Open Road: 9207 books

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: This psychological drama set in Liverpool during WWII follows the courtship of a US soldier and an English working-class girl. Rita is a passive and naïve seventeen-year-old who has been raised by two middle-aged aunts: Nellie, a curmudgeonly dressmaker...

A treasure trove of mysteries drawn from the case files of the world’s cleverest private investigators.   The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes features many of the consulting detective’s best-known cases. “A Scandal in Bohemia” finds Holmes matching wits with—and being outfoxed by—a beautiful...

In London during the Blitz, an amnesiac must outwit a twisted Nazi plot in this “master thriller” of espionage, murder, and deception (Time).   On a peaceful Sunday afternoon, Arthur Rowe comes upon a charity fete in the gardens of a Cambridgeshire vicarage where he wins a game of chance. If...

The New York Times–bestselling author of The King Must Die continues the story of the mythical Greek hero, Theseus, the founder of Athens. In The Bull from the Sea, the story of Theseus resumes with the hero’s return from Knossos. In the wake of his father’s suicide, Athens is now Theseus’s...

Four iconic novels of adventure, science, and fantasy from a master storyteller far ahead of his time. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a monster wreaks havoc in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The US government sends a French marine biologist, his servant, and a Canadian harpoonist...

The second in the Pulitzer Prize–winning historical fiction series takes Lanny Budd through the 1920s, from the rise of fascism to the crash on Wall Street. The First World War brought an abrupt end to Lanny Budd’s idyllic youth. Now, in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles, he barely recognizes...

W. H. Hudson’s trailblazing story of a pastoral utopia that harbors a dark secret After a landslide, Smith awakens groggy and confused. The landscape around him has changed dramatically. He wanders through the countryside, searching for any semblance of civilization, until a family takes...

Henry James’s beloved novel about a young woman’s search for freedom in a world that seeks to tie her to convention In the wake of her father’s death, young Isabel Archer decides to travel to England to visit her aunt, leaving behind the life set out for her in America and spurning the...

“Proof that Durrell can master any genre . . . [a] quiet but suspenseful spy thriller . . . with some similarities to Ian Fleming’s James Bond” (Early Bird Books).   After some especially taxing missions, seasoned secret agent Methuen wants nothing more than to take a long, relaxing...

A masterwork of science fiction that imagines the world not just how it could be, but how it should be In Boston in the year 1887, Julian West is hypnotized and falls into a deep sleep. He awakens at the dawn of a new millennium in an America where war, crime, and inequality no longer exist....

A brilliant study in the art of logical deduction by the author of The Scarlet Pimpernel He sits in the corner of the A.B.C. café, a length of string in his fingers. As the afternoon winds down, he ties and unties intricate knots—in the string and in his mind. No one in the café knows his...

A wealthy dowager confronts the brutality of the class system and fights for justice in this dramatic account of the Sacco and Vanzetti case With the publication of The Jungle in 1906, Upton Sinclair became the literary conscience of America. Two decades later, he brought his singular artistry...

The first installment in the groundbreaking Lensman series, one of the greatest space opera sagas of all time Nevia, located many light years from the Earth’s sun, is running out of iron, the primary source of energy for the planet’s dominant amphibious race. Armed with technology that...

An “adventurous . . . intelligent . . . ingenious” novel of crime and punishment in pre–World War II London (V. S. Pritchett). During a demonstration in Hyde Park, Communist bus driver Jim Drover acts on instinct to protect his wife by stabbing to death the policeman set to strike her...