Study guides: popular books - Page 6 | Just Great DataBase

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

“Life of Pi” is an amazing adventure book that was written by Yann Martel. It is much more than just a fantasy book. It is a novel-confession, revelation, parable where the fight with yourself becomes the meaning of whole life. The story unfolds around an Indian boy who got his nickname of Pi Patel after a Parisian swimming club Piscine Molitor. He is a student in Toronto who is fond...

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is known as a great writer in part because of her novel “Mrs. Dalloway”. It is included in different lists of the best English-language novels of all times. It talks about the generation that lived during a post-war time and the generation that will follow, making the same mistakes. The timeframe of the book is one day. It talks about the life of a well-respected woman...

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

“Oliver Twist” is no Tom Sawyer, but the idea is the same. It is a novel written by Charles Dickens at the end of the 19th century with a similar plot that has its unique particularities. The novel avoids romanticizing the life and motifs of criminal gangs in London, but it also highlights the cruelty in which the orphans lived in England. That’s why the novel’s second...

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

Laura Esquivel wrote “Life Water for Chocolate” in 1989. It is a typical Mexican novel, full of passion, love, family duties, poor choices and suffering. It is in this book that we discover an old family tradition in Latin countries where the youngest daughters don’t marry in order to focus on caring for their mothers until they die. The novel follows the relationship inside...

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys wrote “Wide Sargasso Sea” in 1966. It demonstrates the inequality in the society on the grounds of ethical origins, as well as depicts the racial conflict from a standpoint of white slave owners. The novel is about Antoinette Cosway who lives in Jamaica, and who the reader might have heard about in the “Jane Eyre” book. Antoinette finds herself on the other side...

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

“Tess of the d’Ubervilles” is a novel by Thomas Hardy also entitled “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented”. The author was born in a rural family of a builder and he couldn’t resist writing about peasant life, outlook, and psychology of the working class. The novel consists of a couple of parts, they represent the stages in the life of a protagonist Tess. She is...

Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo created many literary works, but “Hunchback Of Notre Dame” is surely considered to be his best one. If you or anyone shall want to read just one book in your life – then this is it! You won’t be tempted to take another book in our hands for a long time after finishing this novel. The novel saw the world in 1831. It is hard to call it a Gothic novel or a...

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

“Cry, the Beloved Country” is written in 1948 by a South African author Alan Paton. The author has spent many years working in the reformatory institutions and it was on one of the trips abroad that he wrote this book. The novel deals with the racial inequality and segregation. It's important to understand that the novel was published before the segregation issue intensified in...

Watership Down by Richard Adams

“Watership Down” is a 1972 fantasy novel by Richard Adams. It is positioned to be a children book, but it’s read and loved by adults all over the world. It’s common for literature works to use anthropomorphized animals as characters. They walk, talk, do human things, live in houses with large windows and wear brand clothes. But the “Watership Down” used a...

Native Son by Richard Wright

Richard Wright wrote “Native Son” in 1940. It is a very strong, tragic and emotional novel about the position of African Americans in the society. It talks about the existential gap between the nation, it describes the wish for warmth and understanding, and it also deals with the inner monsters inside all of us. How many times do we try to find excuses for somebody’s...

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy is most known for his novel “ Far From the Madding Crowd”. It was published in 1874 and transformed to multiple awards winning film in the end of 1960s. Today it still continues to be in the top 100 reading lists of different publications, such as BBC and The Guardian. The story takes place in an imaginary country called Wessex. The style, descriptions, and behavior of...

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

One of the many things that Daniel Defoe’s novel entitled “Robinson Crusoe” did was instilling in everyone the thirst for adventure and admiration for traveling. Published in 1719, the book is a major piece of catastrophe writing that glorified the ability to survive under any circumstances.  The events of the book are presented from its main narrator and protagonist...

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy is a social novel that shows the life and death of the aforementioned Mayor who managed to turn from a drunkard to a decent man, but still had to constantly face the consequences of his past deeds. At the beginning of the novel we see him as the poor and embittered man, who gets so drunk that he puts his wife and baby daughter to the auction. This...

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

“Les Miserables” is an epic novel of a French writer Victor Hugo, published in 1862. There are many reasons why it was widely acclaimed by different critics and literature connoisseurs as Hugo’s main work and one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. Over a thousand pages of text separated into two parts, the story of the book is centered around critical concepts for the...

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy is a novel that received a very controversial feedback in the Victorian society. It is the story about the complicated relationships, love triangles that sometimes have nothing in common with love, but only with rationality. The desires and goals of the characters are rarely noble and some of them who are relatively “pure” are miserable during...

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

“Hard Times” is the shortest novel that Charles Dickens has written. It was composed in 1854 in an attempt to boost the declining sales the author was experiencing at that time. The book is also often called the most “Victorian” of all his other creations. The original book didn’t have any illustrations, but the language of the story is full of detailed...

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry wrote “Number the Stars” in 1989. The book talks about a Jewish family who, just like many other Jews, found themselves entrapped in Copenhagen during the Second World War. The story is based on real events as the author undertook a couple of trips to Denmark for conducting research. The text is written as a child’s book that talks about sad events from the...

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard wrote what is often considered an absurdist book entitled “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”. This tragicomedy was first staged in Edinburgh and has won for its author a place on the international area along with Samuel Beckett and other writers of this genre. There’s a certain beauty to absurdist texts – through confused plot they deliver a greater...

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

The novel “Kindred” was written by Octavia Butler in 1979. It is one of the few slave narratives written in a science fiction style. Using such style the author tried to reexamine the consequences and legacy of slavery through a modern perspective. The protagonist of the book, Dana, turns 26 years old in the summer of 1976. She is a young African American, who is married to a white...

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert spent a lot of time writing his first novel entitled “Madame Bovary”. It is a story about a woman trying to escape the dullness of the provincial life and unimaginative surrounding. When the text first saw the world, it was accused of obscenity. But it was because of the trial process that followed, that the story became famous and is still well known nowadays. &ldquo...