Ben Richards has no job, no money, and a young daughter who urgently needs medical attention. Desperate, out of options, he signs up for The Running Man, ‘the biggest show in the country.’ It’s an ultraviolent competition where the stakes could not be higher. Ben must stay alive for thirty days while an elite strike force, trained to kill, hunts for him. If he can survive for a month, he wins a...

Travel to 1920s China, a time when the last emperor still ruled and the sweeping changes of the twentieth century were distant rumblings, with this timeless, evocative classic tale of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his family as they struggle to survive in the midst of vast political and social upheavals.

Second in the trilogy that began with The Good Earth, Buck's classic and starkly real tale of sons rising against their honored fathers tells of the bitter struggle to the death between the old and the new in China. Revolutions sweep the vast nation, leaving destruction and death in their wake, yet also promising emancipation to China's oppressed millions who are groping for a way to survive in...

Pearl divers discover giant salamanders on one of the islands in the Pacific Ocean. It quickly becomes clear that the amphibians are capable of speaking various languages, reading, and reasoning. Soon, industrialists and magnates begin to use the trusting and hardworking creatures in construction projects throughout the world's oceans. The salamander population grows rapidly, and they form...

Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts: a talent for learning languages and a skill in telling lies. As a boy he meets a foreign commander who adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of adventurous friends. Spurred on by myths and their own reveries, they decide to go in search of the legendary priest-king Prester John...

Every newcomer has their own Moscow. For the heroine of this book, the city is exactly as she wanted to see it: noisy, chaotic, but surprisingly not malicious – thanks to the wonderful people who are ready to offer help precisely when it seemed there was no one to turn to.

In this amazing philosophical book, which ridicules the modern insane world, the absurdity and cruelty of human actions, fantasy and reality, madness and logic, author and character, truth and falsehood, fact and fiction merge into one.

The Tokyo-Montana Express is a 1980 collection of 131 short stories by Richard Brautigan, written while he was dividing his time between Japan and Montana. The book is structured as a train journey, with each chapter representing a ‘station’ that offers brief, often surreal, vignettes blending the cultures of Tokyo and Montana, showcasing Brautigan's signature mix of humor, melancholy, and...

Lotte in Weimar’ is an elegant and captivating novel by the great Thomas Mann, in which profound reflections on the artist, his often painful existence in the real world, and the true meaning of life are closely intertwined with an interesting and slightly ironic plot – a meeting in Weimar between the aging and celebrated Goethe and his former beloved... Did this meeting actually happen? And if...

‘Fight Club’ is Chuck Palahniuk's most famous novel. Everyone remembers the film directed by David Fincher, starring Brad Pitt, right? It's based on this book. It's a challenging novel, a novel created in defiance of everything and everyone, describing a generation of embittered people who have lost their sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, who they are themselves and who surrounds...

First published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever experienced. The writer’s account of an assignment he...

On the surface, the novel is a love story between the protagonist Jake Barnes—a man whose war wound has made him unable to have sex—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Jake is an expatriate American journalist living in Paris, while Brett is a twice-divorced Englishwoman with bobbed hair and numerous love affairs, and embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. Brett's affair with...