Brave New World is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society that is challenged by only a single...

The novel begins with 16-year-old Steve Harmon writing in his book awaiting his trial for murder. Musing on his short time in prison so far, he decides to record this upcoming experience in the form of a movie screenplay. Kathy O'Brien, Steve's lawyer, informs him of what will happen during the trial. At this stage, only two of the four accused – James King and Steve – will be tried, since the other two accused – Richard "Bobo" Evans and Osvaldo Cruz – have entered into a plea bargain. When...

What if all the crushes you ever had found out how you felt about them…all at once? Sixteen-year-old Lara Jean Song keeps her love letters in a hatbox her mother gave her. They aren’t love letters that anyone else wrote for her; these are ones she’s written. One for every boy she’s ever loved—five in all. When she writes, she pours out her heart and soul and says all the things she would never say in real life, because her letters are for her eyes only. Until the day her secret letters are...

In autumn 1943, the unnamed narrator befriends Holly Golightly. The two are tenants in a brownstone apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Holly (age 18–19) is a country girl turned New York café society, girl. As such, she has no job and lives by socializing with wealthy men, who take her to clubs and restaurants, and give her money and expensive presents; she hopes to marry one of them. According to Capote, Golightly is not a prostitute, but an "American geisha". Holly likes to shock...

Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended.Dismayed by how women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she...

Andrea Sachs, a recent graduate of Brown University with a degree in English, moves to New York City with her best friend, Lily, a graduate student at Columbia. Andrea hopes to find a career in publishing and blankets the city with her résumé. She believes she'll be closer to her dream of working for The New Yorker if she can get a job in the magazine industry. She gets a surprise interview at the Elias-Clark Group and is hired as a junior assistant for Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of...

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race is a 2016 nonfiction book written by Margot Lee Shetterly. Shetterly started working on the book in 2010. The book takes place from the 1930s through the 1960s when some viewed women as inferior to men. The biographical text follows the lives of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three mathematicians who worked as computers (then a job description) at NASA, during the...

Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857 when the region is a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces. When John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, arrives in the area, an argument between Brown and Henry’s master quickly turns violent. Henry is forced to leave town—with Brown, who believes he’s a girl. Over the ensuing months, Henry—whom Brown nicknames Little Onion—conceals his true identity as he struggles to stay alive. Eventually, Little Onion...

On Enola's fourteenth birthday, her mother disappears, and Sherlock and Mycroft, Enola's brothers, conclude that her mother voluntarily left. Enola is devastated but eventually discovers elaborate ciphers her mother wrote, which leads her to conclude that she left to live with the Romani people and escape Victorian society's confines. Enola finds that her mother left money to fund her escape. When the eldest Mycroft insists that Enola attend boarding school and learn to be a proper lady, she...

Atticus Turner, working in Florida after leaving the army, returns home to Chicago after receiving a mysterious letter from his estranged father, Montrose, saying he had left Chicago to go to Ardham, Massachusetts, where he believed he could find some information on Atticus' mother's family (previously unknown to them). Atticus, his uncle George, and his childhood friend Letitia drive to Ardham to find Montrose. They are chased, accosted, and later nearly murdered by racists on the way. Once...

The hero of The Good Shepherd is Commander Krause, the captain of the fictional US Navy Mahan-class destroyer USS Keeling in World War II. Krause is in overall command of an escort force protecting an Atlantic convoy in the Battle of the Atlantic, shepherding it through the Mid-Atlantic gap where no antisubmarine aircraft are able to defend convoys. He finds himself in a difficult position. The voyage in question occurs early in 1942, shortly after the United States' entry into the war....

Sarah's Key is a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, first published in its French translation as Elle s'appelait Sarah in September 2006. Two main parallel plots are followed through the book. The first is that of ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski, a Jewish girl born in Paris, arrested with her parents during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup.  Before they go, she locks her four-year-old brother in a cupboard, thinking the family should be back in a few hours. The second plot follows Julia Jarmond, an American...

Taking place mostly in rural Georgia the story focuses on the life of African-American women in the southern United States in the 1930s, addressing numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture. Celie is a poor, uneducated 14-year-old girl living in the South in the early 1900s. She writes letters to God because the man she thought was her father, Alphonso, beats, and rapes her. Alphonso has already impregnated Celie once, a pregnancy that resulted in the...

The Help is 2009  about African Americans working in white households in Mississippi during the early 1960s.  The Help is set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, and told primarily from the first-person perspectives of three women: Aibileen Clark, Minny Jackson, and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan. Aibileen is a maid who takes care of children and cleans. Her own 24-year-old son, Treelore, died from an accident on his job. In the story, she is tending the Leefolt household and caring for...

The novel takes place in Three Rivers, Connecticut in the early 1990s. Dominick Birdsey's identical twin, Thomas Birdsey, suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. With medication, Thomas is able to live his life in relative peace and work at a coffee stand, but occasionally, he has severe episodes of his illness. Thinking he is making a sacrificial protest that will stop the Gulf War, Thomas cuts off his own hand while at a public library. Dominick sees him through the ensuing decision not to...

The Last Thing he wanted is a novel published by Joan Didion. The story centers on Elena McMahon, a reporter for The Washington Post who quits her job covering the 1984 US Presidential election to care for her father after her mother's death. In an unusual turn of events, she inherits his position as an arms dealer for the U.S. Government in Central America. In this sparsely written, quick-paced narrative, Elena struggles to cope with the spies, American military personnel, and the...

In the Tall Grass is a horror novella by American writers Stephen King and his son Joe Hill.  Cal and Becky Demuth are inseparable siblings (being called Irish twins by their parents, although they are 19 months apart). Becky finds out during her sophomore year of college that she is pregnant, leading the twins' parents to suggest she go live with her aunt and uncle until the baby is born.  While on this journey brother and sister enter a field of tall grass to rescue a boy, but they soon...

The Turn of the Screw is an 1898 horror novella by Henry James that first appeared in serial format in Collier's Weekly magazine (January 27 – April 16, 1898). In October 1898 it appeared in The Two Magics, a book published by Macmillan in New York City and Heinemann in London. Classified as both gothic fiction and a ghost story, the novella focuses on a governess who, caring for two children at a remote estate, becomes convinced that the grounds are haunted. In the century following its...

Based on the first two books in author Eoin Colfer wildly popular children's fantasy series, Walt Disney Studios' Artemis Fowl tells the story of adolescent criminal genius Artemis, who captures a vicious fairy, and attempts to harness her magical powers in a bid to rescue his family.

A mysterious man, Griffin, arrives at the local inn owned by Mr. and Mrs. Hall of the English village of Iping, West Sussex, during a snowstorm. The stranger wears a long-sleeved, thick coat and gloves; his face is hidden entirely by bandages except for a fake pink nose; and he wears a wide-brimmed hat. He is excessively reclusive, irascible, unfriendly, and an introvert. He demands to be left alone and spends most of his time in his rooms working with a set of chemicals and laboratory...

The book is narrated through the eyes of Pat Peoples, and occasionally Tiffany's through letters. A former history teacher who has moved back to his childhood home in Collingswood, New Jersey, after spending time in a Baltimore psychiatric hospital, Pat believes he has been away only a few months, but soon realizes it has been years, and struggles to piece together his lost memories and what has become of his wife, Nikki. He has a hypothesis that life is a film created by God and that its...

A young dog named Bella is separated from her owner, Lucas, and must find her way home. On her 400-mile journey, the lost dog meets new friends who help her find her way through the Colorado wilderness.

A  compulsively readable follow-up to her widely acclaimed debut novel, You. Joe Goldberg is no stranger to hiding bodies. In the past ten years, this thirty-something has buried four of them, collateral damage in his quest for love. Now he’s heading west to Los Angeles, the city of second chances, determined to put his past behind him. In Hollywood, Joe blends in effortlessly with the other young upstarts. He eats guac, works in a bookstore, and flirts with a journalist neighbor. But while...

"The Most Dangerous Game", also published as "The Hounds of Zaroff", is a short story by Richard Connell on January 19, 1924. The story features a big-game hunter from New York City who falls off a yacht and swims to what seems to be an abandoned and isolated island in the Caribbean, where he is hunted by a Russian aristocrat. The story is inspired by the big-game hunting safaris in Africa and South America that were particularly fashionable among wealthy Americans in the 1920s.  The story...

Meet Billy Bloom, a new student at the ultra-white, ultra-rich, ultra-conservative Dwight D. Eisenhower Academy and drag queen extraordinaire. Actually, ?drag queen? does not begin to describe Billy and his fabulousness. Any way you slice it, Billy is not a typical seventeen-year-old, and the Bible Belles, Aberzombies, and Football Heroes at the academy have never seen anyone quite like him before. But thanks to the help and support of one good friend, Billy?s able to take a stand for...