The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. They were alternately known as "waste people," "offals," "rubbish," "lazy lubbers," and "crackers." By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called "clay eaters" and "sandhillers," known for prematurely-aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature...

"In his brilliant new novel, Perumal Murugan paints a bucolic yet menacing portrait of the rural lives of India's farming community through the story of a helpless young animal lost in a world it naively misunderstands. A farmer in Tamil Nadu is watching the sun set over his village one evening when a mysterious stranger, a giant man, appears on the horizon. He offers the farmer a black goat kid who is the runt of the litter, surely too frail to survive....

"Raymond Chandler's incomparable private eye is back, pulled by a seductive young heiress into the most difficult and dangerous case of his career"It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you begin to wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the look of something that knows it's being watched. Traffic trickled by in the street below, and there were a few pedestrians, too, men in hats going nowhere."So begins...

A model-influencer couple get a ticket to the luxe life when they are invited aboard an all-expenses-paid cruise alongside a coterie of the rich and ghoulish, but an act of fate turns their Insta-perfect world upside down.

"A spellbinding story about two girls whose friendship is so intense it not only threatens to destroy them, it changes the trajectory of history. Marie Antoine is the charismatic, spoiled daughter of a sugar baron. At 12 years old, with her blond curls and her unparalleled sense of whimsey, she's the leader of all the children in the Golden Mile, an affluent strip of 19th century Montreal. Until one day in 1873, when Sadie Arnett, dark-haired, sly,...

Queen Nirrim falls victim to a cruel queen's spell and, believing that her friends are enemies, seeks revenge against a world that has wronged her, while the person she loved most sets out to save her from herself.

A modern retelling of the Jane Austen classic follows the Dashwood sisters--Elinor, Marianne and Margaret--as they, after the death of their father, must come to terms with the cruelties of life without the status of their country house, the protection of the family name or the comfort of an inheritance.

The best-selling author of The Thorn Birds presents a sequel to Pride and Prejudice that finds the willful third Bennet sister setting out in her late thirties in pursuit of adventure while her sisters worry about her at home.

Establishes a diverse and dynamic range of relationships among long-time girlfriends, their spouses, and the way in which money (or lack of it) affects them all. The have-not of the group is Olivia. She is a teacher-turned pot-smoking housecleaner in the upscale neighborhoods of West Los Angeles. She's drifting on a sea of uncertainty, while her friends Franny, Christine, and Jane cope with the relatively enviable problems of wealthy discontentment....

In a society where a person's size is directly proportional to his or her wealth, littlepoor Warner, thirteen, and Prayer, fifteen, struggle to improve their lot in a world built against them.