Once Were Warriors is Alan Duff's harrowing vision of his country's indigenous people two hundred years after the English conquest. In prose that is both raw and compelling, it tells the story of Beth Heke, a Maori woman struggling to keep her family from falling apart, despite the squalor and violence of the housing projects in which they live.

"In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife"--Are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves...

The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. She has a noble and exacting mind, a compelling waist, and a busted thesis project. She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari—one in which he is virtually...

Fame, envy, lust, violence, intrigues literary and criminal they're all here in The Information, as one of the most gifted and innovative novelists of our time explores the question, How does one writer hurt another writer? "Satirical and tender, funny and disturbing...wonderful." The New York Times "A portrait of middle-age realignment with more verbal felicity and unbridled reach than [anything] since Tom Wolfe forged Bonfire of the Vanities."...

The author traces his life and career, examining his relationship with his father, comic novelist Kingsley Amis, the changing literary scene in Great Britain and the U.S., and the impact of the abduction and murder of his cousin by one of Britain's most notorious serial killers.

In Osaka in the years immediately before World War II, four aristocratic women try to preserve a way of life that is vanishing. The story of these women, the Makioka sisters, forms what is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century, a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family--and an entire society--sliding into the abyss of modernity. Tsuruko, the eldest sister, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her...