All the Days and Nights (62 page)

She waited for him to go on and when he didn’t, she thought he was trying to say something that was too difficult to put into words. And then she heard his soft regular breathing and realized he was asleep.

In the morning I will hear the rest of it, she thought, and fell asleep herself, much sooner than she usually did. But in the morning he didn’t remember a thing he had told her, and she had great trouble making him understand that he had ever been away.

WILLIAM MAXWELL

“Maxwell’s voice is one of the wisest in American fiction; it is, as well, one of the kindest.”
—John Updike

THE CHÂTEAU

In 1948, two awestruck American tourists arrive at a stately
château
whose residents are just beginning to recover from the horrors and indignities of the war. Out of this tragicomic premise, William Maxwell creates our most astute and affectionate novel of cross-cultural incomprehension since the masterworks of Henry James.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-76156-x

ANCESTORS
A Family History

Ancestors
is the history of William Maxwell’s family, which he retraces branch by branch across the wilderness, farms, and small towns of the nineteenth-century Midwest. Out of letters and journals, memory and speculation, Maxwell takes his readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen and makes us understand the way they saw their world and imagined the world to come.

Literature/Memoir/0-679-75929-8

Available at your local bookstore,
or call toll-free to order: 1-800-793-2665

(credit cards only).

POSSESSION
by A. S. Byatt

An intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.

“Gorgeously written … a tour de force.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

Winner of the Booker Prize

Fiction/Literature/0-679-73590-9

THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
by Kazuo Ishiguro

A profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England.

“One of the best books of the year.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

Fiction/Literature/0-679-73172-5

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES
by Cormac McCarthy

At sixteen, John Grady Cole finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

“A book of remarkable beauty and strength, the work of a master in perfect command of his medium.”

—
Washington Post Book World

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Fiction/Literature/0-679-74439-8

THE ENGLISH PATIENT
by Michael Ondaatje

During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion is woven, leaving them inextricably connected by the brutal circumstances of war.

“It seduces and beguiles us with its many-layered mysteries, its brilliantly taut and lyrical prose, its tender regard for its characters.”

—
Newsday

Winner of the Booker Prize

Fiction/Literature/0-679-74520-3