Modern Classics to Read

19 items

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   Beloved(1987)

   Book· ★ 7.8· African American History · Ohio · History

   Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a s
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   Never Let Me Go(2005)

   Book· ★ 7.6· Fiction · Organ donors · Cloning

   Ishiguro explores what it means to have a soul and how art distinguishes man from other life forms. But above all, *Never Let Me Go* is a study of friendship and the bonds we form which make or break while we come of age.
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   The Road(2006)

   Book· ★ 7.8· Fiction · Dystopia · Adventure

   Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods.

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   The Kite Runner

   (2004)

   Book· ★ 8.2· New York Times bestseller · nyt:trade_fiction_paperback=2008-10-26 · Male friendship

   The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.
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   Life of Pi

   (2003)

   Book· ★ 7.9· Teenage boys · Zoo animals · Fiction

   After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan… and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary works of fiction in recent years.
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   Middlesex

   (2002)

   Book· ★ 8.3· Intersexuality · Greek Americans · Teenagers

   A unique coming of age story. While the main character in this novel is dealing with gender identity issues the main focus of this brilliantly written story is the confusion we all face as we grow into the person we were meant to be. The reader finds himself identifying with the main character's experiences. This is a brilliantly written story. The prose is honest in a way that few authors dare to write. Every word, every action, every thought, is symbolic of the common human experience.
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   Atonement

   (2001)

   Book· ★ 7.5· historical romance · Dunkirk Evacuation · National Book Critics Circle Award Winner

   Atonement is a 2001 British metafiction novel written by Ian McEwan. Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.
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   The Remains of the Day

   (1994)

   Book· ★ 8.4· Man Booker Prize Winner · award:man_booker_prize=1989 · Literature

   In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.
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   White Teeth

   (2000)

   Book· ★ 7.4· Fiction · Immigrants · Male friendship

   One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, WHITE TEETH is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.
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   The God of Small Things

   (1997)

   Book· ★ 7.6· Literary Fiction · Women's Fiction · dalit

   The God of Small Things is the debut novel of Indian writer Arundhati Roy. It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" that lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how much." The book explores how the small things affect people's behavior and their lives. The book also reflects its irony against casteism, which is a major discrimination that prevails in India. It won the Booker Prize in 1997.
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   A Fine Balance

   (1995)

   Book· ★ 8.5· literary fiction · historical fiction · castration

   A Fine Balance is Rohinton Mistry's eagerly awaited second novel and follows his critically acclaimed Such a Long Journey, the book that won three prestigious literary awards in 1991.
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   The Secret History

   (1992)

   Book· ★ 8.0· Fiction · College students · Teacher-student relationships

   Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last - inexorably - into evil.
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    Blindness (Harvest Book)

    (2000)

    Book
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    Norwegian Wood

    (1987)

    Book· ★ 7.8· Student · Theaterwissenschaft · Liebesbeziehung

    As his plane lands at a European airport, thirty-seven-year-old Toru Watanabe casually hears an old Beatles song. Suddenly, the music transports him back to his youth, to the turbulent Tokyo of the late sixties. He then remembers, with melancholy and unease, the unstable and mysterious Naoko, the girlfriend of his best—and only—friend from adolescence, Kizuki, and how Kizuki's suicide distanced them for a year until they reunited at university. There, they began an intimate relationship, which was soon cut short by Naoko’s fragile mental health, leading to her admission to a rest center. Short
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    The Handmaid's Tale

    (1985)

    Book· ★ 7.9· brothels · Canadian authors · Canadian fantasy fiction

    The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England, in a strongly patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state, known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. The central character and narrator is a woman named Offred, one of the group known as "handmaids", who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the "commanders" — the ruling class of men in Gilead.
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    Disgrace

    (1999)

    Book· ★ 7.3· abortion · euthanasia · animal shelters

    At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless, shunned by his friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife. He retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding, where a brief visit becomes an extended stay as he tries to find meaning from the one remaining relationship. David attempts to relate to Lucy and to a society with new racial complexities are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that shakes all of his beliefs and threatens to destroy his daughter. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely te
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    Cloud Atlas

    (2004)

    Book· ★ 7.9· Fate and fatalism · Fiction · Reincarnation

    From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists 2003” issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope.
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    The Corrections

    (2001)

    Book· ★ 7.9· dementia · alcoholism · Protestantism

    Like bookends of the past half century, the two generations of the Lambert family represent two very different aspects of America. Alfred, the patriarch, is a distant, puritanical company man; he is also slipping into Parkinson's-induced dementia. His wife, Enid, is a model Midwestern housewife, at once deferential and controlling. Their three children--Gary, an uptight banker, baffled by his own persistent unhappiness; Chip, and ex-professor now failing as a screenwriter; and Denise, and up-and-coming chief in a hot new restaurant--have little time for Enid and Alfred. But when Enid calls for
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    A Little Life

    (2008)

    Book· ★ 7.9· LGBTQ novels · Coming of Age · Literary

    A Little Life is a 2015 novel by American novelist Hanya Yanagihara. The novel was written over the course of eighteen months. Despite the length and difficult subject matter, it became a bestseller.