popular books

BEST REVIEWED BOOKS — JUNE 1975

Best Reviewed

New Books List: 56 titles


  • Jacquelyn Aeby

    Indian drums in the night beat out a message of danger for pretty young Serena Dahl, on an archaeological expedition to the remote mountains of New Mexico. Now this beautiful landscape had been transformed into a place of menace by fearful figures in...



  • Harvey Ardman



  • James Baldwin

    From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century comes a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime -- "a moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously...



  • Beatrice Brandon

    She came to a land of fearful legends and terrifying reality. Young American actress Grania Kirk was in flight from a disastrous love affair when she came to the homeland of her Irish ancestors--and to the legendary Cliffs of Moher, where ancient evi...



  • Erskine Caldwell

    Through the summer twilight in the Depression-era South, word begins to circulate of a black man accosting a white woman. In no time the awful forces of public opinion and political expediency goad the separate fears and frustrations of a small south...




  • Judith Chernaik

    Compared in the high noon of optimism to Mary McCarthy and Doris Lessing, while the putative author/bored faculty wife also knows she has a greater endowment than her husband Charles--someone seems to have outsmarted him-or-herself. Ah Leah, she shou...



  • James Clavell

    SOON TO BE AN FX LIMITED SERIES • A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life. All brought together in an extraordinary saga aflame with passion, conflict, ambition, and the struggl...



  • Vera Cleaver



  • Laurie Colwin

    When Sam Bax, that charming daredevil of a Boston lawyer, sails his boat into a storm off the coast of Maine, Elizabeth "Olly" Bax, his wife and ardent sidekick, becomes a widow at the edge of seventy-seven. With no pretense of "courage", Olly griev...




  • James Crumley

    Milo once had a thriving divorce-case business in the small town of in the Pacific Northwest, but because of liberal new divorce laws has taken to drinking and staring out the window. He's up to his third drink of the morning when an attractive young...



  • R.F. Delderfield

    They set out as ten who must wend their way out from behind French lines in Portugal and back to the British army. This tale of the Peninsular Campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars offers an unforgettable adventure....



  • R.F. Delderfield

    The story of a modern Mr Chips suddenly fed up with his life as a schoolteacher, who leaves wife, home, and all he owns to set out on the road to freedom. Ahead lies Mr Sugg, the odd little man who teaches him the antiques trade, the generous hearted...



  • Joyce Dingwell

    Roslyn had always adored baby Belinda Forrest, and had always cared for her and about her -- which was more than the child's relatives had ever done! Now, belatedly, they wanted to claim her, but Roslyn had no intention of parting with her. Ho...




  • E.L. Doctorow

    Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.
       The story opens in 1906 in New...



  • Tankred Dorst



  • Iain Douglas-Hamilton

    With a courageous heart and an adventurous spirit, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a young Scottish zoologist, began this study of the elephants of East Africa. The future of these elephants hangs in the balances; the expanding encroachments of man upon their...



  • Max Ehrlich

    Plagued by nightmares of his own death, a California professor puzzles out the riddle of his dreams in this classic spine-tingler about past livesDr. Peter Proud’s ordinary life as a professor is threatened by recurrent dreams that all end the...



  • M.M. Folsom



  • Alan Dean Foster

    IT WAS A PEACEFUL PLANET...IF YOU KNEW HOW TO STAY ALIVE! Born was a child of the rainforest that covered Midworld...part of a primitive society that the peaceful tree planet had sustained for hundreds of years. He was wise in the ways of his worl...



  • Paul Gallico

    ***A BOOK CLUB PICK FROM THE QUEEN CONSORT'S READING ROOM***

    Now a major film, starring Leslie Manville, Isabelle Huppert, Jason Isaacs and Lucas Bravo

    'Mrs Harris is one of the great creations of fiction - so real that ...



  • Myrna Grant

    Ivan and Katya are in the thick of yet another adventure - Smuggling! Can they carry off a smuggling operation right under the noses of suspicious government officials in Soviet Russia? Can they get the much needed warm clothes back to their needy fr...



  • Janice Gray

    Peta wanted nothing more from life than her carefree existence in Norfolk, "messing about in boats" with her old friend, Mike Mandeville. At least, she thought she wanted nothing more -- until Nicholas Waring came along!...



  • Isser Harel

    The former Chief Executive of the Secret Services of Israel and director of Operation Eichmann reconstructs in detail the tracing and capturing of the Nazi war criminal and his clandestine removal from Argentina to Israel...



  • Fiona Hill

    "...considerably more wit and pizazz than the legendary Georgette [Heyer] herself.” -- Kirkus Reviews Lady Laura consents to give her hand to Thaddeus Grey, a man she has known all of her life. Perhaps there is some romantic ingredient missing fro...




  • Ray Hogan

    Special U.S. Marshal John Rye had a dangerous assignment transporting a murderer across the wild country to the Yuma Penitentiary....




  • Donald Honig

    In interviews with the author, eighteen former big-league players, including Wes Ferrell, Bucky Walters, Ted Lyons, Clyde Sukeforth, and Rip Sewell, recall their careers and the game as it was in the twenties, thirties, and forties...



  • Fred Hoyle

    From two hundred light years across the universe comes a message of terror... A new radio telescope picks up a complex series of signals from the Andromeda constellation - signals which prove to be a programme for a giant computer. When the computer ...



  • Florence Hurd

    ADRIFT ON AN OCEAN OF EVIL It had begun as a voyage of adventure -- a trip to exotic China and the South Pacific aboard the sailing ship The Secret Duchess. But for beautiful Charlotte Hayworth, it soon became an excursion into horror. For the...



  • Carolyn Keene

    A ghostly figure, a walking suit of armor, and a gargoyle in the prompter's box confront Jean and Louise Dana and their Starhurst classmates as they rehearse for a musical at Mozart Hall. The owner, a retired singer, and the watchman assure th...





  • Tanith Lee

    A mysterious woman awakens in the heart of a dormant volcano. She comes forth into a brutal ancient world transformed by genocidal pestilence, fierce beauty, and cultural devastation. She has no memory of herself, and she could be anyone -- mortal wo...




  • Stephen Longstreet

    At last their strange and unforgettable story is revealed, an epic of romance and creation rooted in the American soil and a fortune built on the rails of a vast empire. Begin the saga with ENOCH KINGSTON -- a brawny, daring Western adventurer on ...



  • Thomas Mann

    "The great virtue of Royal Highness is its relaxed, fairy-tale quality that naturally brings the reader inside that 'Edwardian' calm which preceded everything common to contemporary social life. It is very easy to make connections between t...



  • Christopher Marlowe

    The introduction to this edition contains an analysis of the first quarto (including new evidence of its original dating) and a reconsideration of the play's complex relation to the Shakespearean histories that preceded and followed it. Charles R. Fo...





  • Betty Neels

    When Henrietta Brodie was left a house in a Dutch village, she decided to make her home there, and settled happily into her new abode. She thought she would like everything about Holland -- except Marnix van Hessel. As 'lord of the manor'...



  • Andre Norton

    Few authors have achieved such renown as World Fantasy Life Achievement honoree and Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Andre Norton. With the love of readers and the praise of critics, Norton’s books have sold millions of copies wo...



  • Tim O'Brien

    A CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE THINGS THEY CARRIEDOriginally published in 1975, Tim O'Brien's debut novel demonstrates the emotional complexity and enthralling narrative tension that later earned him the National Book Awa...



  • Marc Olden

    For the sake of his master’s memory, Sand will kill to recover a magnificent sword

    Though useless in battle, the emperor’s katana is a beautiful weapon. Cast from solid gold, this 1,200-year-old blade was thought to be lost unti...



  • Ellery Queen

    An American cop stumbles across a drug ring on a tropical island No matter how hard she tries, Tracy can’t seem to kill herself. Her hands shake too much to cut her wrists. Wading into the ocean, her body refuses to be drowned. Even the heroin she ...



  • Janette Radcliffe

    The fabled romance of Venice seemed a mockery to lovely young Prudence Tarrant. Left penniless by the disgrace and death of her beloved brother, she came to this foreign city not as the lady she was born, but as a scorned governess to the ambitious H...



  • Gloria Repp

    David caught a flicker of movement behind the trees just as something buzzed past his face and landed with a plop in the river. "David!" Susan cried in fright. "Someone's shooting at us!" Fourteen-year-old David Durant has a...



  • Sara Seale

    When twenty-year-old Laura, after a careful, sheltered upbringing, was suddenly thrust into the turbulent household of the 'dark Trevaynes' she felt young and defenseless, and always overshadowed by her glamorous cousin Cleo. There had bee...



  • C.W. Smith

    C.W. Smith's Country Music is a raw comic romp that offers up a shrewd anatomy of sexual and social stances. It opens when Bobby Joe Gilbert, Hedorville's Bane to Virgins and Most Unlikely to Succeed, confronts an unwelcome question: "What are you go...



  • Florence Stevenson

    FAME, FORTUNE, ROMANCE…OR TERROR IN A MANSION OF DOOM…! The concert at the magnificent Fowler mansion was to be the beginning of a success-filled career for lovely, young opera singer Leslie MacKenzie. But when her chaperone fell ill, Leslie w...



  • Patrick Tilley

    Alien Day. The date was Friday, the third of August. For some people the day was just beginning, for others it was the ending in a perfectly normal way. Then right across the world every ground and airborne radar screen went haywire… This time i...



  • Patrick White

    Patrick White's brilliant 1961 novel, set in an Australian suburb, intertwines four deeply different lives. An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed -- and stricken -- with visionary ...



  • Emily Whittle