TheBestseller
Observatory

Best Sellers

Hardcover Fiction

Week of August 27, 1944

FictionNonfiction
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3
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THE HISTORY OF ROME HANKS
Joseph S. Pennell
Cover of THE HISTORY OF ROME HANKS

THE HISTORY OF ROME HANKS

by Joseph S. Pennell · Scribner

3 wks on list

Lee Harrington, the central figure of the novel, is a young man trying to sort out his memories of the tales of the Civil War told him by his grandfather and his father, and to imagine what their lives must have been like, and what the War had done to them. The tale ranges from past to present, from Gettysburg and Savage's Station and Shiloh to present-day Kansas. Pennell employs a fragmented, interior-monologue narrative style, giving his reader a view of the War as his characters must have experienced it, and he does it with amazing control.

4
1
A BELL FOR ADANO
John Hersey
5
NEW
LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN
Ben Ames Williams
Cover of LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

by Ben Ames Williams · Houghton Mifflin

This classic bestselling novel about a man who encounters a woman whose power to destroy is as strong as her power to love evokes Hemingway in its naturalistic portrayal of elemental forces in both nature and humanity. Ellen's beauty was radiant, and Harland had been so struck with her personality and the strength of her character that he knew he could never leave her. When he found that she returned his adoration, he could marry her with joy, bothered just momentarily by a strange premonition. It was only later, when the premonition became a horrifying reality, that he realized the glowing loveliness of the woman he had married was the true face of evil.

Historical bestseller data sourced from the New York Times Book Review, archived by Hawes Publications.