Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

There are novels, like journeys, which you never want to end: this is one of them. One seventh of July at six in the afternoon, a woman of 71 and a man of 78 ascend a gangplank and begin one of the greatest adventures in modern literature. The man is Florentino Ariza, President of the Carribean River Boat Company; the woman is his childhood sweetheart, the recently widowed Fermina Daza. She has earache. He is bald and lame. Their journey up-river, at an age when they can expect 'nothing more in life', holds out a shimmering promise: the consummation of an amor interruptus spanning half a century. LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA is one of the most uplifting romances of our times. An epiphany to late-flowering love, it holds out the subversive promise that you can have what you wish for: you may just have to wait. Set on the Colombian coast in the early part of this century, it is, arguably even more so than ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE which won him the Nobel Prize, the crowning work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 'My best, ' he says of it. 'The novel that was written from my gut. ' Publication is timed to tie in with the launch of Marquez' new novel, NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING, by Jonathan Cape on 3 July.

THE RADETSKY MARCH is subtle and touching study of family life at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Writing in the traditional form of the family saga, Roth nevertheless manages to bring to his story a completely individual manner which gives at the same time the detailed and intimate portrait of a life and the wider panorama of a failing dynasty. Not yet well known in English-speaking countries, Joseph Roth is one of the most distinguished Austrian writers of our century, worthy to be bracketed with Musil and Kraus.

Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, written when the author was twenty-four, appeared in 1920 and immediately established him as a leading literary figure in the brilliant and dangerous world of 1920s America. The novel tells the story of a spoilt child in search of happiness. Pampered as a child, wealthy, brilliant at school, Amory Blaine looks for the love of others but only finds himself. A short, sharp masterpiece with an intriguing religious undertow, this is also a touchingly autobiographical novel which reflects ominously on Fitzgerald's own future.

The fictional autobiography of a rumbustious adventurer and poker-player who sets off his native Chicago in the spirit of a latter-day Columbus to rediscover the world-and more especially, twentieth-century America. This expansive comedy of American manners in the tradition of Twain's 'innocent abroad' is a major classic of twentieth-century American literature.

A burlesque epic in the tradition of THE GOOD SOLDIER SCHWEIK, CATCH-22 exposes the absurdity of war by applying its own demented logic to America's involvement in Korea. The 'catch' is that soldiers have to claim to be mad in order to get out of fighting - but being capable of making such a claim automatically proves them sane. With a cast of magnificently larger-than-life characters who are rushed along at a breathless pace, for once this really is a novel it's hard to put down. CATCH-22 was made into a film.

In the comic masterpiece which established him one of the greatest writers in the English language, Naipaul follows the fortunes of Mr Biswas, the outsider who refuses to conform to the customs of his grander in-laws whose house he lives in. Finally finding a house of his own, he triumphs over the smaller minds who would repress him.

A history of India since independence seen through the eyes of characters born on that independence was granted. Often hailed as a classic of magic realism, this is a many-layered and entralling narrative in which the complexities of the sub-continent are projected through the minds of its many characters, comic, tragic and fantastic by turns, this is the novel which revolutionized English literature in one fell swoop. MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN was voted in the Booker of Bookers in 1993.

Foreshadowing his later detailed accounts of the Soviet prison-camp system, Solzhenitsyn's classic portrayal of life in the gulag is all the more powerful for being slighter and more personal than those later monumental volumes. Continuing the tradition of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, especially Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn is fully worthy of them in narrative power and moral authority. His greatest work.

In the book which put South America on the literary map, Marquez tells the haunting story of a community lost in the depths of that almighty continent where time passes slowly. A poetic masterpiece whose rich and powerful language easily survives the translation from Spanish, this is the most celebrated text of magic realism.
The mysterious history of the Buendía family of the village of Macondo, which does nothing less than recapitulate the entire history of the human race, has had an influence on world literature unsurpassed by that of any other book of our era. In its lush understanding of the ways in which the political, the personal and the spiritual realms twine and untwine, in its couplings and parturitions, its battles and truces, One Hundred Years of Solitude contains a world we could never have imagined on our own. Yet, once encountered, it seems as familiar as the world of our own childhoods.

An extraordinary kind of autobiography in which each of the 21 chapters takes its title and its starting-point from one of the elements in the periodic table. Mingling fact and fiction, science and personal record, history and anecdote, Levi uses his training as an industrial chemist and the terrible years he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz to illuminate the human condition. Yet this exquisitely lucid text is also humourous and even witty in a way possible only to one who has looked into the abyss.

Newly revised by the author for this edition, and printed together in one volume for the first time, Updike's four Rabbit novels chronicle the history of a man and a nation from the 1950s to the 1980s. Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, athlete, is Mr Middle America. Dazzling in style, tender in feeling, often erotic in description and coruscating with realistic details which recreate a world in each novel, these books give a complete picture of their age.

The story of Macon 'Milkman' Dead, heir to the richest black family in a midwestern town, as he makes a voyage of rediscovery, travelling southwards geographically and inwards spirituality. Through the enlightenment of one man the novel recapitulates the history of slavery and liberation.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is celebrated as a novelist and man of action. He is perhaps most famous for WHOM THE BELL TOLLS and A FAREWELL TO ARMS. But he was equally prolific as a writer of short stories which touch on the same themes as the novels: war, love, the nature of heroism, reunciation, and the writer's life. The present collection includes all Hemingway's shorter fiction arranged chronologically from 'Up in Michigan' (1923) to 'Old Man at the Bridge (1938) and contains stories not currently available in any other UK edition of Hemingway's work's

Christina Stead is one of the great Australian writers of her generation. Rebecca West considered her to be 'one of the few people really original since the First World War.' Stead's fiction has been compared to that of Balzac, Joyce, Ibsen and Tolstoy.

THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN is a magnificent, heartrending novel of American family life, of the relations between parents and children, husbands and wives, set in Baltimore in the 1930s. Newsweek called it 'one of the best novels of this century. ' Elizabeth Hardwick has described it as 'a work of absolute originality. '

Thomas Mann's first great novel, written at the age of 25, is an epic study of decadence among the merchant families of Hamburg at the end of the nineteenth century. The novel is based on Mann's own experience as the son of a German merchant prince, but it goes far beyond his own experience in its sweep and comprehensiveness.

The novel is an astounding, semi-autobiographical family epic. Mann portrays the transition of genteel Germanic stability and arrogance to a very modern uncertainty and fear.

Generally regarded both in Japan and in the West as his most successful novel, THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN PAVILION brings together all Mishima's preoccupations with violence, desire, religious life and the history of his own nation. Based on actual incident, the burning of a celebrated temple, the novel is both a vivid narrative and a meditation on the state of Japan in the post-war period.