Shelfology Book Pairing

by John Wyndham

The beginning of the end seemed harmless enough: a night of mysterious green flashes in the sky. When people woke up blind the next morning, civilization suddenly ground to a halt. And then the triffids began to move in . . . Facing loneliness, confusion, and constant threats from a world gone insane, one man must overcome his fear and discover a way to reestablish a world in the wake of this unexplainable catastrophe.

Introduction by Colm Tóibín

by James Baldwin

Set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, this groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is "a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction" (The Atlantic). • With an Introduction by Colm Tóibín, New York Times bestselling author of The Master. David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni’s curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella’s return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy. Caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality, David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night—“the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.” With sharp, probing insight, Giovanni's Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.