The Remains of the Day
1989 · 245 pages
Driving across England in 1956 to see the housekeeper he worked beside, a butler remembers the Nazi sympathizer he served with pride. What he cannot bring himself to say is the whole novel.
★ 7.7
Browse by time · year
1989
Showing 10 books from 1989
Citizens
A Chronicle of the French Revolution
1989 · 948 pages
Violence was not the French Revolution's tragic accident but its engine, Schama argues, and the Terror merely 1789 with a higher body count. The book drew furious rebuttals from historians on the left.
★ 6.4
Barbarians at the Gate
The Fall of RJR Nabisco
Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
1989 · 563 pages
In 1988 the chief executive of RJR Nabisco moved to buy his own company and set off a bidding war that closed at $25 billion. Burrough and Helyar put you inside every meeting.
★ 6.4
The Joy Luck Club
1989 · 288 pages
Four women who fled China met over mahjong in San Francisco, and when one dies her daughter takes the empty seat. Tan's sixteen interlocking stories carry the mothers' buried lives across.
★ 6.1
The Snows of Yesteryear
1989 · 290 pages
Rezzori rebuilds vanished Czernowitz, the eastern edge of the Habsburg world, through the five people who filled his childhood. His father hunts, his mother panics, and his nursemaid teaches him about death.
★ 5.7
Liar's Poker
1989 · 310 pages
Twenty-four and ignorant of bonds, Lewis was handed millions of other people's money by Salomon Brothers. He wrote the trading floor as farce, and a generation read it as a career guide.
★ 5.6
Coleridge
Early Visions
1989 · 622 pages
The finest modern life of a poet. Holmes walks Coleridge's roads and brings him back talking, from "The Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's company to the laudanum and the sailing for Malta.
★ 5.4
This Boy's Life
A Memoir
1989 · 336 pages
Sent to a Cascade logging town to live with a violent stepfather, a boy who calls himself Jack lies and steals his way toward escape. Wolff renders his adolescence with merciless clarity.
★ 5.1
Hyperion
1989 · 481 pages
The Canterbury Tales in deep space: seven pilgrims travel to the Time Tombs and the blade-covered creature guarding them, each telling the story that brought them. Simmons switches genre with every tale.
★ 4.8
Like Water for Chocolate
1989 · 246 pages
Tradition forbids the youngest daughter to marry, so Tita cooks, and everything she feels enters the food. Her quail in rose petal sauce sends a sister off naked with a Mexican revolutionary.
★ 4.7