The Best Prime Day Book Deals

This literary body boasts a collection of three stunningly deep novels which offer rich, emotional journeys into the lives of fascinating characters. 

The Great Santini is a robust saga of a son struggling to escape the stifling expectations of his erratic military father. The Lords of Discipline follows Will McLean as he mentors the Carolina Military’s Institute’s first black student in the face of a racist secret society. And The Prince of Tides explores the consequences of the haunting family secrets which are revealed when Tom Wingo visits his suicidal twin sister. Deeply influenced by Conroy’s own experiences, these powerful and penetrating sagas dive into the Southern psyche and have each served as the basis for blockbuster film adaptations.

Vinnie Miner is the professor of children’s folk rhymes at an Ivy League school. She's also in her early fifties and exactly the sort of woman that no man ever notices. On a solo flight to London for research, Vinnie meets a sanitary engineer from Oklahoma—he's the kind of man she never would have considered a potential romantic partner. But before she knows it, Vinnie’s spending more and more time with him. 

In the meantime, Vinnie’s colleague, the young, handsome Fred Turner is dealing with his own unstable marriage. And it may become even more tenuous after he's introduced to an eccentric and glamorous London scene by the most beautiful actress in England. 

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, the novel is “a splendid comedy, very bright, brilliantly written in a confident and original manner. The best book by one of our finest writers.” –Elizabeth Hardwick

Growing up in Kitamaat, the Haisla Indian reservation located five hundred miles north of Vancouver, Lisamarie Hill learned of tradition and magic, but also how to speak her mind and never give in. Now, as she races along Canada’s Douglas Channel to the place her younger brother Jimmy had supposedly drowned, she recalls the tragedies that have scarred her life. 

Lisamarie’s firm grounding in both the spiritual realm of the Haisla and the sobering “real” world ensure her an indomitable spirit, which she’ll need for the trials yet to come. 

A recipient of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, Eden Robinson is a brilliant literary voice that must be heard—and this evocative, moving, haunting, and devastatingly funny read is an excellent place to start.

The nameless protagonist in Sayed Kashua's debut novel has a difficult legacy: his grandfather was a war hero, while his father was jailed for blowing up a school cafeteria. When he is granted a scholarship to an elite Jewish boarding school, his family rejoices in the possibility of him being the first Arab to build an atomic bomb. 

Instead, the narrator becomes a chameleon, learning to blend into different cultures, schools, languages, and eventually switch between a Jewish lover and an Arab wife. Despite its dark prognosis, this profoundly honest account of human truth utilizes dry humor and a pleasant lightness to explore one Palestinian’s deep struggle with national identity.

Eudora Welty, winner of a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, has done it again. She paints a vivid and charming portrait of 1930s Southern life by following the big, clamorous Fairchilds family. They’re in the middle of planning their daughter’s wedding when a distant relative, nine-year-old Laura McRaven, comes to visit—and brings a slew of secrets and drama with her.

As the captain of a beat-up, unseaworthy vessel carrying extremely flammable cargo across dangerous stretches of the Pacific Ocean, Sylvester Grant is sure to find the adventure he longs for. Never mind his wife is at home, longing for World War II to be over so she and Syl can just lead conventional, suburban lives. 

Soon the threat of never returning home looms as the crew of the Y-18 face rampant illness, heated arguments, and the terrifying possibility of an enemy attack. In order to survive their mission of bringing two hundred thousand gallons of high-octane aviation fuel to shore, Sylvester must rally these sailors into teamwork, but that requires a trust which will have to be hard-won.

Death sits in her apartment, watching the chaos unfold at the start of her new experiment. She hadn’t reaped a single soul on January 1st. At first, the humans rejoiced. They danced in the streets. They had achieved eternal life. But the awful realities of life without Death soon hit them. 

Families are left to care for the permanently dying, life-insurance becomes worthless, and funeral parlors must arrange pet burials in order to stay afloat. Politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors are thrown into an international panic on Earth as Death contemplates becoming human, and falling in love. A thought provoking read from Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, it's "a novel to die for” (The Washington Post).

Delve into the delights of the visual worlds of art and travel with Calvino’s last collection of 38 essays. Traverse Mexican temples or Japanese gardens guided by this celebrated author’s boundless curiosity and ingenious imagination. Meditate on observation and knowledge as you read deeper into the secrets of antique and cuneiform maps. 

In Calvino’s own words, this collection is “a diary of travels, of course, but also of feelings, states of mind, moods…The fascination of a collection lies just as much in what it reveals as in what it conceals of the secret urge that led to its creation.”

War, natural disaster, reckless gods, and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads the Booker Prize–winning author of Possession weaves into her retelling of the Norse myth of Ragnorak. 

As a young British girl struggles to make sense of her new life during World War II, she is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods, a book which transforms both her inner and outer worlds forever.