Most Popular Books by John Fowles

John Fowles gained international recognition in 1963 with his first published novel, The Collector, but his labor on what may be his greatest literary undertaking, his journals, commenced over a decade earlier. Fowles, whose works include The Maggot, The French Lieutenant''s Woman, and The Ebony Tower, is among the most inventive and influential English novelists of the twentieth century. The first volume begins in 1949 with Fowles'' final year at Oxford. It reveals his intellectual maturation, chronicling his experiences as a university lecturer in France and as a schoolteacher on the Greek island of Spetsai. Simultaneously candid and eloquent, Fowles'' journals also expose the deep connection between his personal and scholarly lives as Fowles struggled to win literary acclaim. From his affair with Elizabeth, the married woman who would become his first wife, to his passion for film, ornithology, travel, and book collecting, the journals present a portrait of a man eager to experience life. The second and final volume opens in 1966, as Fowles, already an international success, navigates his newfound fame and wealth. With absolute honesty, his journals map his inner turmoil over his growing celebrity and his hesitance to take on the role of a public figure. Fowles recounts his move from London to a secluded house on England''s Dorset coast, where discontented with society''s voracious materialism he led an increasingly isolated life. Great works in their own right, Fowles'' journals elucidate the private thoughts that gave rise to some of the greatest writing of our time.

"A superb novel...Evil has seldom been so sinister." --Time Hailed as the first modern psychological thriller, The Collector is the internationally bestselling novel that catapulted John Fowles into the front rank of contemporary novelists. This tale of obsessive love--the story of a lonely clerk who collects butterflies and of the beautiful young art student who is his ultimate quarry--remains unparalleled in its power to startle and mesmerize. "A bravura first novel...As a horror story, this book is a remarkable tour de force." --New Yorker

In Mantissa (1982), a novelist awakes in the hospital with amnesia -- and comes to believe that a beautiful female doctor is, in fact, his muse.

"Wormholes" presents, for the first time, a representative gathering of Fowles''s fugitive and intensely personal nonfiction writings: essays, literary criticism, commentaries, autobiographical statements, memoirs, and musings.

A new trade paperback edition of "a masterpiece of symbolically charged realism....Fowles is the only writer in English who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of a Tolstoy or James" (John Gardner, Saturday Review). The eponymous hero of John Fowles''s largest and richest novel is an English playwright turned Hollywood screenwriter who has begun to question his own values. Summoned home to England to visit an ailing friend, Daniel Martin finds himself back in the company of people who once knew him well, forced to confront his buried past, and propelled toward a journey of self-discovery through which he ultimately creates for himself a more satisfying existence. A brilliantly imagined novel infused with a profound understanding of human nature, Daniel Martin is John Fowles at the height of his literary powers.

Perhaps the most beloved of John Fowles''s internationally bestselling works, The French Lieutenant''s Woman is a feat of seductive storytelling that effectively invents anew the Victorian novel. "Filled with enchanting mysteries and magically erotic possibilities" (New York Times), the novel inspired the hugely successful 1981 film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons and is today universally regarded as a modern classic.

In the spring of 1736 four men and one woman, all traveling under assumed names, are crossing the Devonshire countryside en route to a mysterious rendezvous. Before their journey ends, one of them will be hanged, one will vanish, and the others will face a murder trial. Out of the truths and lies that envelop these events, John Fowles has created a novel that is at once a tale of erotic obsession, an exploration of the conflict between reason and superstition, an astonishing act of literary legerdemain, and the story of the birth of a new faith.

Two years after The Collector had brought him international recognition and a year before he published The Magus, John Fowles set out his ideas on life in The Aristos. The chief inspiration behind them was the fifth century BC philosopher Heraclitus. In the world he posited of constant and chaotic flux the supreme good was the Aristos, ''of a person or thing, the best or most excellent its kind''.''What I was really trying to define was an ideal of human freedom (the Aristos) in an unfree world,'' wrote Fowles in 1965. He called a materialistic and over-conforming culture to reckoning with his views on a myriad of subjects - pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, Christianity, humanism, existentialism, socialism

The Ebony Tower, comprising a novella, three stories, and a translation of a medieval French tale, echoes themes from John Fowles''s internationally celebrated novels as it probes the fitful relations between love and hate, pleasure and pain, fantasy and reality.

In her haste to flee the place before the fairy godmother''s magic loses effect, Cinderella leaves behind a glass slipper.

Mars 1867, Sarah Woodruff, abandonnée par son amant - un lieutenant français - vit plus ou moins repliée sur elle-même, ignorée d''une petite communauté puritaine qui la considère un peu folle. Ce n''est pas l''avis de Charles Smithson, seul homme à oser un jour s''approcher d''elle, et dont la vie est peu à peu bouleversée par cette rencontre. Sarah et le Lieutenant français n''est pas seulement un grand roman d''amour, c''est aussi l''histoire d''une femme en quête de son émancipation et une féroce peinture de mœurs. Avec, pour toile de fond, la cité portuaire de Lyme Regis et les falaises du Dorset, dans cette Angleterre victorienne où, comme le dit John Fowles, " les gens momifiaient leurs sentiments dans d''étranges bandelettes ".

A book of exquisite photographs in which four generations of one remarkable Cornish family record poignant moments of maritime disaster along the most treacherous coast in the world.

John Fowles gained international recognition in 1963 with his first published novel, The Collector, but his labor on what may be his greatest literary undertaking, his journals, commenced over a decade earlier. Fowles, whose works include The Maggot, The French Lieutenant''s Woman, and The Ebony Tower, is among the most inventive and influential English novelists of the twentieth century. The first volume begins in 1949 with Fowles'' final year at Oxford. It reveals his intellectual maturation, chronicling his experiences as a university lecturer in France and as a schoolteacher on the Greek island of Spetsai. Simultaneously candid and eloquent, Fowles'' journals also expose the deep connection between his personal and scholarly lives as Fowles struggled to win literary acclaim. From his affair with Elizabeth, the married woman who would become his first wife, to his passion for film, ornithology, travel, and book collecting, the journals present a portrait of a man eager to experience life. The second and final volume opens in 1966, as Fowles, already an international success, navigates his newfound fame and wealth. With absolute honesty, his journals map his inner turmoil over his growing celebrity and his hesitance to take on the role of a public figure. Fowles recounts his move from London to a secluded house on England''s Dorset coast, where discontented with society''s voracious materialism he led an increasingly isolated life. Great works in their own right, Fowles'' journals elucidate the private thoughts that gave rise to some of the greatest writing of our time.

John Fowles wrote poetry throughout his lifetime, but more during the 1950s and 1960s than later. This book presents a selection of his poetic work opening with two sequences dating from the early part of his career, two of which draw on his time living in Greece and his interest in Greek mythology.

The noted novelist examines the impact of nature on his own life and on that of urban "civilized" man, concentrating in particular on his fascination with trees and their key role in all of his fiction