Schmidt Delivered
by Louis Begley | 
Into the Great Wide Open
by Kevin Canty | 
Eminence
by Morris West | 
The Silent Lady
by Catherine Cookson | 
Leaving Eden
by Anne LeClaire |
The Seven Minutes
by Irving Wallace | 
Brazil
by John Updike | 
A Word Child
by Iris Murdoch | 
I Am the Clay
by Chaim Potok | 
Honey for the Bears
by Anthony Burgess |
The Travelling Hornplayer
by Barbara Trapido | 
Other People
by Martin Amis | 
Marrying the Mistress
by Joanna Trollope |
Wildlife
by Richard Ford | 
Passion Play
by Jerzy Kosinski | 
Look At Me
by Anita Brookner | 
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck | 
Nine Stories
by J. D. Salinger | 
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens | 
Stoner
by John Williams |
In an ambitious departure from her usual form, Anita Brookner expands her canvas in Family and Friends to create a richly textured novel about the life of a wealthy Jewish family in London, focusing on the generation that came to maturity between the two World Wars. Presiding over the Dorn household is the formidable Sofka, an elegant and circumspect widow who watches as her four children find their way into adulthood. Frederick, the sybaritic eldest son, escapes to the comforts of the Riviera while stern, dutiful Alfred runs the family business adn burns with unrealized longings; Betty'??pleasure-loving, vain, and selfish'??makes her ambitious way from Paris to Hollywood, leaving her dreamy, passive sister Mimi to languish at home. A brilliant social novel of lost innocence and the complex nature of family bonds, Family and Friends meticulously portrays the emotional cost of everyday life.