Houghton: 1009 books

“A romance and an adventure, a rumination on royalty and religion in 18th-century Portugal and a bitterly ironic comment on the uses of power.” —The New York Times Portugal, 1711. The Portuguese king promises the greedy prelates of the Church an expansive new convent, should they intercede...

In one volume, the complete short fiction of the author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, including her two most renowned novellas. Carson McCullers—novelist, dramatist, poet—was at the peak of her powers as a writer of short fiction. Here are nineteen stories that explore her signature...

“[A] certifiable masterpiece” from the acclaimed chronicler of New York City’s old money elite (The New York Observer). Widely considered Louis Auchincloss’s greatest novel, The Rector of Justin is an astute dissection of the social mores of the Northeast’s privileged establishment....

“A masterpiece” about faith, race, and morality at a medieval turning point, from the National Jewish Book Award winner and “Israeli Faulkner” (The New York Times).   It’s edging toward the end of the year 999 when Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant from Tangiers, takes two wives—an...

A proofreader realizes his power to edit the truth on a whim, in a “brilliantly original” novel by a Nobel Prize winner (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Raimundo Silva is a middle-aged, celibate clerk, proofing manuscripts for a respectable publishing house. Fluent in Portuguese, he has...

“Touching and funny” short fiction from the O. Henry Award–winning author of The Welsh Girl, about families, estrangement, and dislocation (Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway). Featuring “stories about the touchy relationships between parents and children and the necessary pain...

A saga set in the coastal town of Marblehead, Massachussetts, by the New York Times–bestselling author of Katherine and other acclaimed historical novels. Inspired by research into her own family history, novelist Anya Seton created this compelling tale of New England, set in a “sea-girdled...

This tale of an ambitious inventor in France as the Revolution looms is “brilliantly playful . . . full of lore and lewdness” (Chicago Tribune). “A portrait of a young mechanical genius in 18th-century France, delivered along with a gallimaufry of odd and intriguing facts and a rich,...

**The triumphant return of the New York Times bestselling novel’s orphaned heroine—“**the Southern Holden Caulfield . . . the female Huck Finn” (Bookmarks Magazine). Ellen Foster, fifteen years old, formidable, and back in North Carolina with a loving new foster mother, has written...

A teenage girl goes to work for a chaotic family of Jewish immigrants, in a New York Times bestseller that’s “a cause for celebration” (Ann Patchett). In the 1930s, New York is swarming with Europe’s ousted dreamers, alien families adapting to a new world. Rose Meadows unknowingly enters...

A “beautifully crafted” novel of two sisters’ lives, spanning from 1950s Ireland to modern-day America (Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin). Greta Cahill never believed she would leave her village in west Ireland. Yet one day she found herself on a ship bound for New York,...

After Pearl Harbor, the lives of eleven Montana college football teammates are changed forever in an “intensely suspenseful and moving” novel (Scott Turow). In the early 1940s, the starting lineup of Treasure State University’s football team are local heroes. But as America is pulled...

A New York Times Notable Book: A friendship evolves between an aging author and a young grad student in a novel by the acclaimed author of Florence Gordon. A PEN/Faulkner Award Nominee and one of Publishers Weekly*’s Best Books of the Year* Leonard Schiller is a novelist in his seventies,...

“A mesmerizing, mythic saga” of a Texas family damaged by a dark past, and a son driven by a need for redemption (The New York Times Book Review). On a moonless Texas night in 1895, an ambitious young landowner suffers the loss of his wife—“the only woman he’s ever been fond of”—when...