LETRAS

After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago. Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors—until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova. Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late.

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naïve Catherine Morland experiences fashionable society for the first time, both its pleasures and its pitfalls. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine’s love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father’s mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, Cather learns the danger of an active imagination. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, this is the most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen’s works.

Generations of readers have fallen in love with Jane Austen’s beloved classic Pride and Prejudice. The sparkling Elizabeth Bennet, the taciturn Fitzwilliam Darcy, and an array of characters that range from irrepressible to almost irredeemable, move through this comedy of manners about the danger of first impressions. Set in a provincial world away from London, Austen’s novel pokes fun at the machinations of courtship rituals while celebrating the importance of friendship and sisterhood.

Shy and penniless Fanny Price is brought up on her uncle Sir Thomas Bertram’s estate, Mansfield Park, as an act of charity. Sir Thomas also owns land— and benefits from the labor of enslaved people— in the Caribbean colony of Antigua. Fanny is miserable until her kind cousin Edmund Bertram takes her under his wing. Having secretly fallen in love with him, Fanny suffers severely when his head is turned by the captivating Mary Crawford. Fanny’s quiet fortitude makes Mansfield Park one of Austen’s most psychologically astute novels.

A Farewell to Arms is one of Ernest Hemingway’s most popular books, a masterpiece that is not only among the greatest novels to come out of World War I but also one of the most profoundly moving in the American canon. Based on Hemingway’s own experience volunteering with the Red Cross in Italy during World War I, and written when he was only thirty, it tells the story of Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver, and Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. For Frederic, Catherine’s kindness and beauty shore him up against the carnage of battle; for Catherine, Frederic’s strength and devotion are a lifeboat in the sea of grief over her first love. Through injury, surgery, and the psychic fallout of war, they maintain an overwhelming desire to be together, even as forces conspire to keep them apart. Hemingway captures the intensity of both love and war with the taut immediacy and spare, understated eloquence that are his hallmarks, reminding us why this novel—his first bestseller—endures as a favorite, and why the Nobel laureate ranks among our most treasured writers.

When literature student Anastasia Steele goes to interview young entrepreneur Christian Grey, she encounters a man who is beautiful, brilliant, and intimidating. The unworldly, innocent Ana is startled to realize she wants this man and, despite his enigmatic reserve, finds she is desperate to get close to him. Unable to resist Ana’s quiet beauty, wit, and independent spirit, Grey admits he wants her, too—but on his own terms. Shocked yet thrilled by Grey’s singular erotic tastes, Ana hesitates. For all the trappings of success—his multinational businesses, his vast wealth, his loving family—Grey is a man tormented by demons and consumed by the need to control. When the couple embarks on a daring, passionately physical affair, Ana discovers Christian Grey’s secrets and explores her own dark desires.