FREE/BARGAIN — Fiction (everything else)

[ZodWallop]

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is $2.99 at Amazon US.

Profound if you read it as a teen. Otherwise it is pretty awful. I've tried it twice and just can't get past the first few hundred pages.

Still, it's an important book to many and for better or worse has had a lasting impact on many U.S. politicians.

Who is John Galt? When he says that he will stop the motor of the world, is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battles not against his enemies but against those who need him most? Why does he fight his hardest battle against the woman he loves?

You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the amazing men and women in this book. You will discover why a productive genius becomes a worthless playboy...why a great steel industrialist is working for his own destruction...why a composer gives up his career on the night of his triumph...why a beautiful woman who runs a transcontinental railroad falls in love with the man she has sworn to kill.

Atlas Shrugged, a modern classic and Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism—her groundbreaking philosophy—offers the reader the spectacle of human greatness, depicted with all the poetry and power of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists.

[Tarana]

Cross post from Horror thread.

Carrie by Stephen King $1.99 Amazon, Kobo

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Carrie-Stephe...%2C1133&sr=8-1
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/carrie-2

Sorry for the late posting. Pet emergency took up most of the day. He is doing better now.

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by Tarana

Sorry for the late posting. Pet emergency took up most of the day. He is doing better now.

Glad to hear he's better! Still, I hope (since it's now 3 days later).

[ZodWallop]

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is $1.99 at Amazon US.

Umberto Eco’s first novel, an international sensation and winner of the Premio Strega and the Prix Médicis Étranger awards

The year is 1327. Benedictines in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon—all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where “the most interesting things happen at night.”

[ZodWallop]

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy is $1.99 at Amazon US.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER •The first volume in theBorder Trilogy, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road

All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen 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.

[ZodWallop]

The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry is $2.99 at Amazon US.

The Last Picture Show (1966) is both a rambunctious coming-of-age story and an elegy to a forlorn Texas town trying to keep its one movie house alive. Adapted into the Oscar-winning film, this masterpiece immortalizes the lives of the hardscrabble residents who are threatened by the inexorable forces of the modern world.

I read the book about a decade ago and recommend it. It was also made into an EXCELLENT movie, highly recommended.

[salty-horse]

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante is $1.99 on Amazon.com

Leda, a middle-aged divorcée, is alone for the first time in years after her two adult daughters leave home to live with their father in Toronto. Enjoying an unexpected sense of liberty, she heads to the Ionian coast for a vacation. But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family.

[salty-horse]

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead is $2.99 on Amazon.com

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.

Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children.

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is $2.99 on Amazon.com
Short fiction collection. Some of the stories seem to be speculative fiction.

A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America.

Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation.

In “Control Negro,” hailed by Roxane Gay as “one hell of story,” a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by clinically observing his own son from birth in order to “painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.” Johnson’s characters all seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of Alexandria, finding himself adrift; a young mixed-race woman who adopts a new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her family; or a single mother who seeks salvation through “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse.”

United by these characters’ relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable book that bears witness to this country’s legacies and announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American fiction.

[Tarana]

Not sure where to post this.

Neverwhere By Neil Gaiman $1.99 Amazon, Kobo

[sufue]

Several years later, again £0.99 at Kindle UK...

Originally Posted by sufue

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck is one of the Kindle UK daily deals today at £0.99. Steinbeck's books don't seem to go on sale very often, and are outrageously priced when not on sale, so I'm happy to be able to pick this one up.

link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002RI9X8S/

[issybird]

I’m sticking this in fiction because it’s about literature, although technically it’s non-fiction.

Curiosities in Literature: A Feast for Book Lovers by John Sutherland, a book of literary trivia, is on sale for $1.99. I’ve read other books by Sutherland about puzzling issues in the classics and they’re both fun and erudite.

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/cur...-literature-75
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B004ULMJ7C/
https://play.google.com/store/books/..._of_Literature

[pdurrant]

Seven of Bernard Cornwell's "Richard Sharpe" series are on offer at Amazon UK today. Rather oddly, books 15-20 and 22:
Sharpe’s Enemy: The Defence of Portugal, Christmas 1812
Sharpe’s Honour: The Vitoria Campaign, February to June 1813
Sharpe’s Regiment: The Invasion of France, June to November 1813
Sharpe’s Siege: The Winter Campaign, 1814
Sharpe’s Revenge: The Peace of 1814
Sharpe’s Waterloo: The Waterloo Campaign, 15–18 June, 1815
Sharpe’s Devil: Napoleon and South America, 1820–1821

[issybird]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Seven of Bernard Cornwell's "Richard Sharpe" series are on offer at Amazon UK today. Rather oddly, books 15-20 and 22:

I suspect it’s because book 21 is the current one; it came out last fall.

[sufue]

When Christ and His Saints Slept is the first in Penman's series about that amazingly dysfunctional family, the Plantagenets. It has dropped to $2.99 at Kindle and Kobo US. It's normally $11.99 and doesn't go on sale much, so grab it now if you want it!

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004JF5YU8
Kindle US/Smile: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B004JF5YU8
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/whe...s-saints-slept

Spoiler:

In When Christ and His Saints Slept master storyteller and historian Sharon Kay Penman illuminates one of the lesser-known but fascinating periods of English history.

The next addition in this highly acclaimed series of the middle ages, and the first of a trilogy that will tell the story of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. When Christ and His Saints Slept begins with the death of King Henry I, son of William the Conqueror and father of Maude, his only living legitimate offspring.

[sufue]

More than a year later, again £0.99, as part of today's UK Daily Deal...

Originally Posted by sufue

John Steinbeck's Cannery Row has dropped to £0.99 today at Kindle UK as part of the Daily Deal. I grew up in the Monterey/Carmel/Pacific Grove area, so I like this book even a little bit more than I would anyway - it's fun to really know the area while reading it. (Although East of Eden still is my Steinbeck favorite.)

link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002RI9N2Y/