Shelfology Book Pairing

by James Clavell

SOON TO BE AN FX LIMITED SERIES • A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life. All brought together in an extraordinary saga aflame with passion, conflict, ambition, and the struggle for power. Here is the world-famous novel of Japan that is the earliest book in James Clavell’s masterly Asian saga. Set in the year 1600, it tells the story of a bold English pilot whose ship was blown ashore in Japan, where he encountered two people who were to change his life: a warlord with his own quest for power, and a beautiful interpreter torn between two ways of life and two ways of love. The principal figures are John Blackthorne, whose dream it is to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, to wrest control of the trade between Japan and China from Portuguese, and to return home a man of wealth and position; Toranaga, the most powerful feudal lord in Japan, who strives and schemes to seize ultimate power by becoming Shogun—the Supreme Military Dictator—and to unite the warring samurai fiefdoms under his own masterly and farsighted leadership; and the Lady Mariko, a Catholic convert whose conflicting loyalties to the Church and her country are compounded when she falls in love with Blackthorne, the barbarian intruder. In dramatizing how a Westerner, the representative man of his time, comes to be altered by his exposure to an alien culture, Mr. Clavell provides a spellbinding depiction of a nation seething with violence and intrigue as it moves from the medieval world to the modern. Praise for Shogun “I can’t remember when a novel has seized my mind like this one. . . . It’s not only something you read—you live it.”—New York Times Book Review “Adventure and action, the suspense of danger, shocking touching human relationships . . . a climactic human story.”—Los Angeles Times “A tale surging with action, intrigue and love . . . a huge cast . . . vast and dramatic . . . stunning . . . savage . . . beautiful . . . an extraordinary performance.”—Publishers Weekly “Exciting, totally absorbing...be prepared for late nights, meals unlasting, buisness unattended.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

Film tie-in edition of Stephen King's IT

by Stephen King

King's classic No. 1 bestseller and the basis for the massively successful films It: Chapter One and It: Chapter Two as well as the inspiration for HBO Max's upcoming Welcome to Derry. We all float down here. Derry, Maine is just an ordinary town: familiar, well-ordered for the most part, a good place to live. It is a group of children who see - and feel - what makes Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, IT lurks, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each one's deepest dread. Sometimes IT appears as an evil clown named Pennywise and sometimes IT reaches up, seizing, tearing, killing . . . Time passes and the children grow up, move away and forget. Until they are called back, once more to confront IT as IT stirs and coils in the sullen depths of their memories, emerging again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.