Hardcover Fiction

by William Brinkley · Random House

by Edwin O'Connor · Little, Brown and Co

by Simone de Beauvoir · World Publishing Co

by John Hersey · Alfred A. Knopf

by A.J. Cronin · Little, Brown

by MacKinlay Kantor · Cleveland: World Publishing

by Patrick Dennis · Vanguard Press

by Pearl S. Buck · John Day

by Eugene Burdick · Houghton Mifflin

The rise and near-success of Mike Freesmith, who tries to gain control of California politics by exploiting the fears and hatreds of voting groups.

by Susan Ertz · Harper and Brothers

by Elizabeth Goudge · Coward-McCann

by Nelson Algren · Farrar, Straus and Cudahy

Characters include a lesbian madam at a New Orleans bordello. Book was made into a mainstream movie. -- dm.

by Jon Godden · Alfred A. Knopf

This is a beautiful and grave little tale; the scene and soul is India, the India of the river Ganges with its placid flowing life which goes on much the same today as it has always done. Only a few people come and go in boats about their business until a rich man and his band of followers arrive to found a temple; the story is the impact of their wealth and good intentions on the peace of this ancient and sacred place.

by Norah Lofts · Doubleday

Hadstock, Sir Richard's bailiff, is determined to rescue Linda Schelmadine from her loveless marriage to the cold-hearted Sir Richard

by Cameron Hawley · Houghton and Mifflin

by Peter De Vries · Little, Brown and Company

A laugh-out-loud novel about teenage pretensions and adult delusions from an author whom the New York Times has called "a Balzac of the station wagon set" Chick Swallow and his best friend, Nickie Sherman, are teenage boulevardiers of Decency, Connecticut, devotees of Oscar Wilde who spend their evenings crafting perverse aphorisms in an ice-cream parlor. "There is only one thing worse than not having children," opines Chick, "and that is having them." Unrepentant aesthetes, someday soon they will be in Paris or New York, far removed from the mainstream. Then the unthinkable happens. Marriage. Family. Dinner parties. For Chick, a job at the local newspaper writing an advice column punctuated by blandly inspirational Pepigrams: "To turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones— pick up your feet." For Nickie, an unlikely career in law enforcement. But just when it seems that their lives have settled down before they could even begin, Chick begins an affair with Mrs. Thicknesse, a newspaper music critic of ample girth and means, and a whole brouhaha breaks loose: blackmail, forgery, secret sleuthing, lawsuits. There is drama in suburbia after all, and Chick and Nickie are up to their necks in it. A wild, witty tale of friendship, marriage, and infidelity, Comfort Me with Apples is full of the brilliant wordplay and delicious ironies that made Peter de Vries "one of the best comic novelists that America has ever produced" ( Commentary).