
	William Gibson. Neuromancer Case was the best interface cowboy who ever ran in earth's computer matrix. Then he doublecrossed the wrong people...
	Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.
	George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four To Winston Smith, a young man who works in the Ministry of Truth (Minitru for short), come two people who transform his life completely. One is Julia, whom he meets after she hands him a slip reading, "I love you." The other is O'Brien, who tells him, "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness." The way in which Winston is betrayed by the one and, against his own desires and instincts, ultimately betrays the other, makes a story of mounting drama and suspense.
	Jack Kerouac. On The Road On the Road chronicles Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent, from East Coast to West Coast to Mexico, with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West". As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty", the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience.
	Ken Kesey. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest An inmate of a mental institution tries to find the freedom and independence denied him in the outside world.
	Jerzy Kosinski. The Painted Bird A harrowing story that follows the wanderings of a boy abandoned by his parents during World War II, this classic novel, originally published in 1965, is a dark masterpiece that examines the proximity of terror and savagery to innocence and love. It is the first, and the most famous, novel by one of the most important and original writers of this century.
	Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade's self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.
	E.M. Forster. A Passage to India A classic account of the clash of cultures in British India after the turn of the century.
	Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays A dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It As It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation. Joan Didion chose Hollywood to serve as her microcosm of contemporary society and exposed a culture characterized by emptiness and ennui. Maria Wyeth is an emotional drifter who has become almost anesthetized against pain and pleasure. She finds herself, in her early thirties, radically divorced from husband, lovers, friends, her own past and her own future. Actress, daughter, wife, mother, woman: she has played each role to the sound of one hand clapping.
	Philip Roth. Portnoy's Complaint Thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality and at the same time held back by the iron grip of his childhood, Alexander Portnoy is one of Philip Roth's most intriguing and hilarious characters.
	A. S. Byatt. Possession As a pair of young scholars research the lives of two Victorian poets, they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire-- from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany. What emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passion and ideas.
	Graham Greene. The Power and the Glory The last priest is on the run. During an anti-clerical purge in one of the southern states of Mexico, he is hunted like a hare. Too human for heroism, too humble for martyrdom, the little worldly 'whisky priest' is nevertheless impelled towards his squalid Calvary as much by his own compassion for humanity as by the efforts of his pursuers. A baleful vulture of doom hovers over this modern crucifixion story, but above the vulture soars an eagle -- the inevitability of the Church's triumph.
	Muriel Spark. The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie The critically acclaimed story of an independent-minded Scottish schoolteacher.
	John Updike. Rabbit, Run Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more elusive than a medal, and Harry must continue to run--from his wife, his life, and from himself, until he reaches the end of the road and has to turn back....
	E.L. Doctorow. Ragtime Three remarkable American families--rich white, Harlem black, immigrant Jew--catch the spirit of this country and the shimmering, shattering forces that come together in wonder and terror, in an age when all things seemed possible.
	William Gaddis. The Recognitions
	Dashiell Hammett. Red Harvest When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.
	Richard Yates. Revolutionary Road The story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple who have lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.
	Paul Bowles. Sheltering Sky The story of three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II examines the way Americans apprehend an alien culture and the way their incomprehension destroys them.
	Kurt Vonegut. Slaughterhouse-Five Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
	Neal Stephenson. Snow Crash In the not-too-distant future, the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States is revealed to be a tangled web of corporate-franchise city states, and the Internet is all-powerful. In this mind-altering 21st-century adventure, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior in the metaverse and helps a friend who freaks out on a new designer drug called Snow Crash.
	John Barth. The Sot-Weed Factor This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting...to roam the world since Candide" (Time ).
	William Faulkner. The Sound And The Fury By turns lyrical and dramatic, hilarious and heartbreaking, The Sound and the Fury is the tragic story of beautiful Caddy Comapson and the dissolution of her family.
	Richard Ford. The Sportswriter As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people--men, mostly--who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to. But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage. In the course of the Easter week in which Ford's moving novel transpires, Bascombe will end up losing the remnants of his familiar life, though with his spirits soaring.
	John Le Carre. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold The tale of a British agent who longs to end his career but undertakes one final, bone-chilling assignment. When the last agent under his command is killed and Alec Leamas is called back to London, he hopes to come in from the cold for good. His spymaster, Control, however, has other plans. Determined to bring down the head of East German Intelligence and topple his organization, Control once more sends Leamas into the fray -- this time to play the part of the dishonored spy and lure the enemy to his ultimate defeat.
	Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises The story of a group of Americans and English on a sojourn from Paris to Paloma, evokes in poignant detail, life among the expatriates on Paris's Left Bank during the 1920s and conveys in brutally realistic descriptions the power and danger of bullfighting in Spain.
	Zora Neal Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person-- no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.
	Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart Achebe's masterpiece tells the story of Okonkwo, strongman of an Ibo village in Nigeria, as he witnesses the destruction of his culture and the loss of his own place within it.
	Harper Lee. To Kill A Mockingbird The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice.
	Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse A landmark of modern fiction, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse explores the subjective reality of everyday life in the Hebrides for the Ramsay family.
	Henry Miller. Tropic Of Cancer Chronicles the bohemian life of a penniless artist living in Paris between the world wars.
	Philip K. Dick. Ubik Philip K. Dick's searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation is a tour de force of panoramic menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again.
	Iris Murdoch. Under the Net Set in a part of London where struggling writers rub shoulders with successful bookies, and film starlets with frantic philosophers. Its hero, Jake Donaghue, is a likable young man who makes a living out of translation work and sponging off his friends. A meeting with Anna, an old flame, leads him into a series of fantastic adventures.
	Malcolm Lowry. Under the Volcano The British consul in Mexico goes on an alcoholic binge that will seal his fate.
	Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons. Watchmen A group of super heroes plagued by all too human failings fall from grace while the concept of the super hero is dissected and inverted as strangely realistic characters are stalked by an unknown assassin.
	Don De Lillo. White Noise  After a deadly toxic accident and his wife's addiction to an experimental drug, a man is forced to question everything about his life.
	Zadie Smith. White Teeth A spectacular, riotously entertaining epic set in post-World War II London, "White Teeth" tells the story of two families, whose hilarious and tortured lives capture all the optimism and absurdity of the past half-century.
	Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea Beautiful, wealthy Antoinette Cosway's passionate love for the arrogant Mr. Rochester threatens to destroy her idyllic Caribbean existence and her very life, in a novel based on Jane Eyre.