The story involves a young man (Hans Castorp), who visits a cousin in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps before World War I. After manifesting symptoms of tuberculosis, he remains there for seven years. The characters he meets during this time forms a microcosm of pre-war Europe and represents a classic example of the German Bildungsroman. The work was instrumental in winning Mann the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1929.

We are in an elegant hôtel particulier in the center of Paris. Renée, the building's concierge, is short, ugly, and plump. She has bunions on her feet. She is cantankerous and addicted to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she is everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in a posh Parisian neighborhood. But Renée has a secret: she is a ferocious autodidact who furtively devours...

"One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead. One minute she was breakfasting with him and packing for an upcoming trip, the next, she finds him motionless in their bathtub. Like something out of a dream, next to the tub Jia Jia discovers a pencil sketch of a strange watery figure, an image that swims into Jia Jia's mind and won't leave. The mysterious drawing launches Jia Jia on an...

"The Eternal Wonder tells the coming-of-age story of Randolph Colfax (Rann for short), an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris, a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea that will change his life forever--and, ultimately, to love. Rann falls for the beautiful and equally brilliant Stephanie Kung, who lives in Paris with her Chinese father and has no contact with her American mother,...

The astonishing debut novel from international number one bestselling author Paullina Simons, beautifully repackaged Tully Makker is a tough young woman from the wrong side of the tracks and she is not always easy to like. But if Tully gives friendship and loyalty, she gives them for good, and she forms an enduring bond with Jennifer and Julie, school friends from very different backgrounds. As they grow into the world of the seventies and eighties,...

"When Paul and Julian meet as university freshmen in early 1970s Pittsburgh, they are immediately drawn to one another. A talented artist, Paul is sensitive and agonizingly insecure, incomprehensible to his working-class family, and desolate with grief over his father's recent death. Paul sees the wealthy, effortlessly charming Julian as his sole intellectual equal - an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. He idolizes his friend...

""It's time to come Home. All five of you. Or else." Saskia was a damaged, lonely teenager when she arrived at the lakeside commune called Home. She was entranced by the tang of sourdough starter; the midnight call of the loons; the triumph of foraging wild mushrooms from the forest floor. But most of all she was taken with Abraham, Home's charismatic leader, the North Star to Saskia and the four other teens who lived there, her best and only friends....

The classic novel follows Stephen Dedalus from his days as a student at the Clongowes Wood School, to the deep religious conflict he experiences at a day school in Dublin, to his college years during which he challenges the conventions of his upbringing.

"Sometimes I forget that my Mum is dead. But that is probably better than remembering. When Frankie's mother dies, the six-year-old comes up with a plan: go to France, find a police station, and ask the officers to ring his father--and so begins Giller-nominated Pauline Holdstock's eighth novel. Narrated in turns by Frankie, who likes cheese, numbers, the sea when it's pink and "smooth like counting," and being alone when he feels bad, and a cast...

A girl who would save her mentally ill artist father from succumbing to the pressures of fame follows clues in the illustrations of his remarkable children's book before uncovering an astonishing family secret.