Northanger Abbey

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Valerie Frankel

It's uncanny! Within six months of breaking up with her, Peg Silver's ex-lovers always meet and marry the women of their dreams. Even worse than being the eternal bridesmaid, she's the last girlfriend, the one who awakens in a guy the knowledge of what he's always wanted in a relationship ... and it's never with Peg. Obviously, a major lifestyle change is seriously called for, which is why the distraught interior landscape designer says good-bye to Manhattan and late-night lattes with pal Nina, and hello to a farmhouse on ten acres in tiny, backwater Manshire, Vermont, hoping to meet the ultimate, all-organic country man (without too much facial hair) to keep her warm in those frosty New England winters.Instead, Peg finds herself at Inward Bound -- a proactive adult-education retreat for the hapless and hopelessly lovelorn -- to try to lift her dreaded "girlfriend curse." A steamy (and expressly forbidden) dalliance with gorgeous woman-eater Ray probably isn't going to help cure her. But some romantic insight could arise from her attraction to Linus, Inward Bound's sexy, scruffy, smart and still-single founder. Perhaps there is a secret to be unearthed in the crunchy Green Mountains, one that will magically transform Peg Silver from the Perpetual Also Ran to the Big Winner in love.

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Leslie Stella

Being yourself can be such a bad idea. For sixteen-year-old Badi Hessamizadeh, life is a series of humiliations. After withdrawing from public school under mysterious circumstances, Badi enters Magnificat Academy. To make things "easier," his dad has even given him a new name: Bud Hess. Grappling with his Iranian-American identity, clinical depression, bullying, and a barely bottled rage, Bud is an outcast who copes by resorting to small revenges and covert acts of defiance, but the pressures of his home life, plummeting grades, and the unrequited affection of his new friend, Nikki, prime him for a more dangerous revolution. Strange letters to the editor begin to appear in Magnificat's newspaper, hinting that some tragedy will befall the school. Suspicion falls on Bud, and he and Nikki struggle to uncover the real culprit and clear Bud's name. Permanent Record explodes with dark humor, emotional depth, and a powerful look at the ways the bullied fight back.

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introduction by Donald Thomas

The foundling Tom Jones is found on the property of a benevolent, wealthy landowner. Tom grows up to be a vigorous, kind-hearted young man, whose love of his neighbor's well-born daughter brings class friction to the fore. The presence of prostitution and promiscuity in Tom Jones caused a sensation at the time it was published, as such themes were uncommon. It is divided into 18 shorter books, and is considered one of the first English-language novels.

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Amos Oz

Reality and fiction blend in an ingenious Rothian short novel from the celebrated author of A Tale of Love and Darkness - witty but elegiac, playful and sexy but somehow deadly serious, it's about a bored writer who goes to a reading and has a brief sexual skirmish with a female reader. Or does he?The novel centres around 8 hours in the life of the Author (unnamed), a literary celebrity in his forties, who is in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night to give a reading. Bored, he looks for distraction - and finds copy. On the way he stops at a cafe where he 'bumps into' some of his own characters. In his head he conjures up the life stories of the people he meets, not least Ricky, an equally bored but seductive waitress. Later, even as the reading from his new book is underway, and the obligatory inane questions ("Why do you write? Do you write with a pen or on a computer?) have come and gone — he weaves stories round the audience and the panel. Afterwards, the Author invites the professional reader for a drink before walking her home. It turns out she lives just opposite, so she goes home and he wanders off into the night. But he returns, climbs the many flights of stairs to the flat, where she lives alone with her cat - and they have a brief but steamy sexual skirmish. Or is this merely a middle-aged writer's fantasy? We never quite know where reality ends and invention begins. He spends the rest of the night wandering, smoking, inventing, regretting and thinking till dawn. The Rhyming of the title refers to the popular couplets of a Hebrew poet, once a household name but now virtually forgotten, whose little rhymes about life punctuate the story. At dawn, the Author reads in yesterday's paper that the poet has just died, almost unnoticed.This is a gem of a work by a master, about writing, reading, growing old and the elusive chimera of literary posterity.