Books published by publisher Quality Paperback Book Club, New York, 1997

Nothing especially interesting has ever happened to Sandy and Dennys, the run-of-the-mill twins in the extraordinary Murry family. Nothing, that is, until the bitter cold afternoon when, fooling around in their parents' lab, they type on the computer: TAKE ME SOMEPLACE WARM . . . SOMEPLACE WARM AND SPARSELY POPULATED . . . Suddenly Sandy and Dennys are in a harsh desert land. Many Waters continues the distinguished and popular Time Trilogy, made up of A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

In common with much of his other writing, this work by the eminent English novelist and essayist E. M. Forster (1879–1970) displays an unusually perceptive view of British society in the early 20th century. A Room with a View: (1908) brings home the stuffiness of upper-middle-class Edwardian society in a tremendously funny comedy that pairs a well-bred young lady with a lusty railway clerk and satirizes both the clergy and the English notion of respectability. Howards End: which rivals A Passage to India as Forster’s greatest work, makes a country house in Hertfordshire the center and the symbol for what Lionel Trilling called a class war about who would inherit England. Commerce clashes with culture, greed with gentility. Maurice: Set in the elegant Edwardian world of Cambridge undergraduate life, this story by a master novelist introduces us to Maurice Hall when he is fourteen. We follow him through public school and Cambridge, and into his father's firm. In a highly structured society, Maurice is a conventional young man in almost every way―except that his is homosexual. Written during 1913 and 1914, immediately after Howards End, and not published until 1971, Maurice was ahead of its time in its theme and in its affirmation that love between men can be happy. "Happiness," Forster wrote, "is its keynote.... In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad businessman and rather a snob. Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that puzzles him, wakes him up, torments him and finally saves him."