Waugh tells the story of the Marchmain family. Aristocratic, beautiful and charming, the Marchmains are indeed a symbol of England and her decline in this novel of the upper class of the 1920s and the abdication of responsibility in the 1930s.

Klingsor's Last Summer tells the story of a famous painter named Klingsor as he experiences a final burst of creativity in his last summer of life. He grabs the cup of life with both hands and drinks until he simply cannot take any more.

Klingsor is an expressionist painter ruled by emotion, his commitment to art is total, for art is the embodiment of what he feels to be the essence of life. Klingsor’s most prominent traits are his love of extremes. As a person he is violently opposed to moderation or mediocrity. He burns the candle at both ends and shuns the safety of moderation.

Klingsor is very much a man of the moment. He does not like to plan ahead in any way. He does not believe in tomorrow and he regards every day as his last. Klingsor's two primary interests in life are creating art and making love and he succeeds in both endeavors.

Like Demian, Siddhartha, Goldmund, and Joseph Knecht, Klingsor is no ordinary person. He has attained a remarkable degree of success in his chosen field and he works intensely to maintain this level of achievement. Like other Hesse’s heroes, Klingsor seeks and finds his own unique and independent path to fulfillment.

The style of the story is expressionist, it conveys a feeling of exuberance and excitement. The imagery is wild and colorful. The reader feels transported to Klingsor’s side as he attempts to embrace the wonders of life and nature with his entire being, only to accept that his time is nearly up.

The novel is somehow autobiographical, Hesse began painting around 1917 and Klingsor's Last Summer was written in the summer of 1919, the novel is a more direct self-portrait of the Hesse of that year when Hesse settled in the Ticino mountain village of Montagnola to start a new life without his wife and children.

Some of the characters have relevance to Hesse's real life. Hermann the poet could be a self reference and Louis was modeled on Hesse's artist friend Louis Moilliet. Klingor, the name, is taken from the magician who appears in Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal.

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
For readers of Neil Gaiman’s
and fans of Madeline Miller’s
,
introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.

In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child--not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power--the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.
Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.
But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.