The story of the love of Ali, a Muslim from a traditional Tatar family and Nino, daughter of a Georgian Christian family and how their different cultures try to keep them apart in pre-WWI Baku, Azerbaijan.

The snobbery and false values of the English country nobility are satirized in these two love stories involving the well-established Radlett and Hampton families.

Moving from Paris to Dresden to Shanghai, Wagenstein chronicles the lives of European migr and refugees in WWII Shanghai. Elisabeth and Theodore Weissberg, a German mezzo-soprano and her German-Jewish violinist husband, flee Dresden to eke out an existence in Shanghai's burgeoning Jewish ghetto, which ends up 30,000 strong as the Shoah begins. Hilde Braun, a German-Jewish actress, is living illegally in Paris aided by a mysterious Slav named Vladek, until events force them to Shanghai.

The rise and fall of a man of imagination. From a helper in his grandfather's cigar store in 19th Century New York, he rises to become an entrepreneur of fabulous creations, culminating in a hotel with moonlight, waterfalls and a Grecian temple where maidens recite poetry around the clock. Facing ruin, he comes to the conclusion he dreamed the wrong dream. By the author of Edwin Mullhouse.

Boria, the narrator of this lovely novel, is a superfluous man fated to play a marginal role in society--Soviet Russian society. The son of a small Jewish businessman, his petit bourgeois origins prevent him access to the university world in which he believes he has found his calling. This means he must educate himself and resign himself to teaching in second-class institutions. In a fragmentary way, the sensitive Boria recalls his tumultuous life: the death of his father; his first attempts to earn a living teaching private lessons; living in different cities, including Kharkiv, Leningrad, and Rostov; and, above all, his love for the beautiful Katia, a paradigm of feminine unpredictability. Through these fragments, the narrator forms an emotional yet insightful portrait of daily life in Soviet Russia, a world dominated by collective values that tend to crush any glimmer of humanity. The author infuses biographical elements into the novel, which he finished writing in the 1960s but could not publish until 1989. The book established Metter as one of the most prominent Soviet authors of the era and earned him international fame.

Writing the story of Iris Grenville's life, Brady Campion is introduced to a beautiful woman, uncultured but determined to become a member of society's elite, who killed her husband and whose lawyers convinced a jury that she mistook him for a prowler.