"This response to Camus's The Stranger is at once a love story and a political manifesto about post-colonial Algeria, Islam, and the irrelevance of Arab lives. He was the brother of "the Arab" killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus's classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling's memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name--Musa--and...

The only authorized translation of the bestselling masterpiece by one of the greatest authors of our time, "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. "Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all...

The slow but inevitable moral degeneration of a weak woman. Describes the patient rendering of the squalor and narrowness of provincial life and of its effect on the woman's mind.

1870. Professor Aronnax agrees to join the crew of a ship whose mission is to investigate a series of attacks by a mysterious sea monster. Finally hunting their quarry down, the men discover that it is a large electrically powered submarine, the Nautilus. Aronnax and hot-tempered harpoonist Ned Land are imprisoned on this remarkable vessel, captained by the renegade scientist and misanthropic recluse, Nemo. Among deep-sea volcanoes, sunken ships,...

Maria lives in a remote village in Burgundy, where she learns that she has a gift for communicating with nature. Hundreds of miles away in Italy, Clara discovers that she possesses a stunning musical genius and is sent from the countryside to Rome to develop her preternatural abilities. Barbery's The life of the elves tells the story of two children whose extraordinary talents will bring them into contact with magical worlds and malevolent forces....

"André Gide is the inventor of modern metafiction and of autofiction, and his short novel Marshlands shows him handling both forms with a deft and delightful touch. The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing "Marshlands," which is about a reclusive character who lives all alone in a stone tower. The narrator, by contrast, is anything but a recluse: He is an indefatigable social butterfly, flitting about the Paris literary world and...

Classic novel about the adventures of Phileas Fogg and his servant Passerpartout. One day while Phileas Fogg is with some friends, he reads in a newspaper that it is possible to travel around the world in eighty days. No one believes this is true, except Phileas. Then Phileas bets them that he could make the journey in eighty or under days, and then leaves along with his servant.

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation...

"The feel-good #1 bestselling French novel about a woman whose mission to cure her "routine-itis" leads her to lasting joy and true fulfillment, for fans of The Alchemist and Hector and the Search for Happiness. At thirty-eight and a quarter years old, Paris native Camille has everything she needs to be happy, or so it seems: a good job, a loving husband, a wonderful son. Why then does she feel as if happiness has slipped through her fingers? All...

In fifteenth-century Paris, a disfigured man named Quasimodo, who was abandoned as an infant in the cathedral of Notre-Dame and now lives in its bell tower, must come to the aid of a beautiful gypsy girl named Esmeralda after she repels the advances of the cruel archdeacon Don Claude Frollo.