A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...

"It's 1999. Martin Hill is ten years old, crazy about Arsenal and has a minor crush on a girl named Betty. Then he makes it to the final two in the casting for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. In the end, the other boy is picked for the role of a lifetime. A devastated Martin tries to move on with his life. But how can he escape his failure, especially when it's the most famous film series in the world?"--Provided by publisher.

A French courtesan with a passion for life and romance, sacrifices her happiness to prove her love for a young man whose family disapproves of their relationship.

"The Man Who Laughs" was originally published in April 1869 under the French title L'Homme qui rit and is one of Hugo's more obscure works. It is "a dark novel about royal and aristocratic despotism", but Hugo intended parallels between the England depicted and the France of Louis-Philippe and the Régence.

It is 1919. On a summer's night in Normandy, a newborn baby is left in a basket outside the home of Albert and Jeanne Arnaud. The childless couple take the foundling in, name him Jean, and decide to raise him as their own, though his parentage remains a mystery.

The unfettered exuberance of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the storms of phenomenal life it offers for our inspection, the honor it gives to the deformed, the cloacal, and the profane aspects of existence are at the very heart of Rabelais' genius. But the author of this fantasia on the lives of a father-and-son pair of giants was one of the most magnificent and magnificently learned products of the Renaissance; and he also represents, as well as any of...

Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras's childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts.

When headhunter Fabrice Valantine faces a smoking ban at work, he decides to undergo hypnotherapy to help kick the habit. At first the treatment is a success but, as the stresses of daily life begin to overwhelm him, he can't help lighting up again. To his great distress, he finds that smoking no longer offers him the ecstatic release it once did. Until, that is, he stumbles across a criminal way to recapture that intense nicotine joy.

Nana Coupeau is a beautiful woman, able to attract men of enormous wealth with the crook of her finger. Part-time prostitute, part-time actress, she makes her debut in a mediocre operetta The Blonde Venus at the bustling Paris World's Fair of 1867. She can't sing, act or dance, yet she is stunning. Nana soon rockets through elite Parisian society, and, blinded by desire, men crawl to her feet, yielding to her every demand. Affections are manipulated,...

The story of how the convict Jean-Valjean struggled to escape his past and reaffirm his humanity, in a world brutalized by poverty and ignorance, became the gospel of the poor and opressed.