The narrator interrupts reminiscences about his childhood spent in late-nineteenth-century France to recall the affair which a friend of the family carried on with young Odette de Crecy.

In this superb novel composed of fragments of memory, Gilbert Sorrentino captures the unconventional nuances of a conventional world. A masterful collage of events is evocatively chained together by secrets and hidden truths that are almost accidentally revealed. Each episode, affectingly textured with penetrating detail, ferrets out the gristle and unconventional beauty found in the voices of the working-class inhabitants from an irretrievable, golden...

Sheldon and Eloise Schell are twins, orphans, and the estranged college companions of the rich, scandalous, celebrated Roman Stone. Now Roman is dead, murdered with a pair of scissors in his living room, and Eloise and Sheldon must separately tease out the secrets--a burning house, a murdered girl--that were the one story they could never tell. Moving between the muffled plush of wintry Chicago, the fogbound darkness of a Lake Superior island, and...

'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' Haunting, moving, evocative, The Go-Between is L.P. Hartley's heartbreaking novel about social constraints and childhood innocence. During the long hot summer of 1900, young Leo Colston is invited to stay for a month at a lordly, aristocratic manor in Norfolk. There he falls in love with his friend's older sister, who commissions him to ferry secret messages to the local farmer, her...

A psychological tale recounts the experiences of Andrew, who confesses to an unknown recipient the memory- and truth-challenging events, loves, and tragedies that have led him to a mysterious act.

"Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free? Athena Rao must reckon with the memory of her father, King Rao--literally. Through biotechnological innovation, he has given her his memories. His Dalit childhood on an Indian coconut plantation in the 1950s is as alive to her as her own existence in a prison cell, accused of her father's murder. Egocentric, brilliant, a little damaged, King Rao had a visionary idea: the personal computer known as the...

A pair of book collectors infiltrate the mind of ten-year-old Oliver Nelson, the last person to read a rare recently destroyed book, which thrusts Oliver into the story where he helps the characters reach the ending before the collectors steal it.

As ten-year-old Gwyn searches for a missing neighbor in her new town in Iowa, she learns much about her mother, who grew up there but has suffered from memory loss since Gwyn was four.