David Bellos

Les Misérables is among the most popular and enduring novels ever written. Like Inspector Javert's dogged pursuit of Jean Valjean, its appeal has never waned, but only grown broader in its one-hundred-and-fifty-year life. Whether we encounter Victor Hugo's story on the page, onstage, or on-screen, Les Misérables continues to captivate while also, perhaps unexpectedly, speaking to contemporary concerns. In The Novel of the Century, the acclaimed...

A stunning tale of a young boy and an ancient land, each awakening to the joys and horrors of the modern world. Masterful in its simplicity, CHRONICLE IN STONE is a touching coming-of-age story and a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit. Surrounded by the magic of beautiful women and literature, a boy must endure the deprivations of war as he suffers the hardships of growing up. His sleepy country has just thrown off centuries of tyranny,...

In a small town at the foot of the northern highlands in Albania, a decade after the fall of the Communist regime, the harsh blood-for-blood law of the fearsome Kanun mountain folk is emerging from hibernation, like everything else that was forbidden under the fifty years of Communist rule. Mysterious happenings that are two thousand years old, two centuries old, or even just two years old reemerge in daily life. The marriage of a girl and a snake...

The renowned French author’s modern masterpiece: “one of the great novels of the century . . . on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov” (Boston Globe).
Structured around a single moment in time—8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975—Georges Perec’s “elaborate jigsaw puzzle of a novel” begins in an apartment block in Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room,...