Notable Novels: 1970s

First published in 1979, a Bend in the River is a novel of the politics and society of postcolonial Africa. Salim, a young Indian man, moves to a town on a bend in the river of a recently independent nation. As Salim strives to establish his business, he comes to be closely involved with the fluid and dangerous politics of the newly created state, the remnants of the old regime clashing inevitably with the new.

Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town's...

A fictional memoir illuminating Aaron Burr's life and times, highlighting his political accomplishments and fatal duel with Alexander Hamilton.

Born the bastard son of a Welsh princess, Myridden Emrys -- or as he would later be known, Merlin -- leads a perilous childhood, haunted by portents and visions. But destiny has great plans for this no-man's-son, taking him from prophesying before the High King Vortigern to the crowning of Uther Pendragon ... and the conception of Arthur -- king for once and always.

Combines fact and speculation in a fictionalized reconstruction of the events leading up to and including the November 1943 mission of a small force of German paratroopers landed in Britain to capture Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Humans first bumped heads with the Taurans when we began using collapsars to travel the stars. Although the collapsars provide nearly instantaneous travel across vast distances, the relativistic speeds associated with the process means that time passes slower for those aboard ship. For William Mandella, a physics student drafted as a soldier, that means more than 27 years will have passed between his first encounter with the Taurans and his homecoming,...

In teeming Victorian London, where lavish wealth and appalling poverty live side by side, Edward Pierce charms the most prominent of the well-to-do as he cunningly orchestrates the crime of the century. Who would suspect that a gentleman of breeding could mastermind the daring theft of a fortune in gold? Who could predict the consequences of making the extraordinary robbery aboard the pride of England's industrial era, the mighty steam locomotive?...

Keeping watch over the young Arthur Pendragon as he grows, the prince and prophet Merlin Ambrosius is haunted by a vision of a magical sword--the fabled sword Caliburn, hidden for centuries. Sheathed in fire and stone, water and ice, the sword of the Emperor Maximus is destined to reveal the true High King. When Uther Pendragon is killed in battle, the time of destiny is at hand, and Arthur must claim the sword from a perilous chapel to claim his...

"Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly erotic, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force--a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses. It is a novel only Anne Rice could write"--Page [4] of cover.

When three people are killed by a great white shark in three different incidents, the police chief of a Long Island resort town is forced to take action.