THE EIGHTH DAY
by Thornton Wilder · Harper & Row
Over the years the family of the escaped murderer finds itself drawn inexorably closer to the victim's family.
CAPABLE OF HONOR
by Allen Drury · Doubleday
Uses characters and settings from Advise and consent and A shade of difference.
VALLEY OF THE DOLLS
by Jacqueline Susann · Random House
Three beautiful women compete in the New York entertainment world, where sex is a weapon and nearly everyone depends on "dolls" (pills).
TALES OF MANHATTAN
by Louis Auchincloss · Houghton Mifflin
"Manhattan Island is a skinny piece of land which comprises only one of the five boroughs of New York City. But this borough contains the stock market, the great banks and law offices, the art galleries, the theatres, the luxury hotels, and the best clubs. Also, the people who belong to them. No one can write of these people with more authority than Louis Auchincloss. Tales of Manhattan is divided into three parts. 'Memories of an Auctioneer' reveals the background of certain works of art that have come into the hands of the Philip Hone gallery. None of the men who created or owned these things is quite what he seems and the clues to their characters and actions are subtle and sometimes contradictory. 'Arnold & Degener, One Chase Manhattan Plaza' is a distinguished law firm, whose members write about each other and themselves and the soceity they live in. The senior partner is shown as seen by his colleagues, by himself, and by the men who will succeed them; and though the viewpoints differ, they fuse into a consistent picture. 'The Matrons' are the women who rule New York society--most of them old, all of them entrenched in power through family and money. Some use their power cleverly, and some are almost destroyed by it. But it is there in all of them. Louis Auchincloss's books of short stories are not random collections. They are unified by a common theme. The Injustice Collectors were rich, well-born people who succeeded in making themselves miserable. The Romantic Egoists were people in a conventional world who swam against the stream. The characters in Power of Attorney were bound together through their association in the firm of Tower, Tilney & Webb. In Tales of Manhattan the pattern is broken into three parts but the thread of a common background holds them together. One can easily imagine the characters in this book sitting down at the same well-appointed dinner table"--Dust jacket.
UNDER THE EYE OF THE STORM
by John Hersey · Alfred A. Knopf
This is a tale of the sea, of two men and their wives on a sailboat, moving toward the heart of a great storm. It is an adventure story that carries four travelers on the yawl Harmony from Edgartown to Menemsha to Block Island and thence out into a huge, dark cone of uncertainty. In the modulating airs of the voyage four personalities emerge to work changes on each other. The two marriages seem to react to the barometer. As the drama of the storm gathers and breaks, themes are sounded of escape and confrontatoin, of illusion, of the "secret place" that every boat and every person harbors, of a meticulousness, a prudent attention to the details of life, which can blind a man to the whole of reality, and also of endurance, of instinctively courageous seamanship, and of strength that the strong may not know they possess even as they exert it. The skipper, a young doctor, follows his obsession to the terrible goal to which it must lead him at the moment wehn the calm eye of the storm looks down on the tiny boat in the violent sea. The four visions of the characters, which seem to have been focused on the one experience, reveal themselves as sharply at variance with each other, so that a final "truth" of the story has to be bargained out. And in the end that truth turns out to be an irony.
Historical bestseller data sourced from the New York Times Book Review, archived by Hawes Publications.