impedimenta

Elderly, uncompromising Claudia Hampton lies in a London hospital bed with memories of life fluttering through her fading consciousness. An author of popular history, Claudia proclaims she’s carrying out her last project: a history of the world. This history turns out to be a...

This was T. C. Boyle’s first novel, a sublime, fast-paced fantasy that is both fun and indecent, announcing the arrival of one of the great talents in contemporary American literature. Set in the late 18th century, this historical fiction narrates the wild adventures of...

Peggy Hillcoat is eight years old when her survivalist father, James, takes her from their home in London to a remote hut in the woods and tells her that the rest of the world has been destroyed. Deep in the wilderness, Peggy and James...

In the future, the human race has ceased to progress. Granted endless leisure by widespread automation, the masses devote themselves solely to the pleasures of the here and now, to drugs that dull their senses and electronic bliss that disconnects them from reality. Theirs...

Winter is coming, the nights are longer. There are those who gather under the mistletoe with their family and friends while others advocate the abolition of the Christmas spirit under the slogan "Ban Christmas or Die." Among the pages of this collection of stories...

Tudor is the youngest son of two servants at the court of a great boyar of backward Wallachia. Since his birth, his ambition seems to guide his every step, and in his arduous rise to power he will not hesitate to leave his path...

One of the bravest memoirs published in recent years. A story of resistance as bold as it is clarifying, as intense as it is real. A survival guide to dealing with suffering and the paradox of embracing loss in order to reconcile with the...

Jeanie and Julius are 51 years old and live with their mother in the middle of the English countryside. They do not have internet, television or bank accounts. They don't have a partner. They also have no father: he died when they were children....

Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is...

After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last has grown bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes...

In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology Ph.D. student and his wife, Joanie, become...

Shirley Perrigny, the heroine of A Fairly Good Time, is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young widow—recently remarried to a French journalist named Philippe—is fond of quoting Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis and of...

Maryse Condé recounts the life of her grandmother Victoire, an exceptional cook in colonial Guadeloupe. Blending memory and imagination, she tells the story of a humble woman who became a legendary figure, driven by passion and the pursuit of perfection.

This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba...