NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement, this “totally gripping and entirely hilarious” novel (The Wall Street Journal) traces the arc of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s ambitions and self-deception.

Dr. Michael Beard’s best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned...

Professor Godfrey St. Peter is a man in his fifties who has devoted his life to his work, his wife, his garden and his daughters, and achieved success with all of them. But when St. Peter is called on to move to a new, more comortable house, something in him rebels. And although at first theat rebellion consists of nothing more than mild resistance to his family's wishes, it imperceptibly comes to encompass the entire order of his life.

Tom Violet's life has brought a far different reality from his dreams of having a beautiful wife, a satisfying career as a successful novelist and a happy dog to greet him as he returns home. But his novel is currently hidden in his desk drawer while his father has just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And the dog has acute anxiety. But Tom has decided to do something to control of his own happiness, even if it means making a complete idiot of...

The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal -- a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Here Hemingway recasts, in strikingly contemporary style, the classic theme of courage in the face of defeat, of personal triumph won from loss. Written in 1952, this hugely...

A tragicomic story of a deeply faithful man who, crippled by grief and the demands of work and family, becomes entangled in an affair that threatens to destroy his family's future.

Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.QUESTION How do you arrange to skip town?ANSWER You accept them all.What...

"The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child - a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the...

"From Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford: the final novel in the world of Frank Bascombe, one of the most indelible characters in American literature Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive, and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway....

After a brilliant and fulfilling career, Charles Arrowby revels in his perfect refuge, an isolated home by the sea, but soon his complex past makes unbidden visits

Working as a quality control inspector at a toy factory in Rhode Island, friendless alcoholic Smithy Ide considers himself a loser until a tragic event prompts him to set off on an epic cross-country bicycle journey