At the center of Martin Chuzzlewit is Martin himself, very old, very rich, very much on his guard. What he suspects (with good reason) is that every one of his close and distant relations, now converging in droves on the country inn where they believe he is dying, will stop at nothing to become the inheritor of his great fortune. Having unjustly disinherited his grandson, young Martin, the old fellow now trusts no one but Mary Graham, the pretty girl...

"Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, a year after Butler's death, his marvelously uninhibited satire savages Victorian bourgeois values as personified by multiple generations of the Pontifex family. A thinly veiled account of his own upbringing in the bosom of a God-fearing Christian family, Butler's scathingly funny depiction of the self-righteous hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life was hailed by George Bernard...

"The author of the classic bestsellers The Secret History and The Little Friend returns with a brilliant, highly anticipated new novel. A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds...

In Basil's secret and unconsummated marriage to the linen-draper's sexually precocious daughter, and the shocking betrayal, insanity, and death that follow, Collins reveals the bustling, commercial London of the 19th century wreaking its vengeance on a still powerful aristocratic world.

Thirteen-year-old Everett stares at the whitewashed gallows emblazoned against an orange sunset as his father, found guilty of murder, plunges through the trap door. Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves takes the now-orphaned boy to Fort Gibson where he becomes a stable hand until early manhood. Believing his father innocent and Wiley Stuart guilty, Everett hunts down the outlaw, but Deputy Marshal Ben Williams wrests away the prisoner and denies Everett all...

Fat City is a vivid novel of defiance and struggle, of the potent promise of the good life and the desperation and drink that waylay those whom it eludes. Stockton, California, is the novel's setting: the Lido Gym, the Hotel Coma, Main Street's lunchrooms and dark bars offer a temporary respite to the men and women whose backbreaking work in the fields barely allows them to make a living. When two men meet in the gym-the ex-boxer Billy Tully and...