George ELIOT
Middlemarch FICTION ELI In a panoramic sweep of English life during the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Eliot explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but näive; Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally-flawed physician; the passionate artist Will Ladislaw; and Fred Vincey and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel’s rich comic vein. Alexander SOLZHENITSYN
Cancer Ward FICTION SOL As a medical novel, Cancer Ward paints a picture of medicine as practiced in Central Asia in 1955. However, this is also one of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature. Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of men facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the ‘cancerous’ Soviet police state. Withdrawn from publication in the Soviet Union in 1968, it became, along with Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a work that awoke the conscience of the world.
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