This was the first of Bennett's novels to mark out the province of the Five Towns where much of his later fiction is set. Drawing on his boyhood experience of the Staffordshire Potteries area, he shows both the vitality and the harshness of life in the community. Yet although the events of the novel - including suicide and embezzlement - are sensational, the narrative is restrained and compelling in its delineation of Anna's attempts to gain freedom and independence.

creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls "a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary 'Nanny of the maroons,"' who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her. Rich with postmodern irony, the novel even includes an encounter with Hester Prawn of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Conde breaks new ground in both style and content,

transcending cultural and epochal boundaries, not only exposing the hypocrisy of Puritan New England but challenging us to look at racism and religious bigotry in contemporary America. This highly readable and ultimately joyful novel celebrates Tituba's unique voice, exploring issues of identity and the implications of Otherness in Western literary tradition. Its multiple layers will delight a wide variety of readers.

interned Japanese-Americans and confiscated their property, when the war ended the property of those in Canada was never returned to them. Itsuka is the story of the fight to get government compensation for the thousands of victims of the wartime internment, which was, unbelievably, only just accomplished in 1988. Both a moving novel of self-discovery and a fascinating historical account of the fight for redress, Itsuka's final message is one of inspiration and hope.

Iris, India, and Singing Bird. Theirs is an uneasy alliance - a makeshift trinity of mother, daughter, and ambiguously holy spirit - that together forges a family of necessity. The fates of these women and their loved ones are inextricably linked by the powerful magic of the talisman known as the Life Stone.

The adult eyes of India Baldoon Walker unfold the narrative: her mother's grinding journey west, including her murdered husband and stillborn baby, and the discovery of a Native American infant boy who becomes India's adopted brother, Boy Found. As the two children grow into adults, their individual heritages prove to be insurmountable and their harmonious co-existence is shattered.

Mazurka for Two Dead Men represents a culmination of the 1989 Nobel Prize winner Camilo Jose Cela's literary art. The novel was originally published in Spain in 1983 and is now presented in a fine translation by Patricia Haugaard. In 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, "Lionheart" Gamuzo is abducted and killed, an event recalled repeatedly by the widowed Adega, one of the several narrative voices. In 1939, when the war ends, Tanis Gamuzo avenges his brother. For both events, and for them only, the blind accordion player Gaudencio plays the same mazurka. Set in a backward rural community in Galicia (the author's home territory), Cela's creation is in many ways like a contrapuntal musical composition built with varying themes and moods. In alternately melancholy, humorous, lyrical, or coarse tones he portrays a reign of fools.

Powys thought Porius his masterpiece, but because of the paper shortage after World War II and the novel's lengthiness, he could not find a publisher for it. Only after he cut one-third from it was it accepted. This new edition not only brings Porius back into print, but makes the original book at last available to readers.

Set in the geographic confines of Powys's own homeland of Northern Wales, Porius takes place in the course of a mere eight October days in 499 A.D., when King Arthur - a key character in the novel, along with Myrddin Wyllt, or Merlin - was attempting to persuade the people of Britian to repel the barbaric Saxon invaders. Porius, the only child of Prince Einion of Edeyrnion, is the main character who is sent on a journey that is both historical melodrama and satirical allegory.

A complex novel, Porius is a mixture of mystery and philosophy on a huge narrative scale, as if Nabokov or Pynchon tried to compress Dostoevsky into a Ulyssean mold. Writing in The New Yorker, George Steiner has said of the abridged Porius that it "combines [a] Shakespearean-epic sweep of historicity with a Jamesian finesse of psychological detail and acuity. Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, which I believe to be the American masterpiece after Melville, is a smaller thing by comparison.".

This new, and first complete, edition of the novel substantiates both Steiner's judgement and Powys's claim for Porius as his masterpiece.

The story reaches dramatic heights in Scott's description of the Covenanters rebuff of the Royalist forces at Loudoun Hill, the preparations for the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, and the moving trial of the young Morton and his fellow prisoners before Claverhouse and the Privy Council.

Scott's grim tale of extremism and cruelty is redeemed by the courage and the loyalty of its characters and the humorous vignettes of the maid Jenny Dennison, the faithful Cuddie Headrigg, and his stubborn yet resolute mother Mause. In this, one of his best-known novels, Scott dramatically reaffirms his conviction that religious and civil liberty are essential for a civilized society.

from memories of the embittered family, the harrowing story that emerges is that of a child denied his past, "bound out" to a brutish man (whose justification is "You get you an animal, you got to break him"), trussed and staked to the floor of the sod hut to keep him from running away, worked endlessly at planting, harvesting, picking off tobacco worms by hand, wrapping tobacco plugs (while the other children go to school), and - the ultimate humiliation - bullied by.

the soft, resentful son of the family, George Stoke. Through it all the anger burns, yet the fire forges an uncanny strength in the child. He bides his time. And then the railroad roars through the prairie, stopping at Sweetbrier, Kansas, and provides escape - freedom in the rough boomtown of Denver and a ferociously dangerous career as brakeman, astride the cars on the TransContinental Mogul heading into the Rockies. In the railroad yards, College, a gabby fellow.

runaway of sorts, befriends the helpless young man; in a bar in Cheyenne a fire-and-brimstone preacher fights for his soul; in a windswept farmhouse in Maine he finally gets the education that had been withheld. Jonathan survives - survives his "idyll with God," his education, his uneasy marriage. But the rage keeps breaking through, and always it is George Stoke, now a fat "cobra of a politician," known as the "fearless liberal" senator from Kansas, who is the target.

The strategies of war - fueled by hatred - are what keep Jonathan Carrick in fighting trim. But as Joan Brady makes devastatingly clear in this brilliant and disturbing novel, the cost of slavery to flee human spirit is overwhelming, and her account of one man as victim leaves, in the mind of the reader, an enduring scar.