A landmark in American fiction, Light in August published in 1932, explores Faulkner's central theme: the nature of evil. Joe Christmas-a man doomed, deracinated and alone-wanders the Deep South in search of an identity, and a place in society. After killing his perverted God-fearing lover, it becomes inevitable that he is, pursued by a lynch-hungry mob. Yet after the sacrifice, there is new life, a determined ray of light in Faulkner's complex and...

Nobel Prize winner Patrick White's masterpiece, The Eye of the Storm, the basis for the film starring Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davies, and Geoffrey Rush. In White's 1973 classic, terrifying matriarch Elizabeth Hunter is facing death while her impatient children-Sir Basil, the celebrated actor, and Princess de Lascabane, an adoptive French aristocrat-wait. It is the dying mother who will command attention, and who in the midst of disaster will look...

Considered the first true detective story Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) is a 19th-century British epistolary novel. Originally serialized in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round, it introduced many hallmarks of detective fiction, including an English country house setting, bungling local policemen, and a large number of false suspects. In it, Rachel Verinder, a young English woman, inherits a large Indian diamond on her eighteenth birthday...