Akron Public Library

The most controversial classic novel of the 20th century, Lolita tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is aroused to erotic desire only by a young girl. Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita. Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of...

In the early 1950's, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England, At mealtimes he is seated at the "cat's table" - - as far from the Captain's Table as can be -- with a ragtag group of "insignificant" adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Seuz Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like...

Frank Money is an angry, broken veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and taker her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits his memories from childhood...

August 1943: In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncles young wife two years earlier. His life, in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, is a daily struggle to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, fro pitiless beatings. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever.

"A woman around her thirties begins to question the routine and predictability of her days. In everybody's eyes, she has a perfect life: a solid and stable marriage, a loving husband, sweet and well-behaved children and a job as a journalist she can't complain about. However, she can no longer bear the necessary effort to fake happiness when all she feels in life is an enormous apathy. All that changes when she encounters an ex-boyfriend from her...

"As he pushes fifty, painter and petty thief Oliver Otway Orme reflects on his life, trying to uncover the answer to how and why things have turned out as they have, excavating memories of family, of places he has called home, and of the way he has apprehended the world around him, Olly reveals the very essence of a man who, in some way, has always been waiting to be rescued from himself.--

Told from different perspectives by a host of beguiling characters, A Strangeness in My Mind is a modern epic of coming of age in a great city, a brilliant tableau of life among the newcomers who have changed the face of Istanbul over the past fifty years. Here is a mesmerizing story of human longing, sure to take its place among Pamuk���s finest achievements.