In an espionage master's latest, war is a booming private enterprise.

How selfish must an artist be?

Revealing the candid passions and ambitions of the austere O Pioneers! author.

The frustrated doctor at the center of Restoration travels to Versailles and beyond.

A nineteenth-century Russian comic storyteller shines in a bold new English translation.

Small tales offer medium-sized heroes a grand forum.

Henry VIII's diplomat (and Anne Boleyn's lover) as seen through his vivid poetry. 

The blithe soul of Bertie Wooster can be spotted in his creator's correspondence.

A star actor and his harried ghostwriter wage a war of words.

A tale of an English estate -- and those who cherish, neglect, and covet it.

A critic looks back at her favorite read of the year.

Their father was universally beloved, but growing up Dickens led, more often than not, to hard times.

The network of spies and secret police that kept Good Queen Bess in power.

The unsung deeds of a hero of the Royal Navy.

The True Grit author's short work reveals the range of an inimitable and hilarious American voice.

The alpha and omega of a comic novelist's oeuvre.

Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's surprisingly dark American epic.

A historian goes on the hunt for the details of literary lives most of us overlook.

Two new books unveil the work of the double agents who ran circles around the Nazis.

A geriatric gumshoe takes the case.

A vision of a prelapsarian Ireland, circa 2006, where old and new exist together in serenity.

A tale of manipulation, fame, love and fate crossing half a century centers on an Italian village and the making of a Hollywood epic.

Playing games with the meaning of life -- and the inevitability of its final turn.

The chaos of a Karachi hospital mirrors a nation pulled in multiple directions.

In the sequel to her novel Wolf Hall, a novelist continues her exploration of the enigmatic man at the heart of Tudor intrigues.

War threatens a remote recess in North Carolina's Appalachia.

Tradition and revolution, friendship and bitter enmity, on the diamond and in the clubhouse.

Murder, terrorism, and corruption at the heart of the Swedish state are knotted at the center of Leif GW Persson's novel.

A tale of love, loneliness, and the mysteries of an English mansion reaches back to the gothic novels of the past.

In honor of the centenary of Elizabeth Taylor's birth, two novels that showcase the author's gift for crafting comedies of manners with troubling undertones.