Jefferson Mays

London, 2010. Grieving the loss of her lover, Swinburne museum curator Catherine Gehrig is given a special project--bring back to life an automaton whose original owner, 19th century Englishman Henry Brandling, was also confronted with the mystery of life and death.

German-American Paul Schumann is a brilliant mobster hitman who gets caught and is offered a deal: hunt down and kill Reinhardt Ernst, the ruthless architect of Hitler's clandestine rearmament or face the electric chair. From a boarding house near the Tiergarten, a huge park in central Berlin also known as the Garden of Beasts, Schumann stalks Ernst while a Berlin police officer and the entire Third Reich apparatus search frantically for him.

Bernhard Schlink burst onto the literary scene with the internationally best-selling Oprah's Book Club selection The Reader. Through his unique brand of gripping narrative, Schlink scores again with The Weekend, the tale of old friends who come together for a remarkable reunion. One of the group is a convicted murderer and terrorist, fresh out of prison and joined by his devoted sister. But another guest has remained true to the cause that might spell...

Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898) is one of the most gripping psychological novellas ever written; a grim tale that could equally be a tale of madness or a tale of the supernatural. The depths and meaning of this story has been one of the most fascinating literary debates in all of literature. The intriguing asymmetry of The Turn of the Screw, between the seen vs. unseen, the internal v. the external, and good vs. evil, rises this book beyond...

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room brilliantly evokes six decades of Eastern European history, beginning in 1930s Czechoslovakia. Jewish newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer build their dream home, and despite the low hum of the German war machine reverberating through the land, the two look forward to a life of promise. But as war becomes inevitable, their lives are transformed in profound ways.

As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable. But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. In...

In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans, a banker originally from the Netherlands-finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic...

These six stories, written at the height of Camus' artistic powers, all depict people at decisive, revelatory moments in their lives. Translated by Justin O'Brien.

"Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Then he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who upends Macon's insular world--and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life."--Publisher.

In what is widely considered to be the first Gothic novel, a monk must resist a temptation that could consume his soul Ambrosio has developed a reputation across Madrid for his piety and selflessness in his role as a monk. Left on the abbey's doorstep as a child, Ambrosio took quickly to monastic life, and his fellow monks pronounced him a gift from the Virgin Mary. Despite his virtue, his status as the abbey's favorite son is put in jeopardy with...