aListofBooks

Ultimate Best Books

List: 100 Best Novels by Modern Library

The Good Soldier

The Good Soldier

Ford Madox Ford

3.57 (7)

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

#281
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2,050
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The Heart is A Lonely Hunter

The Heart is A Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

4.38 (8)

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.

#178
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4,199
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Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

3.5 (6)

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.

#211
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3,264
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Death Comes for the Archbishop

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather

4.0 (2)

One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.

#355
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1,515
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Scoop

Scoop

Evelyn Waugh

3.8 (5)

While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, 'achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters'.

#317
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1,784
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The House of Mirth

The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton

4.5 (6)

Selden paused in surprise.

#234
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2,892
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Nostromo

Nostromo

Joseph Conrad

3.8 (5)

In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco—the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity—had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a brisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some harbours of the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.

#340
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1,595
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Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh

4.44 (9)

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.

#155
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4,825
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As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner

3.25 (11)

Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file.

#115
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7,149
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Under the Net

Under the Net

Iris Murdoch

3.0 (2)

When I saw Finn waiting for me at the corner of the street I knew at once that something had gone wrong. Finn usually waits for me in bed, or leaning up against the side of the door with his eyes closed.

#495
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627
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