Hester Prynne is the adulteress, forced by the Puritan community to wear a scarlet letter A on the breast of her gown. Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister and the secret father of her child, Pearl, struggles with the agony of conscience and his own weakness. Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband, revenges himself on Dimmesdale by calculating assaults on the frail mental state of the conscience-stricken cleric. The result is an American tragedy of stark...

Shortly after the death of her husband, a wealthy Southern widow is visited by an impoverished young woman with a small boy. A mistress? A son? Julia Springer can't believe it, only to discover that the whole town has known for years. But she will rise to the occasion when the boy is kidnaped.

Working-class Jude Fawley longs to be a scholar. But after scheming local girl Arabella Donn traps him in marriage, Jude finds his university dreams drifting away. When his wife abandons him, a window of opportunity opens, and Jude moves to Christminster to work as a stonemason-his eye still on his studies. Then he falls in love with the modern-minded Sue Bridehead, and his descent into scandal, tragedy, and ruin truly begins. Shunned by society and...

The Sound and the Fury, first published in 1929, is perhaps William Faulkner’s greatest book. It was immediately praised for its innovative narrative technique, and comparisons were made with Joyce and Dostoyevsky, but it did not receive popular acclaim until the late forties, shortly before Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel reveals the story of the disintegration of the Compson family, doomed inhabitants of Faulkner’s...

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire. Together they ruthlessly kill or vanquish all who fall out of their favor. Their marriage begins to unravel, and the story moves toward its shocking reckoning.

In Las Vegas, Fanny Thornton Reed's children turn against one another after she chooses her first husband's illegitimate son Jeff to run Babylon, the family's successful casino.

After the death of her son, Arden Gentry tries to find the son she was forced to give up at birth.

The book describes the early life of Clara Walpole, the daughter of a migrant farm worker; her life after she leaves her father; her romance with a rum-runner; and her marriage to a rich man, whom she convinces is the father of her illegitimate baby. The final part of the novel deals with the childhood and adolescence of Swan, the son.

When he inherits the estate of his estranged brother, Ricky Lam decides to develop the resort his brother had planned to build on an island off the coast of South Carolina, where Ricky finds new love with his former sister-in-law.

At age eighty-two and in failing health, Olivia Morrow must decide whether she will expose a long-held family secret and reveal that her cousin, Catherine, gave birth to a son at age seventeen and gave him up for adoption before entering a convent. Now deceased, Sister Catherine is being considered for beatification by the Catholic Church. Olivia Morrow, a Manhattan psychologist, begins to suspect that her husband Jonathan, a brilliant obstetrician...