East of Eden
by John Steinbeck | 
Nine Stories
by J. D. Salinger | 
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens | 
Stoner
by John Williams | 
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf | 
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers | 
White Noise
by Don DeLillo | 
The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy | 
Hard Times
by Charles Dickens | 
Embers
by Sandor Marai | 
Sometimes a Great Notion
by Ken Kesey |
The Tunnel
by Ernesto Sabato | 
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy | 
Barren Lives
by Graciliano Ramos |
The Life Before Us
by Romain Gary |
Against Nature
by Joris-Karl Huysmans |
They Were Sisters
by Dorothy Whipple | 
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
by Henry Fielding | 
The Easter Parade
by Richard Yates | 
Play It As It Lays
by Joan Didion |
The peaceful and traditional people, located on the shores of a large bay, are surrounded by the rough pastoral folk in the surrounding hills, who feel increasing pressure from the unscrupulous and lowly followers of the dreaded head forester. The narrator and protagonist lives on the marble cliffs as a botanist with his brother Otho, his son Erio from a past relationship and Erio's grandmother Lampusa. The idyllic life is threatened by the erosion of values and traditions, losing its inner power. The head forester uses this opportunity to establish a new order based on dictatorial rule, large numbers of mindless followers and the use of violence, torture and murder.