READING LIST ENGELS STED. GYM. BREDA
1800 – 1900
Austen, J.
Brontë, C.
Brontë, E.
Chopin, K.
Collins, W.
Crane, S.
Dickens, C.
Sense and Sensibility
When two sisters appear to be deserted by the young men they had intended to marry, the stage is set
for a delicious comedy of manners that not only showcases Austen’s perception, humor and
incomparable prose, but offers a splendid glimpse of upper and middle-class English society of the early
19th century.
Pride and Prejudice
Mr. and Mrs. Bennet have five unmarried daughters, and Mrs. Bennet is especially eager to find suitable
husbands for them. When the rich single gentlemen Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy come to live nearby, the
Bennets have high hopes. But pride, prejudice, and misunderstandings all combine to complicate their
relationships and to make happiness difficult.
Emma
Charming, willful Emma Woodhouse amuses herself by planning other people's lives. When her
interfering backfires, she learns a bitter lesson: well-intentioned busybodies are as resented as those
motivated by ill will, and everyone should learn to respect the individuality of others.
Mansfield Park
Joseph Andrews, refuses Lady Booby's advances, she discharges him, and Joseph-in the company of
his old tutor, Parson Adams (one of the great comic figures of literature)-sets out from London to visit his
sweetheart, Fanny. Along the way, the two travelers meet with a series of adventures-some hilarious,
some heartstopping-in which through their own innocence and honesty they expose the hypocrisy and
affectation of others. Joseph Andrews started out as a parody of Richardson's Pamela, but soon left that
purpose behind and now is regarded as the first English realistic novel.
Northanger Abbey
Catherine Morland is taken by her aunt to Bath, where she encounters the social whirl denied her at
home. She befriends Isabella Thorpe and her boorish brother John. She meets the charming but
eccentric Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor. And all the time her head is full of the Gothic fantasies of
Mrs Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, scenes from which will keep intruding into the daily life of Bath
society.When Catherine accepts an invitation to the Tilney's country seat at Northanger Abbey, lurid
images of Udolpho threaten to overwhelm her. Until, as in all the best Jane Austen, Catherine finally gets
her man
Jane Eyre
Poor and plain, Jane Eyre begins life as a lonely orphan in the household of her hateful aunt. Despite the
oppression she endures at home, and the later torture of boarding school, Jane manages to emerge with
her spirit and integrity unbroken. She becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she finds herself
falling in love with her employer--the dark, impassioned Mr. Rochester. But an explosive secret tears
apart their relationship, forcing Jane to face poverty and isolation once again.
Vilette
Charlotte Brontë’s last and most autobiographical novel, Villette explores the inner life of a lonely young
Englishwoman, Lucy Snowe, who leaves an unhappy existence in England to become a teacher in the
capital of a fictional European country. Drawn to the school’s headmaster, Lucy must face the pain of
unrequited love and the question of her place in society.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë’s only novel, Wuthering Heights remains one of literature’s most disturbing explorations into
the dark side of romantic passion. Heathcliff and Cathy believe they’re destined to love each other
forever, but when cruelty and snobbery separate them, their untamed emotions literally consume them.
The Awakening
Novelist and short story writer Kate Chopin (1851-1904) was the first American woman to deal with
women's roles as wives and mothers. The Awakening (1899), her most famous novel, concerns a
woman, dissatisfied with her indifferent husband, who gives in to her desire for other men and commits
adultery. This is a searing depiction of the religious and social pressures brought to bear on women who
transgress restrictive Victorian codes of behavior.
The Woman in White
The story begins with an eerie midnight encounter between artist Walter Hartright and a ghostly woman
dressed all in white who seems desperate to share a dark secret. The next day Hartright, engaged as a
drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie and her half sister, tells his pupils about the strange events
of the previous evening. Determined to learn all they can about the mysterious woman in white, the three
soon find themselves drawn into a chilling vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue.
The Red Badge of Courage
In the spring of 1863, as he faces battle for the first time at Chancellorsville, Virginia, a young Union
soldier matures to manhood and finds peace of mind as he comes to grips with his conflicting emotions
about war.
Oliver Twist
After escaping from the dark and dismal workhouse where he was born, Oliver finds himself on the mean
streets of Victorian-era London and is unwittingly recruited into a scabrous gang of scheming urchins. In
this band of petty thieves Oliver encounters the extraordinary and vibrant characters who have captured
readers’ imaginations for more than 150 years: the loathsome Fagin, the beautiful and tragic Nancy, the
crafty Artful Dodger, and perhaps one of the greatest villains of all time—the terrifying Bill Sikes.
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Dickens, C.
Eliot, G.
Gaskell, E.
Hardy, T.
Hardy, T.
Nicholas Nickleby
Left penniless by the death of his improvident father, young Nicholas Nickleby assumes responsibility for
his mother and sister and seeks help from his Scrooge-like Uncle Ralph. Instantly disliking Nicholas,
Ralph sends him to teach in a school run by the stupidly sadistic Wackford Squeers. Nicholas decides to
escape, taking with him the orphan Smike, one of Squeers’s most abused young charges, and the two
embark on a series of adventurous encounters with an array of humanity’s worst and best—greedy fools,
corrupt lechers, cheery innocents, and selfless benefactors.
David Copperfield
David Copperfield is the story of a boy who loses his parents at an early age, and who escapes the
torture of working for his pitiless stepfather to try to make something of himself and, with any luck, find
true happiness.
Great Expectations
Great Expectations follows the life of the orphan, Pip. We first meet him as a tiny, terrified child in a
village churchyard. Years later, through the help of an anonymous benefactor, Pip will travel to London,
full of expectations to become a gentleman. But his life is already inextricably tangled in a mystery that
surrounds a beautiful woman, an embittered recluse, and an ambitious lawyer.
A Tale of Two Cities
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” With these famous words, Charles Dickens
plunges the reader into one of history’s most explosive eras—the French Revolution. From the storming
of the Bastille to the relentless drop of the guillotine, Dickens vividly captures the terror and upheaval of
that tumultuous period. At the center is the novel’s hero, Sydney Carton, a lazy, alcoholic attorney who,
inspired by a woman, makes the supreme sacrifice on the bloodstained streets of Paris.
The Chimes
The story centers around Trotty Veck, a poor ticket porter, whose outlook is converted from despair to
hope by the spirits of the chimes on New Year's Eve.
The Old Curiosity Shop
The emotional tale of Little Nell and her doting grandfather.Played out against the backdrop of a cold and
brutal London, the twosome abandon their home to escape debt and roam the countryside as beggars.
Relentlessly pursued by a malicious moneylender and encountering ne'er-do-wells, con artists, and the
persevering poor, they also find goodness and generosity, love and loyalty.
The Mill on the Floss
Misunderstood Maggie Tulliver is torn. Her rebellious and passionate nature demands expression, while
her provincial kin and community expect self-denial. Based closely on the author's own life, Maggie's
story explores the conflicts of love and loyalty and the friction between desire and moral responsibility
Silas Marner
A gentle linen weaver who is wrongly accused of a heinous theft goes into seclusion and finds
redemption in his unselfish love for an abandoned child who mysteriously appears at his cottage.
Adam Bede
Adam Bede is a hardy young carpenter who cares for his aging mother. His one weakness is the woman
he loves blindly: the trifling town beauty, Hetty Sorrel, whose only delights are her baubles-and the
delusion that the careless Captain Donnithorne may ask for her hand. Betrayed by their innocence, both
Adam and Hetty allow their foolish hearts to trap them in a triangle of seduction, murder, and retribution.
Mary Barton
The background story is Manchester in the 'hungry forties'and the acute poverty of the unemployed millhands. Mary Barton,daughter of an embittered worker,wins the attention of Henry Carson,son of one of
the employers.But a group of workmen plot his murder as a warning to his class,and it falls upon Mary's
father to perform the deed.Suspicion lies with Mary's working class admirer,Jed,who is tried for his
life.Finally,John Barton is driven by guilt to confess
North and South
When her father leaves the Church, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire
to move with her family to the North of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new
surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of
local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice.
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
In writing about Charlotte Bronte, who became her life-long friend, and whom she greatly admired but
whose novels she did not entirely like, Elizabeth Gaskell portrays the struggle of a woman artist for
whom she had, until her late marriage, "foreseen the single life".
Wives and Daughters
Set in English society before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters centres on the story of youthful
Molly Gibson, brought up from childhood by her father. When he remarries a new stepsister, Cynthia,
enters Molly's quiet life. Loveable but worldly and troubling, Cynthia's arrival alters Molly's daily life. The
narrative traces the development of the two girls into womanhood within the gossiping and watchful
society of Hollingford.
The Return of the Native
'To be loved to madness - such was her great desire' Eustacia Vye criss-crosses the wild Egdon Heath,
eager to experience life to the full in her quest for 'music, poetry, passion, war'. She marries Clym
Yeobright, native of the heath, but his idealism frustrates her romantic ambitions and her discontent
draws others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness.
The Mayor of Casterbridge
A poor workman named Michael Henchard, in a fit of drunken rage, sells his wife and baby daughter to a
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Hawthorne, N.
James, H.
James, H.
London, J.
Scott, Sir. W.
Stevenson, R.L.
Stoker, B.
Thackeray, W.
stranger at a country fair. Stricken with remorse, Henchard forswears alcohol and works hard to become
a prosperous businessman and the respected mayor of Casterbridge. But he cannot erase his past. His
wife ultimately returns to offer Henchard the choice of redemption or a further descent into his own selfdestructive nature.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the
aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is a rich wastrel who seduces her and makes her life
miserable. When Tess meets Angel Clare, she is offered true love and happiness, but her past catches
up with her and she faces an agonizing moral choice.
The Scarlet Letter
This classic of American literature is the tale of a passionate woman who challenges the system of moral
authority and places belief in the higher law of her own heart. She is sternly judged by the puritans of her
society, but viewed more ambiguously by the author himself.
Washington Square
In the Washington Square area of New York City in the late nineteenth century, devastating betrayals by
both her father and her lover leave shy and fragile Catherine Sloper permanently scarred.
Portrait of a Lady
Transplanted form her native America, Isabel Archer has candour, beauty, intelligence, an independent
spirit and a marked enthusiasm for life. An unexpected inheritance gives her freedom, but she makes
one disastrous error of judgement, resulting in tragedy.
The Ambassadors
This complex tale of self-discovery--considered by the author to be his best work--traces the path of an
aging idealist, Lambert Strether. Arriving in Paris with the intention of persuading his young charge to
abandon an obsession with a French woman and return home, Strether reaches unexpected
conclusions. Astute, humorous, and intelligent, this masterpiece from the pinnacle of James' long and
brilliant career remains ever vital
The Call of the Wild
Buck is a dog born to luxury, but he is betrayed and sold as a sled dog in the harsh and frozen Yukon.
But Buck is stronger than any man knew, and he escapes captivity and rises above his enemies to
become the leader of a wolf pack. This action-packed novel tells the remarkable story of one of the most
feared and admired dogs in the north. This Call of the Wild graphic novel captures all of the excitement
and adventure of Jack London’s classic novel.
The Son of the Sun
Captain Grief encounters the adventurers, scoundrels, pirates, and opportunists who followed the
example of their colonial predecessors and exploited the islands and their resources early in the
twentieth century. Inspired by London's own voyage through the South Seas on board his self-made
yacht, the Snark, these stories paint a colorful - and at times horrifying - picture of the remote South
Pacific.
The Son ot the Wolf
The book centres on the exploits of Malemute Kid, who dispenses crude but unerring justice through his
canny understanding of the minds and hearts of the people of this raw frontier territory. They act out their
dramas of life and death in mining camps and on the Long Trail, against the backdrop of the frozen
Northland. The stories tell of gambles won and lost, of endurance and sacrifice, and often turn on the
unsuspected qualities of exceptional women and the complex relations between the white adventurers
and the native tribes.
Ivanhoe
Ivanhoe, son of Cedric, of Saxon birth, loves Rowena, who traces her descent to King Alfred, and who
returns his love. Cedric, who is devoted to the restoration of the Saxon line to the throne of England sees
the chance of effecting this in the marriage of Rowena to Athelstane and banishes Ivanhoe.
The Heart of Midlothian
1736 and the people of Edinburgh are infuriated by the actions of John Porteous, Captain of the Guard.
His death reprieved by a distant monarch they resolve to take their own revenge. At the centre of the
story is Edinburgh's forbidding Tolbooth prison, known by all as the Heart of Midlothian.
Old Mortality
A swift-moving historical romance that places an anachronistically liberal hero against the forces of
fanaticism in 17th-century Scotland in the period infamous as the "killing time". Henry Morton is torn
between his love for a royalist's granddaughter and his loyalty to his downtrodden countrymen
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
This fascinating novel explores the curious turnings of human character through the strange case of Dr.
Jekyll, a kindly scientist who by night takes on his stunted evil self, Mr. Hyde. Anticipating modern
psychology, Jekyll And Hyde is a brilliantly original study of man's dual nature — as well as an immortal
tale of suspense and terror.
Treasure Island
Set sail to the heart of adventure with cabin boy, Jim Hawkins, aboard the legendary scoundrel, Captain
Long John Silver. A secret treasure map becomes the key to heart-pounding thrills, danger and
swashbuckling action as a boy faces the high seas and the grandest pirate of all in a great adventure.
Dracula
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, he makes
horrifying discoveries about his client. Soon afterward, disturbing incidents unfold in England-an
unmanned ship is wrecked at Whitby, strange puncture marks appear on a young woman's neck,
and a lunatic asylum inmate raves about the imminent arrival of his "Master"-culminating in a battle of
wits between the sinister Count and a determined group of adversaries.
Vanity Fair
Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use all her wit, charm and considerable sex
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appeal to escape her drab destiny as a governess. From London’s ballrooms to the battlefields of
Waterloo, the bewitching Becky works her wiles on a gallery of memorable characters, including her
lecherous employer, Sir Pitt, his rich sister, Miss Crawley, and Pitt’s dashing son, Rawdon, the first of
Becky’s misguided sexual entanglements.
Twain, M.
Wilde, O.
Wollstonecraft
Shelley, M.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Perhaps the best-loved nineteenth-century American novel, Mark Twain’s tale of boyhood adventure
overflows with comedy, warmth, and slapstick energy. Below Tom Sawyer’s sunny surface lurk hints of a
darker reality, of youthful innocence and naïveté confronting the cruelty, hypocrisy, and foolishness of
the adult world.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry Finn, rebel against school and church, casual inheritor of gold treasure, rafter of the
Mississippi, and savior of Jim the runaway slave, is the
archetypical American maverick.
Fleeing the respectable society that wants to "civilize" him, Huck Finn shoves off with Jim on a rhapsodic
raft journey down the Mississippi River.
As Huck learns about love, responsibility, and morality, the trip becomes a metaphoric voyage through
his own soul, culminating in the glorious moment when he decides to "go to hell" rather than return Jim to
slavery.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dorian Gray is a dreamlike story of a young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty. As a
result of this seedy exchange, Dorian remains unchanged—ageless, vain, and amoral—while his portrait
grows increasingly hideous with the years.
Frankenstein
A monster assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies develops a mind of his own as he learns
to loathe himself and hate his creator.
1900 – 1980
Adams, R.
Amis, K.
Amis, M.
Atwood, M.
Auster, P.
Bainbridge, B.
Baldwin, J.
Girl in a Swing
A London art broker goes to Copenhagen where he requires the services of a secretary fluent in Danish,
English, and German. He falls deeply in love with the woman, despite the fact that he knows virtually
nothing about her. She insists on not being married in a church, and after they are married, some bad
things from her past begin surfacing in subtly supernatural ways, and he must find the best way to deal
with them without destroying their relationship.
Lucky Jim
In Lucky Jim, Amis introduces us to Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer at a British college who spends his days
fending off the legions of malevolent twits that populate the school. His job is in constant danger, often
for good reason. Lucky Jim hits the heights whenever Dixon tries to keep a preposterous situation from
spinning out of control, which is every three pages or so. The final example of this--a lecture spewed by
a hideously pickled Dixon--is a chapter's worth of comic nirvana.
Take a Girl Like You
The story of attractive little Jenny Bunn, come south to teach and confront head-on, the cold, cold world.
Other People
The story concerns itself with a young woman in London suffering from amnesia. As she slowly pieces
together who she was it becomes clear that all is not what it seems.
Surfacing (3)
Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a young woman who returns to
northern Quebec, to the remote island of her childhood, with her lover and two friends, to investigate the
mysterious disappearance of her father. Flooded with memories, she begins to realize that going home
means entering not only another place, but another time. As the wild island exerts its elemental hold and
she is submerged in the language of the wilderness, she discovers that what she is really searching for
is her own past.
In the Country of Last Things
A postapocalyptic quest set against a backdrop of urban deprivation. The masses are homeless, theft is
so rampant it is no longer a crime, and death -- by arranging either suicide or assassination -- is the only
way out. Buildings collapse daily, driving huge numbers of citizens into the streets, where they starve or
die of exposure -- if they aren't murdered by other vagrants first. Government forces haul away the
bodies, and licensed scavengers collect trash and precious human waste. Weird cults form around the
most popular methods of suicide. Anne Blume comes to this unnamed city in search of her brother and
finds friendship -- even love -- amid the devastation.
A Quiet Life
In genteel poverty and unremitting strife they live together - a father, a mother, their son, a teenage
daughter - in the shabby confines of their small, English seaside house. The Second World War has
ended, but not the battles waged daily on this domestic front. To escape the life she herself has half
created, the romantically disappointed mother spends half the night reading novels in the railway station,
while the melancholy father, in all ways bankrupt, weeps in front of the radio. In the woods, where land
mines still lie undetected, the fifteen-year-old Madge sneaks off after dark to tryst with a German P.O.W.
And Alan, the troubled adolescent son who tries vainly to retreat into silence, suffers the family he can
neither alter or ignore, at least not until it has been destroyed.
If Beale Street Could Talk
Fonny, a talented young artist, finds himself unjustly arrested and locked in New York's infamous tombs.
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But his girlfriend, Tish, is determined to free him, and to have his baby... a starkly realisitic tale... and a
powerful endictment of American concepts of justice and punishment in our time.
Giovanni’s Room
In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden
violence, an American finds himself confronting secret desires that jeopardize the conventional life he
envisions for himself. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with
an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured as he oscillates between the two.
Baldwin, J.
Bates, H.E.
Bellow, S.
Bellow, S.
Go Tell It on the Mountain
A fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a
storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his
protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the
American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
The Amen Corner
For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her Harlem congregation with a mixture of personal
charisma and ferocious piety. But when Margaret's estranged husband, a scapegrace jazz musician,
comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried
to keep on the godly path.
Fair Stood the Wind for France (1)
When John Franklin crash lands his Wellington bomber in Occupied France at the height of the Second
World War, there are two things on his mind – the safety of his crew and his own badly injured arm. The
family of a mill-owner risk their own lives to hide Franklin in their home until he regains his health. But
during the balmy summer months that follow, the pilot’s situation becomes increasingly complicated by
his feelings for Françoise, the daughter of the house. And as German patrols close in on the area, his
only chance of survival is to escape from France.
Love for Lydia (1)
The Jacaranda Tree (1)
The Japanese come to Burma, and a motley group is forced to flee. From the native girl to the proper
British major, the members of the band fight their private battles against a backdrop of war.
The Cruise of the Breadwinner (1)
A coming-of-age story, in which Snowy, a young crew member on a coastal patrol boat, "goes out, all
starry-eyed in his notions of war's glamour and glory, to find himself involved in naked and bloody
battle...finally [sailing] home...strangely grown in stature and refined by fire".
The Purple Plain (1)
Full of mounting suspense and masterly characterisation, Bates's popular wartime novel tells the story of
three very different men who, after their aircraft crashes, are forced to trek across the Burmese
wilderness to safety.
The Darling Buds of May (1)
From the moment Pop Larkin tells his family that their world is "perfick," H. E. Bates transports the
reader into the delights of an England where the larger-than-life Pop and Ma, together with their children,
squeeze every drop of enjoyment out of life and never let a cloud darken their days. The Larkins may
live in a junkyard in rural England, but they never fail to see beauty all around them, and they bring light
into the lives of all who come into contact with them, be they tax inspector, vicar, or lord.
Henderson the Rain King
Bellow evokes all the rich colour and exotic customs of a highly imaginary Africa in this comic novel
about a middle-aged American millionaire who, seeking a new, more rewarding life, descends upon an
African tribe. Henderson's awesome feats of strength and his unbridled passion for life earns him the
admiration of the tribe - but it is his gift for making rain that
turns him from mere hero into messiah.
The Dean’s December
Albert Corde, dean of a Chicago college, is unprepared for the violent response to his expose of city
corruption. Accused of betraying his city, as well as being a racist, he journeys to Bucharest, where his
mother-in-law lies dying, only to find corruption rife in the Communist capital.
The Adventures of Augie March
This National Book Award-winning novel takes place in Depression-era Chicago and is not only a
testimony on human nature but also of the drive to succeed. The novel follows the adventures of a
lifelong dreamer named Augie March, who only through failure after failure finally succeeds in the end.
The novel recreates life during the Depression and is filled with memorable characters.
Herzog (3)
Is Moses Herzog – philosopher, suffering romantic and cuckhold – losing his mind? His formidable wife
Madeleine has left him for his best friend and he is left alone with his whirling thoughts, yet he still sees
himself as a survivor, raging against private disasters and those of the modern age. His head buzzing
with ideas, he writes frantic, unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, the
living and the dead, revealing the spectacular workings of his labyrinthine mind and the innermost
secrets of his troubled heart.
Humboldt’s Gift (3)
For many years, the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine, a young man inflamed with a
love for literature, were the best of friends. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and
Charlie's life has reached a low point: his career is at a standstill, and he's enmeshed in an acrimonious
divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And
then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just
help him turn his life around.
Seize the Day
Tommy Wilhelm is a worried man. Once charming, he has failed to make it big as an actor in Hollywood,
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Bennet, A.
Boyd, W.
Braine, J.
Brautigan, R.
O’ Brien, E.
O’ Brien, T.
Brown, R.M.
Buchan, J.
left his family and lost his job as a salesman. Now he lives in the Hotel Gloriana in New York City, while
his successful father lectures him about changing his life. But Wilhelm clings to the hope that his luck is
about to turn and has given his last $700 to the mysterious, philosophizing Dr Tamkin to invest. Is the
smooth-talking Tamkin ripping Wilhelm off? Or does he offer him one last chance to make it out of this
mess?
A Theft (1)
The story of a woman raised on old time mid-western religious values and plunged into the world of
contemporary marriage and business. Four times divorced and still in love with a man she now knows
she cannot have, Clara is still convinced of the necessitity if not viability of the heterosexual human pair
in a world which looks like “gogmagogsville” to her.
The Old Wives’ Tale
Bennett's best novel and a masterpiece, The Old Wives' Tale tells the story of two sisters: Constance,
who spends her life in their father's drapery shop in Bursley, married to the chief assistant; and Sophia,
the spirited one, who elopes to Paris with Gerald Scales, an irresistible, unscrupulous commercial
traveller who has inherited twelve thousand pounds.
Stars and Bars
All Henderson Dores dreams of is fitting in. But America, land of the loony millionaire and the subway
poet, down-home Bible-basher and sharp-suited hood, of paralysing personal frankness and surreally
fantasized facilities, is hard enough for an Englishman to fit in to. Henderson could never shed enough
inhibitions to become just another weirdo.Or could he?
A Good Man in Africa
Morgan Leafy isn't overburdened with worldly success. Actually, he is refreshingly free from it. But then,
as a representative of Her Britannic Majesty in tropical Kinjanja, it was not very constructive of him to get
involved in wholesale bribery. Nor was it exactly oiling his way up the ladder to hunt down the
improbably pointed breasts of his boss's daughter when officially banned from horizontal delights by a
nasty dose ... Falling back on his deep-laid reserves of misanthropy and guile, Morgan has to fight off
the sea of humiliation, betrayal and ju-ju that threatens to wash over him.
The New Confessions
The New Confessions is the outrageous, extraordinary, hilarious and heartbreaking autobiography of
John James Todd, a Scotsman born in 1899 and one of the great self-appointed (and failed) geniuses of
the twentieth century.
Room at the Top
A working-class Yorkshireman tells the story of his ruthless social climbing.
Life at the Top
The Hawkline Monster
In the early 1900s, two professional killers travel to an isolated house.
The (ubiquitous) mad professor has created his masterpiece, but then
disappeared, leaving his two (also ubiquitous) beautiful daughters alone,
a monster roving around the basement and strange things afoot ...
The Country Girls
Naïve, reckless Kate Brady and Baba Brennan escape from their convent school and the Irish
countryside to the bright lights of Dublin city, and a whirl of dances, flirtations and passionate
misadventures. While romantic Kate causes uproar by falling in love with a non-Catholic and Baba
settles for a rich, companionable husband, both girls find, however, that their dreams of wedded bliss
seem as elusive as ever, and that maybe happiness doesn't lie in marriage after all ...
Going after Cacciato (3)
This story captures the peculiar blend of horror and hallucinatory comedy that marked this the strangest
of wars. Reality and fantasy merge in this fictional account of one private's sudden discussion to lay
down his rifle and begin a quixotic journey from the jungles of Indochina to the streets of Paris. Will
Cacciato make it all the way? Or will he be yet another casualty of a conflict that seems to have no end?
Rubyfruit Jungle
Born a bastard, Molly Bolt is adopted by a dirt-poor southern couple who want something better for their
daughter. Molly plays doctor with the boys, beats up Leroy and loses her virginity to her girlfriend. Molly
decides not to apologize for that. In no time she mesmerizes the head cheerleader of Ft. Lauderdale
heiress. But the world is not tolerant. Booted out of college for moral turpitude, an unrepentant, penniless
Molly takes New York by storm, sending not a few female hearts aflutter with her startling beauty,
crackling wit and fierce determination.
High Hearts
High Hearts deals with the stupidity of the Civil War and its effect on women. The main character is
Geneva Chatfield, daughter of an old Virginia family and horsewoman extraordinaire. When she cuts her
hair and follows her husband into battle disguised as a boy, she becomes an outstanding soldier. Her
adventures are interspersed with episodes back on the plantation, where her mother Lutie, an old
spirited slave called Sin-Sin, and other women must tend the wounded and fight their private battles.
Southern Discomfort
Here is a witty, warm and pentrating tale of two decades in Montgomery Alabama--a world where all is
not what it seems. Meet Hortensia Reedmuller Banastre, a beautiful woman entrenched on old money,
white magnolia and a loveless marriage--until she meets an utterly gorgeous young prizefighter.
The Thirty-nine Steps
Adventurer Richard Hannay has just returned from South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his London
life – until a murder is committed in his flat, just days after the victim had warned him of an assassination
plot that could bring Britain to the brink of war. An obvious suspect for the police and an easy target for
the killers, Hannay goes on the run in his native Scotland, where he must use all his wits to stay one
step ahead of the game – and warn the government before it is too late.
The Power-House (1)
6
Buck, P.S.
Burgess, A.
Capote, T.
Coetzee, J.
Conrad, J.
Conrad, J.
When his friend Charles Pitt-Heron vanishes mysteriously, Sir Edward Leithen is at first only mildly
concerned. But a series of strange events that follow Pitt-Heron's disappearance convince Leithen that
he is dealing with a sinister secret society. Their codename is 'The Power-House'. The authorities are
unable to act without evidence. As he gets deeper involved with the
underworld, Leithen finds himself facing the enemy alone and in terrible danger.
The Good Earth
In The Good Earth Pearl Buck presents a graphic view of a China when the last emperor reigned and
the vast political and social upheavals of the twentieth century were but distant rumblings for the ordinary
people. This moving, classic story of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his selfless wife O-lan is must
reading for those who would fully appreciate the sweeping changes that have occurred in the lives of the
Chinese people during this century.
The Exile (1)
Sons (1)
Second in the trilogy that began with The Good Earth, Buck's classic and starkly real tale of sons rising
against their honored fathers tells of the bitter struggle to the death between the old and the new in
China. Revolutions sweep the vast nation, leaving destruction and death in their wake, yet also
promising emancipation to China's oppressed millions who are groping for a way to survive in a modern
age.
A Clockwork Orange
In Burgess's infamous nightmare vision of youth culture in revolt, 15-year-old Alex and his friends set out
on a diabolical orgy of robbery, rape, torture and murder. Alex is jailed for his teenage delinquency and
the state tries to reform him - but at what cost?
The Devil’s Mode
A mix of imaginary historical tales and fictional travel pieces. In the most daring story, William
Shakespeare, visiting Spain with his troupe, meets an aged, raging Cervantes. In another, French poet
Stephane Mallarme, bumming around Dublin with his pal, young Claude Debussy, trades views on art
with 77-year-old Robert Browning. "Hun," a long, bloody romp through
the crumbling Roman Empire, involves betrayal, murder and intrigue as Roman general Aetius attempts
to use fearsome prince Attila as a "great whip" against Goths and Visigoths. Two stories deal with
Englishmen's fascination with dark female flesh in the tropics. In "Murder to Music," a detective story a la
Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes solves a case using a clue the reader may spot early on without being
able to decode it.
In Cold Blood
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were
savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent
motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.
Five years, four months and twenty-nine days later, on April 14, 1965, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged
thirty-three, and Perry Edward Smith, aged thirty-six, were hanged for the crime on a gallows in a
warehouse in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansa.
In Cold Blood is the story of the lives and deaths of these six people.
The Grass Harp (1)
Set on the outskirts of a small Southern town, The Grass Harp tells the story of three endearing misfits—
an orphaned boy and two whimsical old ladies—who one day take up residence in a tree house. AS they
pass sweet yet hazardous hours in a china tree, The Grass Harp manages to convey all the pleasures
and responsibilities of freedom. But it also teaches us about the sacredness of love, "that love is a chain
of love, as nature is a chain of life."
Waiting for the Barbarians (3)
For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier
settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive,
however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy
for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state.
Heart of Darkness
A masterpiece of twentieth-century writing, Heart of Darkness (1902) exposes the tenuous fabric that
holds "civilization" together and the brutal horror at the center of European colonialism. Conrad's
crowning achievement recounts Marlow's physical and psychological journey deep into the heart of the
Belgian Congo in search of the mysterious trader Kurtz.
Lord Jim
When Jim, an idealistic merchant seaman and ship’s officer, abandons the supposedly sinking Patna
and its passengers, he dashes his youthful dreams of glory in a single stroke. Condemned in court for
his impetuous act of cowardice, Jim relegates himself to a life roaming the Far East.
Unforgettably told by Marlow, who also narrates Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the story of Lord Jim
plumbs the mysteries of a man renounced by society but driven by a desire for redemption
The Secret Agent
The Secret Agent (1907) builds a triangle of conspiracy, which is destroyed, by the self-interset of its
participants. Mr Verloc, employed by a foreign embassy to incriminate an anarchist group, instead
destroys his family, his illusions, and his own life, in a terrorist act gone utterly wrong.
Typhoon
It is the story of one unremarkable steamship captain, pitted against a storm of incredible fury. Captain
Macwhirr has a reputation as a solid, steadfast man, who "having just enough imagination to carry him
through each successive day, and no more" cannot fully believe any storm would be a match for his
powerful ship. So, when the barometer and other clues begin to hint at trouble ahead, he is only
moderately concerned and unwilling to change course and lose precious time -- a decision that may
prove more costly than he could ever have imagined.
7
Cook, D.
Corman, A.
Dahl, T.
Didion, J.
Drabble, M.
Faulkner, W.
Nostromo
Ten years after his father is murdered by a brutal dictator, Englishman Charles Gould arrives in
Costaguana to reopen the family silver mine. But instead of ushering in a shining era of prosperity and
progress, the return of the silver engenders a new cycle of violence as Costaguana erupts in civil war,
initiated by rival warlords determined to seize the mine and its riches. In desperation, Gould turns to the
only man who can save the mine’s treasure—Nostromo, the incorruptible head of the local dockworkers,
who protects the silver from rebel forces by taking it out to sea. But disaster strikes, burdening Nostromo
with a terrible secret that forever alters the fate of everyone involved with the mine.
Victory
Victory takes place in 1913 in the Dutch East Indies and tells the story of one man's battle for the woman
he loves and the tragedy it leaves in its wake.
Walter
Crying out Loud
Kramer versus Kramer (1)
Ted Kramer is a career man for whom his work comes before his family. His wife Joanna cannot take
this anymore, so she decides to leave him. Ted is now faced with the tasks of housekeeping and taking
care of himself and their young son Billy. When he has learned to adjust his life to these new
responsibilities, Joanna resurfaces and wants Billy back. Ted however refuses to give him up, so they go
to court to fight for the custody of their son
Working for Love
Molly's husband has left her after over seven years. In this scream-of-consciousness first novel, Molly
analyzes, reminisces, and agonizes--ostensibly in a letter to him--about her childhood and failed
marriage. The daughter of an English artist and an American actress (in fact , Dahl is the daughter of
writer Roald Dahl and actress Patricia Neal), Molly's childhood is shocked by repeated traumas, much
the same as Dahl's own: an infant brother is hit by a bus, a sister dies from measles, and her mother
suffers a stroke. Molly longs for her father's love but is always denied it. She ends up letting herself be
victimized by men.
A Book of Common Prayer
Book of Common Prayer is the story of two American women in the derelict Central American nation of
Boca Grande. Grace Strasser-Mendana controls much of the country's wealth and knows virtually all of
its secrets; Charlotte Douglas knows far too little. "Immaculate of history, innocent of politics," she has
come to Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter.
Garrick Year
Emma grudgingly leaves London for Hereford when her actor husband stars in two plays there, but her
anger over her husband's arrogance and the egocentricity of his fellow actors forces her into a liaison
with the director. Is it attraction? Loneliness? The desire for romance? Or an act of revenge?
The Ice Age
Anthony Keating is a middle-aged property developer in Yorkshire in the mid-seventies. Having escaped
London's hustle-bustle and survived a heart attack aged just thirty eight, he awaits the return of his lover
Alison, who is trying to help her daughter incarcerated in a draconian Eastern bloc country. With debts
spiralling out of control, Anthony realises that he and his friends are bound to the engine driving the
society in which they live and that should it falter, so will they. The Ice Age is a portrait of a Britain of
boom and bust, and greed - and uncannily predicts the Thatcher years.
The Millstone
It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual
liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes
pregnant as a result of a one night stand. Although single parenthood is still not socially acceptable, she
chooses to have the baby rather than to seek an illegal abortion, and finds her life transformed by
motherhood. The Millstone is a celebration of the drama and intensity of the mother-child relationship.
The Realms of Gold
Frances Wingate is a woman much given to living in the past. As an eminent archaeologist she travels
widely giving lectures on ancient history. As a woman she is eaten away with regrets that she ended her
relationship with Karel - for reasons that no longer seem valid.
Jerusalem the Golden
Clara has broken away from the stifling respectability of her northern home to live her own life in London.
Through her close friendship with Celia Denham she enters a world of dazzling educated people and
wealthy bohemians. Clara yearns to be part of their constellation.
The Needle’s Eye
"Simon Camish, an embittered, diffident lawyer in a loveless marriage, would not have particularly
noticed Rose Vassiliou had he not been asked to drive her home one night after a dinner party. Yet at
one time she had been notorious - her name constantly in the news." "Now, separated from her Greek
husband, she lives alone with her three children. Despite all the efforts and sneers of her friends, she
refuses to move from her slum house in a decaying neighborhood to which she has become attached."
Gradually, Simon becomes aware that Rose is a woman of remarkable integrity and courage. He is
drawn into her affairs when her husband takes legal action to reopen the question of custody of the
children - a scheme for getting his wife back. And, while the precise nature of their ties eludes him,
Simon comes to realize that Rose and her ex-husband are forever and inextricably bound to each other.
The Sound and the Fury (3)
This narrative chronicles the decline of the American South through the experiences of Benjy Compson,
who struggles to articulate his vision of life.
Light in August (3)
Simon McEachern, the puritanical farmer who rears Joe, frequently whips the boy, and Joe leaves home
after savagely beating Simon. Joe then wanders for 15 years, eventually settling in with a white woman
8
devoted to aiding blacks, Joanna Burden. But her evangelism is a reminder to Joe of Simon's; still
damaged from his upbringing, Joe murders Joanna. Joe flees but a companion reveals his whereabouts
and he is killed and castrated
As I lay Dying
At the heart of this 1930 novel is the Bundren family's bizarre journey to Jefferson to bury Addie, their
wife and mother. Faulkner lets each family member — including Addie — and others along the way tell
their private responses to Addie's life.
Absalom, Absalom
Narrated by Quentin Compson, the suicide in "The Sound and the Fury", this is the tale of Thomas
Sutpen, a poor White who dreams of founding a dynasty. His refusal to accept his wife's Negro blood
initiates a bloody train of events to create a vision of doom of the American South.
Fitzgerald, S.
Forster, E.M.
Fowles, J.
Golding, W.
Graves, R.
Green, H.
Greene, G.
Greene, G.
The Great Gatsby
First published in 1925, it is the timeless story of Jay Gatsby and his love for Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby
lives in the New York suburb of West Egg, where those with "new money" reside. Gatsby's mansion is
right across the bay from the home of his wartime love, Daisy Buchanan, pictured always in white.
Gatsby seeks to keep his illusion of Daisy as perfect alive. He uses his money, gained through illegal
means, to do so, and uses his neighbor, Nick Carroway, to try to reach Daisy. The love of money as the
root of evil is a pervading theme.
A Passage to India
A group of English visitors want to see the “real” India, and in Dr. Aziz they find a highly civilized
companion. During a visit to the Marabar caves, one of the women accuses Dr. Aziz of sexually
assaulting her, triggering a chain of events that will change the lives of people on both sides of this
complex conflict.
A Room with a View
When Lucy Honeychurch, visiting Italy, mentions the lack of a view from her room, George Emerson and
his father offer to swap. But Lucy's suspicions that the Emersons are the wrong sort of people seem
confirmed when George impulsively kisses her during a picnic in the Tuscan countryside. Soon,
however, thoughts of that kiss have Lucy questioning her engagement to boorish, if utterly acceptable,
Cecil Vyse. All in all, the situation presents quite a muddle for a young woman who wishes to be
absolutely truthful—even when she's lying to herself about the most important aspects of life and love.
The Collector
Miranda, a beautiful young art student, is the object of obsession here. She becomes the ultimate prize
for the psychopathic Frederick, the butterfly collector who has watched her for years. Then one day,
chloroform in his pocket, he takes her to his cottage miles from nowhere.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
In this contemporary, Victorian-style novel Charles Smithson, a nineteenth-century gentleman with
glimmerings of twentieth-century perceptions, falls in love with enigmatic Sarah Woodruff, who has been
jilted by a French lover.
Lord of the Flies
A plane crashes on a desert island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the
beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but
at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast. As the boys' delicate sense of order
fades, so their childish dreams are transformed into something more primitive, and their behaviour starts
to take on a murderous, savage significance.
Rites of Passage
In the cabin of an ancient, stinking warship bound for Australia, a man writes a journal to entertain his
godfather back in England. With wit and disdain he records mounting tensions on board, as an
obsequious clergyman attracts the animosity of the tyrannical captain and surly crew.
Goodbye to All That
Robert Graves's autobiography tells the story of his life at public school and as a young officer during the
first world war.
I, Claudius
A work of historical fiction which recreates the life and times of Emperor Claudius, who lived from 10 BC
to AD 41, a time when poisoning, blasphemy, treachery, incest and unnatural vice were commonplace.
Claudius the God
'Claudius the God' is actually part two of a two-part set, the second volume after the much-better-known
'I, Claudius'. This particular volume looks at the later part of Claudius' life, concluding with the time when
he was emperor. The intrigues that had carried on in the royal family continued unabated around him as
emperor, except that the wise and almost omniscient Claudius
of old seemed to develop blind spots once in the imperial seat, largely due to love. When his wife
Messalina finally plots his overthrow with a divorce, he acts, and his life is rather sorrowful ever after.
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Aided by a brilliant psychiatrist, and accompanied by her deeply concerned-and terrified-parents,
Deborah must undertake a three-year struggle to resist the allure of madness, and rejoin the real world.
The Power and the Glory
During a vicious persecution of the clergy in Mexico, the 'whisky priest' is on the run and the police are
closing in. But compassion and humanity impel him toward his destiny.
Brighton Rock
9
Guest, J.
Hartley, L.P.
Heller, J.
Hemingway, E.
A gang war rages through the dark underworld of Brighton. Pinkie has killed a man. Believing he can
escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold, who is determined to
avenge a death.
The Quiet American
While the French Army in Indo-China is grappling with the Vietminh, back at Saigon a young and highminded American begins to channel economic aid to a 'Third Force'.
Fowler, a seasoned foreign correspondent, observes: 'I never knew a man who had better motives for all
the trouble he caused.' As young Pyle's policies blunder on into bloodshed, the older man finds it
impossible to stand aside as an observer. But Fowler's motives for intervening are suspect, both to the
police and to himself: for Pyle has robbed him of his Vietnamese mistress.
Our Man in Havanna
Mr. Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in a city of powercuts, becomes a spy to earn extra income.
The End of the Affair
This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The
End of the Affair. And it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account
of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles -- a hate bred of a passion that ultimately lost out to God. Now, a
year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of that passion by retracing its
course from obsessive love to lovehate.
Dr Fisher of Geneva or The Bomb Party (1)
A darkly comic novel about a misanthropic millionaire who decides to hold the last of his famous parties,
but this time it is to be his own deadly version of the Book of Revelation.
The Human Factor
A leak is traced to a small sub-section of SIS, sparking off the inevitable security checks, tensions and
suspicions. The sort of atmosphere, perhaps, where mistakes could be made? For Maurice Castle, it is
the end of the line anyway, and time for him to retire to live peacefully with his African wife, Sarah. To
the lonely, isolated, neurotic world of the Secret Service, Graham Greene brings his brilliance and
perception, laying bare a machine that sometimes overlooks the subtle and secret motivations that impel
us
The Comedians
Three men meet on a ship bound for Haiti, a world in the grip of the corrupt “Papa Doc” and theTontons
Macoute, his sinister secret police. Brown the hotelier, Smith the innocent American, and Jones the
confidence man—these are the “comedians” of Greene's title. Hiding behind their actors' masks, they
hesitate on the edge of life. They are men afraid of love, afraid of pain, afraid of fear itself...
The Honorary Consul
On the far side of the great, muddy river that separates the two countries lies Paraguay, a brutal
dictatorship shaken by sporadic revolutionary activity; on the near side, a torpid city whose only visible
cultural institution is a brothel. The foreigners of the city are refugees, each washed up on the banks of
the Paraná by some inner disaster or defeat: Dr. Eduardo Plarr, a physician, whose English father has
vanished into a Paraguayan prison, and for whom "caring is the only dangerous thing"; Humphries, a
teacher of English, who has touched bottom and accepted it; Charley Fortnum, the Honorary Consul,
who at the age of sixty-one, sustained by drink and his disputed status as British Consul, still retains
enough hope and illusion to marry a twenty-year-old girl from Señora Sanchez' brothel...
The Third Man
Set in the ruins of post-war Vienna, Greene's riveting tale follows a hack writer's investigation into the
mysterious death of his childhood friend.
The Tenth Man
An utterly gripping story of a wealthy French lawyer being held prisoner by the Germans during World
War II. The lawyer is chosen by the soldiers to die, but instead he makes a cowardly trade for his life-one that he will have to pay for even as a free man.
Ordinary People
The Jarrets are a typical American family. Calvin is a determined, successful provider and Beth an
organized, efficient wife. They had two sons, Conrad and Buck, but now they have one. In this
memorable, moving novel, Judith Guest takes the reader into their lives to share their
misunderstandings, pain...and ultimate healing.
The Go-Between
An invitation to a friend's house changes an adolescent boy's life. Discovering an old diary, Leo, now in
his sixties, is drawn back to the hot summer of 1900 and his visit to Brandham Hall. The past comes to
life as Leo recalls the events and devastating outcome that destroyed his beliefs and future hopes.
Catch 22
At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly
inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly
understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't even met are trying to
kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to
complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous
missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously
sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly
continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved
of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be
relieved.
The Garden of Eden
David Bourne, a young American writer, finds his Mediteranean honeymoon interrupted by a flood of
good notices about his second novel. Catherine, his wife, encourages him in his work...or does she?
Does Catherine resent the time that he spends at his desk? Is he crazy, or has she put a younger, more
10
Hill, S.
Huxley, A.
Irving, J.
Isherwood, C.
James, P.D.
exotic woman in his path? All David knows is that this is a dangerous game.
Fiesta, The Sun Also Rises
The story of a group of American and English expatriates on an excursion from Paris's Left Bank to
Pamplona for the July fiesta and its climactic bull fight, a journey from the center of a civilization
spiritually bankrupted by the First World War to a vital, God-haunted world in which faith and honor have
yet to lose their currency.
A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and
his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway's frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant
Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in
modern literature, while his description of the German attack on Caporetto -- of lines of fired men
marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized -- is one of the greatest moments in literary
history.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist
guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic
death of an ideal.
The Old Man and the Sea (1)
The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great
simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal
— a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.
I’m the King of the Castle
When Hopper's father takes in a new housekeeper she brings with her a son of the same age. The
parents assume the two of them will hit it off but in reality Hopper subjects the newcomer to a sustained
psychological torture that makes
him one of the all-time great baddies of literature.
Strange Meeting
Set against the horrors of the First World War, this novel portrays the friendship of two young officers.
Hilliard is a veteran of combat, a reserved and isolated young man who prefers the stark reality of the
front line, where he follows orders and makes only simple decisions based on life or death, to the
political and social complications of his previous existence in England. He is initially displeased to find he
will be sharing quarters with a new officer, Barton, but he soon warms to the open honesty and
affectionate nature of his room-mate. Barton causes him to re-evaluate his approach to the war, to
family, and to his whole philosophy of living.
In the Springtime of the Year
In the Springtime of the year tells the story of Ruth, a young woman who has recently been widowed. It
details the way she deals with grief, the torment, and depression that follows such a loss. Alone with her
thoughts, and the material objects left from a short marriage, Ruth has to try and reclaim her life, this
time without Ben.
The Woman in Black
Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor in London, is summoned to Crythin Gifford to attend the funeral of Mrs
Alice Drablow, and to sort through her papers before returning to London. It is here that Kipps first sees
the woman in black and begins to gain an impression of the mystery surrounding her. From the funeral
he travels to Eel Marsh House and sees the woman again, plus he also hears the terrifying sounds of
adult and child passengers sinking into the quicksand on a pony and trap.
Brave New World
Huxley΄s vision of the future -- a world of tomorrow in which capitalist civilization has been reconstituted
through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, where the people are genetically
designed to be passive, consistently useful to the ruling class.
Island
In Island, his last novel, Huxley transports us to a Pacific island where, for 120 years, an ideal society
has flourished. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A
conspiracy is underway to take over Pala and events begin to move when an agent of the conspirators,
a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time
with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and -- to his amazement -- give him hope.
The World According to Garp (3)
The World According to Garp is a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John
Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. A worldwide bestseller since its
publication in 1978, Irving's classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S.
Garp, novelist and bastard son of Jenny Fields--a feminist leader ahead of her time. Beyond that, The
World According to Garp virtually defies synopsis.
The Hotel New Hampshire (3)
Win Berry graduates from his small New Hampshire high school and goes to work at a resort in Maine to
save money to attend Harvard. Mary Bates, also from Dairy, New Hampshire, found herself working at
this same resort and the two fell in love over the course of that summer. That summer also brought them
Freud, a small German man who had trained a bear and provided entertainment at the resort. He
became a life-long friend to the couple and at the end of the summer sold Win the bear. What unfolds is
a life's story, told from the perspective of Win and Mary's 3rd child, John, that is as bizzare as it is
touching and moving.
Goodbye to Berlin
The scene is 1930s Berlin; as Communists and Nazis pursue power in the waning days of the Weimar
Republic, none of the principal characters perceive what is in store for them.
Shroud for a Nightingale (1)
11
Jong, E.
Joyce, J.
Kelman, J.
Kesey, K.
Kosinsky, J.
Lawrence, D.H.
Lee, H.
Lessing, D.
Lessing, D.
The young women of Nightingale House are there to learn to nurse and comfort the suffering. But when
one of the students plays patient in a demonstration of nursing skills, she is horribly, brutally killed.
Another student dies equally mysteriously, and it is up to Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard to unmask a
killer who has decided to prescribe murder as the cure for all ills.
Fear of Flying
Fear of flying is the ground-breaking, uninhibited story of Isadora Wing and her desire to fly free. A
timeless tale of self-discovery, liberation, and womanhood.
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (3)
James Joyce's first and most widely read novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the story of
Stephen Dedalus, a young man struggling to decide between a religious vocation and an artistic one.
A Disaffection
Patrick Doyle, a 29-year-old Glasgow schoolteacher, feels hopelessly trapped in a life of compromise
and hypocrisy. A closet revolutionary who believes that all teachers are Establishment lackeys, Doyle
despises his colleagues but has no other social contacts. His life is an endless round of lunch-hour pints
in working-class pubs, cheap take-out dinners, and lonely weekends in his dreary flat, where his only
amusement is playing imaginary music on cardboard "pipes" that he salvaged from the trash.
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched
and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see
the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses
and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome power of the Combine.
Being There
Chauncey Gardiner is the great enigma: a hero of the American media. TV
loves him; print pursues him. He is a household face; the one everybody is talking about. Nobody knows
what he is talking about or where he has come from, but everybody knows he has come to money,
power and sex. Was he led to all this by the lovely, well-connected wife of a dying Wall Street tycoon?
Or is Chauncey Gardiner riding the waves all by himself because, like a TV image, he floated into the
world buoyed up by a force he did not see and could not name? Does he know something we don't? Will
he fail? Will he ever be unhappy? The reader must decide.
Sons and Lovers
Called the most widely-read English novel of the twentieth century, D. H. Lawrence's largely
autobiographical Sons and Lovers tells the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing into manhood in a
British working-class community near the Nottingham coalfields. His mother Gertrude, unhappily married
to Paul's hard-drinking father, devotes all her energies to her son. They develop a powerful and
passionate relationship, but eventually tensions arise when Paul falls in love with a girl and seeks to
escape his family ties. Torn between his desire for independence and his abiding attachment to his
loving but overbearing mother, Paul struggles to define himself sexually and emotionally through his
relationships with two women--the innocent, old-fashioned Miriam Leivers, and the experienced,
provocatively modern Clara Dawes.
The Rainbow
At the center of our great, pulsating darkness burns the coldly luminous Rainbow, the brilliant prism of
life and color that draws all people to Itself. Lawrence's vision hovers on the rim of this darkness and
takes us on a tumultuous ride through three generations of the Brangwen family, sixty years in all,
culminating in the passionately intense and purposeful young Ursula Brangwen.
Lady Chatterly’s Lover
Inspired by the long-standing affair between Frieda, Lawrence's German wife, and an Italian peasant
who eventually became her third husband, Lady Chatterley's Lover is the story of Constance Chatterley,
who, while trapped in an unhappy marriage to an aristocratic mine owner whose war wounds have left
him paralyzed and impotent, has an affair with Mellors, the gamekeeper.
Women in Love
A sequel to Lawrence's earlier novel The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love continues the story of the
Brangwen sisters in the coal-mining town of Beldover. Based in part on Lawrence's own stormy marriage
to German
aristocrat Frieda von Richthofen, the tale is charged with intense feelings and psychological insights as it
focuses on the relationships of the two sisters--Ursula, who deeply loves and eventually marries a school
inspector; and Gudrun, who is attracted to the son of a wealthy industrialist but, who, in time, finds only
emptiness in their association.
To Kill a Mocking Bird
Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird
follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three
years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white
woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child.
The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up.
The Grass is Singing
Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife
of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow
poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant,
Moses. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses—master and slave—are trapped in a web of mounting
attraction and repulsion. Their psychic tension explodes in an electrifying scene that ends this disturbing
tale of racial strife in colonial South Africa.
The Golden Notebook (3)
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a
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Lowry, M.
Lurie, A.
Malamud, B.
McCarthy, M.
McCullers, C.
black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her
political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine
relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an
American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in
a golden notebook.
Memoirs of a Survivor
In a beleaguered city where rats and roving gangs terrorize the streets, where government has broken
down and meaningless violence holds sway, a woman — middle-aged and middle-class — is brought a
twelve-year-old girl and told that it is her responsibility to raise the child. This book, which the author has
called "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman's journal — a glimpse of a future only slightly more
horrendous than our present, and of the forces that alone can save us from total destruction.
The Summer Before the Dark
As the summer begins, Kate Brown — attractive, intelligent, forty five, happily enough married, with a
house in the London suburbs and three grown children — has no reason to expect anything will change.
But when the summer ends, the woman she was — living behind a protective camouflage of feminine
charm and caring — no longer exists.
The Boys from Brazil (1)
A young inexperienced Nazi Hunter stumbles onto a secret SS meeting in 1970's South America. Led by
the infamous Doctor Josef Mengele, the plot of the Nazis is first dismissed as unimportant by veteran
Nazi hunter Lieberman. When the young Nazi hunter turns up murdered, however, Lieberman
investigates the mysterious meeting and discovers an insane plot to resurrect the Führer Adolf Hitler and
establish the Fourth Reich.
A Kiss Before Dying (1)
Levin's 1953 thriller dishes up a handsome young man with great social ambitions who also happens to
be a sociopath. Not wanting anything to get in his way on the road to success, he must do the right thing
when his girlfriend gets pregnant. But for him the right thing is murder.
This Perfect Day (1)
It is the tale of a lad named Chip, in a future world in which the great socialist dream has finally been
realized. Preferring one person to another is a sign of social maladjustment. Everyone is told what to do
by "Uni," the great computer that organizes society and keeps track of everyone's location via electronic
bracelet.
Under the Volcano
The Consul staggers from bar to bar hoping to find salvation. The dissolute life suits him until his former
wife Yvonne returns with Hugh, the Consul's half-brother. As the trio enjoys a local Mexican festival, they
discover the dead body of a peasant, thus beginning a series of events that will decide the Consul's fate.
In the course of one day an entire life is chronicled.
The War between the Tates
Once the Tates were an attractive family, but now Erica is bored, Brian's career is at a standstill, and the
children have become revolting teenagers. Then Erica discovers that her husband is carrying on with
one of his students.
Only Children
A novel set during a summer weekend in a country house where eight-year-old Mary Ann and her friend
Lolly watch with excitement, fear and anger as the owner of the house and their parents abandon the
conventions of adult behavior.
Imaginary Friends
Tom McCann, a professor of sociology, and his young assistant Roger, infiltrate a religious cult group
based in New York State, deciding that it will make excellent study material. But they find it hard to
maintain their deception, especially as Verena, the cult's leader, is an attractive woman.
The Assistant
A struggling neighborhood Jewish grocer takes on a helper who falls in love with his daughter and steals
from his store.
The Fixer (3)
Kiev, in the years before World War I, is a hotbed of anti-Semitism. When a 12-year-old Russian boy is
found stabbed to death, his body drained of blood, the accusation of ritual murder is made against the
Jews. Yokov Bok, a carpenter, is blamed, arrested and imprisoned without indictment.
The Tenant
The last remaining tenant in a condemned New York tenement, Harry Lesser struggles against rising
panic and escalating odds to complete the novel he had started 10 years earlier, while his landlord
cajoles through closed doors with hard-luck tales and cash sums.
The Group
Mary McCarthy's The Group is a sharply-pointed satire of upper-class New England society which
follows the post-college lives of eight Vassar graduates, class of '33.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The deaf-mute John Singer becomes the confidant for all various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town
during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion
goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine, finds solace in
her music.
The Member of the Wedding
The inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie is utterly bored with life until she hears about her older brother’s
wedding. Bolstered by lively conversations with her house servant, Berenice, and her six-year-old male
cousin, Frankie takes on an overly active role in the wedding, hoping even to go, uninvited, on the
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MacLaverty, B.
Maugham, W.S.
Murdoch, I.
Nabokov, V.
honeymoon, so deep is her desire to be the member of something larger, more accepting than herself.
The Cement Garden
In the relentless summer heat, four abruptly orphaned children retreat into a shadowy, isolated world,
and find their own strange and unsettling ways of fending for themselves.
Cal
A love story set in Northern Ireland. For Cal, some of the choices are simple. He can work in an abattoir
that nauseates him or join the dole queue; he can brood on his past or plan a future with Marcella.
The Moon and the Sixpence
Charles Strickland, a conventional stockbroker abandons his wife and children for Paris and Tahiti, to
live his life as a painter. Whilst his betrayal of family, duty and honour gives him the freedom to achieve
greatness, his decision leads to an obsession which carries severe implications.
Cakes and Ale (1)
Somerset Maugham's satirical novel caused a storm of controversy when it was first published. It is a
story of literary poseurs and a study of freedom, in which Maugham traces the fortunes of Edward
Driffield and his extraordinary wife, Rosie.
Of Human Bondage
Of Human Bondage is a potent expression of the power of sexual obsession and of modern man's
yearning for freedom. This classic bildungsroman tells the story of Philip Carey, a sensitive boy born with
a clubfoot who is orphaned and raised by a religious aunt and uncle. Philip yearns for adventure, and at
eighteen leaves home, eventually pursuing a career as an artist in Paris. When he returns to London to
study medicine, he meets the androgynous but alluring Mildred and begins a doomed love affair that will
change the course of his life
Henry and Cato
This is the story of two prodigal sons. Henry returns from a self-imposed exile in America to an
unforeseen inheritance of wealth and land in England and to his mother. His friend Cato is struggling
with two passions, one for a God who may or may not exist, the other for a petty criminal who may or
may not be capable of salvation. Cato's father and sister Colette wait anxiously to welcome Cato back to
sanity.
The Sea The Sea (3)
Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated
home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor,
both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for
many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange
events and unexpected visitors-some real, some spectral-that disrupt his world and shake his oversized
ego to its very core.
The Sandcastle
The quiet life of schoolmaster Bill Mor and his wife Nan is disturbed when a young woman, Rain Carter,
arrives at the school to paint the portrait of the headmaster. Mor, hoping to enter politics, becomes
aware of new desires. A complex battle develops, involving love, guilt, magic, art and political ambition.
Mor's teenage children and their mother fight discreetly and ruthlessly against the invader. The Head,
himself enchanted, advises Mor to seize the girl and run. The final decision rests with Rain. Can a 'great
love' be purchased at too high a price?
The Italian Girl
Edmund has escaped from his family into a lonely life. Returning for his mother's funeral he finds himself
involved in the same awful problems, together with some new ones. He also rediscovers the eternal
family servant, the ever-changing "Italian girl".
The Flight from the Enchanter
The Time of the Angels
Carel is rector of a non-existent City church (it was destroyed in the war). In the rectory live his daughter,
Muriel, his beautiful invalid ward, Elizabeth, and their West Indian servant, Patti. Here too are Eugene, a
Russian emigre, and his delinquent son, Leo. Carel's brother, Marcus, co-guardian with him of Elizabeth,
tires to make contact with Carel but is constantly rebuffed. These seven characters go through a dance
of attraction and repulsion, misunderstanding and revelation, the centre of which is the enigmatic Carel
himself - a priest who believes that, God being dead, His angels are released.
Under the Net
Set in a part of London where struggling writers rub shoulders with successful bookies, and film starlets
with frantic philosophers. The hero, Jake Donaghue, is captivated by a majestic philosopher, Hugo
Belfounder, whose profound reflections prompt the title - under the net of language.
Lolita
The story of Humbert Humbert, poet and pervert, and his obsession with 12-year-old Dolores Haze.
Determined to possess his "Lolita" both carnally and artistically, Humbert embarks on a disastrous
courtship that can only end in tragedy.
The Gift (1)
THE GIFT is the phantasmal autobiography of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the
closed world of Russian intellectuals in Berlin shortly after the First World War. This gorgeous tapesty of
literature and butterflies tells the story of Fyodor's pursuits as a writer. Its heroine is not Fyodor's elusive
and beloved Zina, however, but Russian prose and poetry itself.
Pnin
Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched on a college campus in the
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Orwell, G.
Plath, S.
Plath, S.
Potok, C.
Purdy, J.
Renault, M.
Renault, M.
fast beating heart of the USA. In a series of funny and sad misunderstandings, Pnin does halting battle
with American life and language.
On Boxing
Joyce Carol Oates explores the world of professional boxing, examining the subject from many angles:
boxing as metaphor, spectacle and history, boxing as seen in literature and film and by women. The
author chronicles many famous figures such as Jack Dempsey, Barry McGuigan, Joe Louis and others.
Oates writes of "stiffs and bums" who make a living out of losing and the big-earning champs like Ali who
made $70 million with his fists. She explores boxing's links with racism and the violent streets - long the
recruiting ground for generations of professional pugilists.
Animal Farm (1)
When the downtrodden beasts of Manor Farm oust their drunken human master and take over
management of the land, all are awash in collectivist zeal. Everyone willingly works overtime,
productivity soars, and for one brief, glorious season, every belly is full. Too soon, however, the pigs,
who have styled themselves leaders by virtue of their intelligence, succumb to the temptations of
privilege and power.
Nineteen Eighty-four (3)
In a grim city and a terrifying country, where Big Brother is always Watching You and the Thought Police
can practically read your mind, Winston is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory
still functions. He knows the Party's official image of the world is a fluid fiction. He knows the Party
controls the people by feeding them lies and narrowing their imaginations through a process of
bewilderment and brutalization. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a
secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party.
Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.
The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer
internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s. The real Plath committed
suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly-written book, which remains one
of the best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity.
A Dramatic Portrait
A play by Barry Kyle. Kyle's idea was to create a companion piece to Plath's Three Women, which is the
only play Plath ever wrote. Plath centers her drama on the theme of childbirth. Kyle dramatizes Plath's
play and some of her poems in his presentation, which was first theatrically produced by the Royal
Shakespeare Company in 1973.
The Chosen(3)
It is the now-classic story of two fathers and two sons and the pressures on all of them to pursue the
religion they share in the way that is best suited to each. And as the boys grow into young men, they
discover in the other a lost spiritual brother, and a link to an unexplored world that neither had ever
considered before. In effect, they exchange places, and find the peace that neither will ever retreat from
again....
My Name is Asher Lev
Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono
Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the
world he sees and feels even when it leads him to blasphemy.In this stirring and often visionary novel,
Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the
other subject only to the imagination.
Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual
and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time his gift threatens to estrange him from that world
and the parents he adores.
The Gift of Asher Lev
Twenty years have passed for Asher Lev. He is a world-renowned artist living in France, still uncertain of
his artistic direction. When his beloved uncle dies suddenly, Asher and his family rush back to Brooklyn-and into a world that Asher thought he had left behind forever....
Garments the Living Wear
A vision of evil and dark salvation peopled with bizarre and memorable characters. Satirizing life in New
York City in the 1980s, its themes include the scourge of AIDS, criminal conspiracies, the excesses of
the superrich, modern evangelism, and love in its many forms.
The King Must Die
The story of the mythical hero Theseus, slayer of monsters, abductor of princesses and king of Athens.
He emerges from these pages as a clearly defined personality; brave, aggressive and quick. The core of
the story is Theseus' Cretan adventure.
Funeral Games
As Alexander the Great lies dying, around his body gather the generals, satraps and royal wives, already
competing for his power and land, only Bagoas, the Persian boy, mourns. Tracing the events of the 15
years after Alexander's death, this novel sees his empire disintegrate.
Fire from Heaven
At 20, when his reign began, Alexander the Great was already a seasoned soldier and a complex,
passionate man. This novel tells the story of the boy Alexander, and the years that shaped him.
The Bull from the Sea
Recreates the Greek myth concerning Theseus' love for Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, and his
reign as king of Athens.
The Persian Boy
This novel tells the story of the climactic last seven years of Alexander the Great's life through the eyes
of his lover, Bagoas, a eunoch who was sold to King Darius of Persia, but found freedom with the great
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Rhys, J.
Salinger, J.D.
Sayers, D.
Shute, N.
Sillitoe, A.
Snow, C.P.
general, sustaining Alexander through mutiny, assassination attempts and two wives.
The Nature of Alexander
More has been written about Alexander the Great than any other figure in history. Like his boyhood hero,
Achilles, he traded long life for lasting fame. King of Macedonia before he was twenty, Alexander went
on to become the greatest conqueror of the ancient world, inspiring legends in his lifetime and after his
death. Every age has interpreted him to suit their own values: either as a ruthless destroyer who
eliminated all those who stood in his path, or as a far-sighted statesman pursuing a civilizing mission for
the world. He has been condemned for sins that in his time were merits and credited with romantic 19thcentury virtues which his own culture despised. In this hard-hitting work, Mary Renault, who spent years
studying the Hellenistic world, peels off the layers of wishful thinking to reveal the real Alexander
beneath. Re-examining the crucial episodes in his life: the murder of his father, Philip, in which he was
implicated, the sacking of Thebes and his dying wishes, this study places him in the rightful context of
his times.
Ghost Writer
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great
Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the
secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff.
At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign
background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress.
Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi
persecution. If she were, it might change his life.
Wide Sargasso Sea
Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies
on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her
away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and
a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree
ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched."
Good Morning Midnight
Sasha Jensen has returned to Paris, the city of both her happiest moments and her most desperate. Her
past lies in wait for her in cafes, bars, and dress shops, blurring all distinctions between nightmare and
reality. When she is picked up by a young man, she begins to feel that she is still capable of desires.
After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
Julia Martin wants more than the usual woman's lot, but the only thing she knows how to do is please
men. When she was young, it was easy to find glamour and adventure in affairs with respectable
married men. Always willing to be cunning enough to start an affair with the kind of man she could
wangle a living out of, she was never willing - or able - to make all the compromises necessary to keep
an affair going. Now living in a dingy hotel, alienated by her past from family and friends, she faces a
lonely and wanting middle-age. Her affair with Mr. McKenzie is over, the last in a string of affairs with
men whose respect she cannot earn and whose money she desperately needs; there are no likely new
prospects.
The Catcher in the Rye
A 16-year old American boy relates in his own words the experiences he goes through at school and
after, and reveals with unusual candour the workings of his own mind. What does a boy in his teens
think and feel about his teachers, parents, friends and acquaintances?
Murder Must Advertise (1)
Victor Dean falls to his death on the stairs of Pym's Advertising Agency, and no one is sorry. That is until
Lord Peter Wimsey joins the firm and asks some awkward questions. Finding himself involved in a web
of blackmail and drugs, more must die before the sinister plot can be unravelled.
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1)
90-year-old General Fendman was definitely dead, but no one knew exactly when he had died - and the
time of death was the determining factor in a half-million-pound inheritance. Lord Peter Wimsey would
need every bit of his amazing skills to unravel the mysteries of why the General's lapel was without a red
poppy on Armistice Day, how the club's telephone was fixed without a repairman, and, most puzzling of
all, why the great man's knee swung freely when the rest of him was stiff with rigor mortis.
A Town Like Alice
The story is about a young woman who miraculously survives a Japanese "death march" in World War II,
and of an Australian soldier, also a prisoner of war, who offers to help her--even at the cost of his life....
On the Beach
Australia is one of the last places where life still exists after nuclear war starts in the Northern
Hemisphere. A year on, an invisible cloak of radiation has spread almost completely around the world.
Darwin is a ghost town, and radiation levels at Ayres Rock are increasing. An American nuclear-powered
submarine has found its way to Australia where its captain has placed the boat under the command of
the Australian Navy. Commander Dwight Towers and his Australian liaison officer are sent to the coast
of North America to discover whether a stray radio signal originating from near Seattle is a sign of life.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Working all day at a lathe leaves Arthur Seaton with energy to spare in the evenings. A young rebel of a
man, he knows what he wants and he's sharp enough to get it. Before long his meetings with a couple of
married women are part of local gossip.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1)
Sillitoe's portrayal of the mind of an incorrigible rebel, and other stories.
The Masters
The fourth in the Strangers and Brothers series begins with the dying Master of a Cambridge college.
His imminent demise causes intense rivalry and jealousy amongst the other fellows.Former friends
become enemies as the election looms.
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Spark, M.
Steinbeck, J.
Storey, D.
Swift, G.
Tolkien, J.R.
Toole, J.K.
Townsend, S.
Corridors of Power
The corridors and committee rooms of Whitehall are the setting for the ninth in the Strangers and
Brothers series.They are also home to the manipulation of political power.Roger Quaife wages his banthe-bomb campaign from his seat in the Cabinet and his office at the Ministry.The stakes are high as he
employs his persuasiveness.
The Mandelbaum Gate
An insistent Englishwoman, a half-Jewish covert to Catholicism, crosses from Israeli-held to Jordanianheld Jerusalem. The backdrop is the Eichmann trial of 1961. So begins a series of bizarre, sometimes
comic events.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1)
She was a schoolmistress with a difference. Proud, cultured, romantic, her ideas were progressive, even
shocking. And when she decided to transform a group of young girls under her tutelage into the "creme
de la creme" of Marcia Blaine school, no one could have predicted the outcome.
Memento Mori
Dame Lettie Colston, 79 and pioneer penal reformer, has much in common with the elderly residents of
the Maud Long Medical Ward. All are united by scorn, resentment, boredom - and the humour that
masks the awareness of impending death. Then the insidious telephone calls begin.
Not to Disturb
Behind the locked doors of the library, the Baron, the Baroness and their handsome young secretary are
not to be disturbed. In the attic, the Baron's lunatic brother howls and hurls plates at his keeper. But in
the staff quarters, all is under control. The night is long, but morning will bring a crime passionnel of
outstanding attraction and endless possibilities.
Tortilla Flat (1)
Danny is a "paisano", descended from the Spanish settlers who arrived in California centuries before. He
is quick to offer shelter to his fellow gentlemen when he suddenly inherits two houses, until he tires of his
responsibilities and disappears.
Of Mice and Men
A parable of commitment, loneliness, hope and loss, OF MICE AND MEN is a powerful and moving
portrayal of two men striving to understand their own unique place in the world. Drifters in search of
work, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie have nothing in the world except each other - and a
dream. A dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a
ranch, but their hopes are doomed as Lennie - struggling against extreme cruelty, misunderstanding and
feelings of jealousy - becomes a victim of his own strength.
The Red Pony (1)
This is the tragic story of Jody, a young farm boy, and his red pony. As he meets disaster with brave
acceptance, his knowledge of life matures.
Pasmore (1)
This Sporting Life
Rugby League football in an industrial northern city is a life of grime, mud, sweat and intrigue. The story
follows the fortunes of the hero Arthur Machin, from the day of his inclusion in the local team to the
match when he first feels age creeping up on him.
Shuttlecock
Alienated from his wife and children, and obsessed by his father, a wartime hero, now the inmate of a
mental hospital, Prentis feels increasingly unsettled as his enigmatic boss, Mr Quinn, turns his
investigations towards himself - and his father.
The Sweet Shop Owner
A novel about a bargain struck between a quiet man who runs a sweet shop and his emotionally
damaged wife who has to accept life's deprivations. But it is a bargain that is threatened by their clever,
angry and unforgiving daughter.
The Hobbit (1)
Bilbo Baggins is an upstanding member of a "little people, about half our height, and smaller than the
bearded dwarves." He is, like most of his kind, well off, well fed, and best pleased when sitting by his
own fire with a pipe, a glass of good beer, and a meal to look forward to. Certainly this particular hobbit
is the last person one would expect to see set off on a hazardous journey; indeed, when Gandalf the
Grey stops by one morning, "looking for someone to share in an adventure," Baggins fervently wishes
the wizard elsewhere. No such luck, however; soon 13 fortune-seeking dwarves have arrived on the
hobbit's doorstep in search of a burglar, and before he can even grab his hat or an umbrella, Bilbo
Baggins is swept out his door and into a dangerous adventure.
Lord of the Rings (3 for 3 parts)
The Lord of the Rings recounts the Great War of the Ring and the closing of Middle-Earth's Third Age, a
time when magic begins to fade from the world and men rise to dominance.
A Confederacy of Dunces
A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, and suspicious of anything modern - this is Ignatius J. Reilly of
New Orleans, crusader against dunces. In revolt against the 20th century, Ignatius propels his bulk
among the flesh-pots of a fallen city, documenting life on his Big Chief tablets as he goes, until his
mother decrees that Ignatius must work.
The Neon Bible
The Neon Bible tells the story of David, a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s.
David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly funny, sad, shrewd, gathering force from page to page
with an emotional directness that never lapses into sentimentality. Through it we share his awkward,
painful, universally recognizable encounter with first love, we participate in boy evangelist Bobbie Lee
Taylor's revival, we meet the pious, bigoted townspeople.
The Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ (1)
At 13 years old, Adrian Mole has more than his fair share of problems - spots, ill-health, parents
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Vonnegut, K.
Wain, J.
Waugh, E.
Waugh, E.
Weldon, F.
Wells, H.G.
threatening to divorce, rejection of his poetry and much more - all recorded in his diary.
The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1)
The troubled life of Adrian Mole continues in this sequel to "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13
3/4". Adrian continues to struffle valiantly against the slings and arrows of growing up and his own
family's attempts to scar him for life.
Johnny got his Gun
"Johnny Got His Gun" tells the story of Joe Bonham, an American soldier who is horrifically wounded
and disabled in World War I. The book is told from Joe's perspective as he struggles to understand and
cope with his situation. His mind wanders back and forth between his past, including his war
experiences, and his immediate condition. Thus we get a non-chronological but full picture of his
complete life so far.
Slaughterhouse Five
Unstuck in time, Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut's shattered survivor of the Dresden bombing, relives his life over
and over again under the gaze of aliens; he comes at last to some understanding of the human comedy.
Cat’s Cradle
Cat's Cradle travels from the home turf of Vonnegut's imagination, Ilium, N.Y. to a Caribbean banana
republic where an illicit religion called Bokononism is practiced, as a sense of doom (in the form of
icenine) overtakes mankind.
Hurry on Down
Hurry on Down is a study of disaffected youth in 1950's Britain. At the centre of the book is Charles
Lumley. His first act of rebellion is to forego his university education and become a window cleaner.
A Handful of Dust
After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the
Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow
socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set.
Brideshead Revisited
The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the
golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the
Marchmain family and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by
Sebastian at Oxford then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles
comes finally to recognize his spiritual and social distance from them.
The Loved One (1)
In Hollywood, at Whispering Glades, a full-service funeral home for departed greats, the mononymonous
Mr. Joyboy and Aimee Thanatogenos fall in love...with each other and their work. He is chief embalmer,
she a crematorium cosmetician. They spend their days contentedly prepping the loved ones for a final
appearance.
Into this idyllic scene comes Denis Barlow, aspiring poet and funerary colleague. But Denis is
downscale, his employer the Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery. Denis looks to Aimee for
professional reconstruction, falls in love with her instead, and sets up a triangle that is literally more than
Aimee can bear.
Puffball
A novel of urban deceit and rural passion, of doctors, witches, birth and death.
Richard and Liffey, a young married couple, follow their dream of moving out of London to a country
cottage in the middle of Somerset. Richard continues to live and work in London, coming to stay with
Liffey only on weekends. Pregnant Liffey feels burdened, hampered, at the mercy of these biological
impulses beyond her control. Then there are the odd neighbours, the Tuckers, to reckon with, and the
looming shadow of Bella, Richard's lover in London, threatening the rural idyll Liffey had for so long
imagined.
Letters to Alice (1)
In this reply by an important writer to her neice's complaint that Jane Austen is boring and irrelevant,
Alice is instructed on the difference between Literature and Just Books and the arts of reading and
writing.
The Wheels of Chance (1)
Mr Hoopdriver is an expert in his field - a perfect gentleman with exemplary manners and more than a
little flair behind the drapers' counter. Yet Mr Hoopdriver is growing tired of measuring out yards of
gingham and selling endless reels of threads various. He yearns for new discoveries and new
adventures, and above all a change of scenery. Determined to leave the humdrum behind him, he
mounts his bicycle and heads off for places new.
War of the Worlds (1)
H.G. Wells's science fiction classic, the first novel to explore the possibilities of intelligent life from other
planets.The daring portrayal of aliens landing on English soil, with its themes of interplanetary
imperialism, technological holocaust and chaos, is central to the career of H.G. Wells, who died at the
dawn of the atomic age. The survival of mankind in the face of "vast and cool and unsympathetic"
scientific powers spinning out of control was a crucial theme throughout his work. Visionary, shocking
and chilling, The War Of The Worlds has lost none of its impact since its first publication in 1898.
The Time Machine (1)
This is the tale of a Victorian time traveler who creates a machine which takes him 800,000 years into
the future, to a divided world of innocence and knowledge.
The Invisible Man (1)
Griffin is a brilliant and obsessed scientist who is dedicated to achieving invisibility. He takes whatever
18
Wilder, T.
Wilson, A.
Woolf, V.
Wyndham, J.
Zindel, P.
action is necessary to keep his incredible discovery safe and terrorises the local village where he has
sought refuge. Gradually he loses his sanity and, ultimately, his humanity.
The Bridge of St. Luis Rey
"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five
travelers into the gulf below." By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks
on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who
perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death -- and to the author's timeless investigation
into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (3)
The grotesque idol discovered in Bishop Eorpwald's tomb has scandalized, mystified and inspired a
whole generation of scholars. As a young man Gerald Middleton was involved with the dig. Now an
eminent historian, he is none the less haunted by a sense of failure both as a man and as a scholar.
The World of Charles Dickens (1)
Of the many works that have been published on Dickens, this stands with the very finest. Wilson applies
his incisive mind and elegant pen to one of the 'greats' of English literature, producing a work that
'stands out for its vigour, range and discrimination' (New Statesman) and is 'vivid...thoughtful and
penetrating' (Sunday Times).
Mrs Dalloway
Past, present and future are brought together one day in June 1923. Clarissa Dalloway prepares for her
party, remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Smith is on the brink of
madness. His day interweaves with Clarissa's.
The Kraken Wakes (1)
All over the world, great slimy monsters crept out of the sea - to feed on human flesh!
The Chrysalids
In a world where deviations from the norm are considered evil, David's talent to communicate by thought
is a crucial secret.
My Darling, My Hamburger (1)
As senior year rolls around, two unlikely couples find themselves caught between desire and the fear of
intimacy. Liz and Sean, misunderstood by their parents, confused but certain they are in love, have an
affair that ends shatteringly. Maggie and Dennis, just as confused, take their first steps toward
understanding the demands life makes on everyone. Faced with real-life dilemmas that have no easy
answers, Maggie, Dennis, Liz, and Saen must make choices that will affect the rest of their lives.
1980-2004
Abraham, Pearl
Achebe, Chinua
Ali, Monica
Amis, Kingsley
Amis, Martin
The Romance Reader
As the oldest child of Rebbe (Rabbi) Benjamin, Rachel, 12, is expected to follow the traditions of her
ultra-Orthodox Chassidic family, and to set a good example for her six siblings. She must be modest,
chaste, and obedient, even though, she is bursting to explore the world of her classmates. She wants to
be a lifeguard, but wearing a bathing suit is "improper." Her parents protect Rachel from straying from
the right-and-righteous way, or bringing shame to herself and her family. Every issue becomes a battle of
wills, with Rachel always pushing the limits and sidestepping the restrictions.
Anthills of the Savannah
Chirs, Ikem and Beatrice are three like-minded friends working under the military regime of His
Excellency, the Sandhurst-educated president of Kangan. In the pressurized atmosphere, they are
simply trying to live and love - and remain friends.
Brick Lane
Monica Ali's debut novel chronicles the life of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi girl so sickly at birth that the
midwife at first declares her stillborn. At 18 her parents arrange a marriage to Chanu, a Bengali
immigrant living in England. Although Chanu--who's twice Nazneen's age--turns out to be a foolish
blowhard who "had a face like a frog," Nazneen accepts her fate, which seems to be the main life lesson
taught by the women in her family.
The Old Devils
Malcolm, Peter and Charlie and their Soave-sodden wives have one main ambition left in life: to drink
Wales dry. But their routine is both shaken and stirred when they are joined by professional Welshman
Alun Weaver (CBE) and his wife, Rhiannon.
Difficulties with Girls
Over 25 years ago, Kingsley Amis wrote Take a Girl Like You, a comedy about a lusty young couple,
Patrick and Jenny, each engaged with equal ardor in gaining an opposite goal -- he with getting her into
bed, she with staying out of it. They both win.
In Difficulties with Girls, Jenny and Patrick are back with us. They're older, though not much wiser -Jenny, devoted but aggrieved; Patrick, boozing and unfaithful. Each lives in a fantasyland projecting life
through lenses not calibrated in this world.
Money
Porn freak and jetsetter, John Self, is the shameless heir to a fast-food culture where money beats out
an invitation to futile self-gratification. Out in New York, mingling with the mighty, Self is embroiled in the
corruption, the brutality and the obscenity of the money conspiracy.
Time’s Arrow (1)
In Time's Arrow the doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers
as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home. And all the while
19
Ashworth,
Andrea
Atwood,
Margaret
Auster, Paul
Azzopardi,
Trezza
Bainbridge,
Beryl
Tod's life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make
sense.
Once in a House on Fire
Although she only vaguely remembers her Maltese father, who died when she was five, Andrea quickly
becomes aware that the dark skin she inherited from him sets her apart from her English mother and the
series of stepfathers who soon enter her life. Through the sharp and penetrating eyes of childhood,
Andrea imparts a vivid and unforgettable portrait of a family terrorized by the explosive rage of one
stepfather and then another. Sensitive and observant, the young girl watches the remorse, apologies,
and repeated rampages of these men, yet she never gives in to despair. For even in a house where the
noise of turning pages is reason enough for brutality, Andrea finds a haven in the work of great writers -Joyce, Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and others -- who allow her to see a world beyond her own and set her on
the path toward intellectual and artistic awakening.
Bodily Harm
Rennie Wilford, a young journalist running for her life, takes an assignment on a Caribbean island and
tumbles into a world where people are not what they seem. When a burnt-out Yankee offers Rennie a
no-hooks, no-strings affair, she is caught up in a lethal web of corruption.
The Handmaid’s Tale
A look at the near future presents the story of Offred, a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, once the
United States, an oppressive world where women are no longer allowed to read and are valued only as
long as they are viable for reproduction.
Cat’s Eye (3)
Elaine Risley, a painter, returns to Toronto to find herself overwhelmed by her past. Memories of
childhood surface relentlessly, forcing her to confront the spectre of Cordelia, once her best friend and
tormentor, who has haunted her for 40 years.
Alias Grace (3)
A decade and a half has passed since Grace was locked up, at the age of 16, for the cold-blooded
murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper/lover Nancy Montgomery. Her alleged
accomplice, James McDermot, was hanged in 1843. Dr Simon Jordan attempts to uncover the truth.
The Blind Assassin (3)
Even now, at the age of 82, Iris lives in the shadow cast by her younger sister Laura. Now poor and
trying to cope with a failing body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events
surrounding her sister's tragic death and the novel which earned her such notoriety.
Oryx and Crake
In this story Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the
horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a
tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as
he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children
of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world
fell apart.
Moon Palace
Against the mythical dreamscape of America, Auster brilliantly weaves the bizarre narrative of Marco
Stanley Fogg in Moon Palace. Fogg goes through a period of time when he nearly starves himself to
death out of poverty and dejection, is rescued by a beautiful Chinese girl named Kitty Wu, and ends up
as the live-in helper to an invalid old man, the recording of whose life story becomes Marco's obsession
and the focus of the novel.
The Music of Chance
A fireman and a gambler enter a poker game with two rich eccentrics, risking everything on the single
blind turn of a card. Jim Nashe is the Boston fireman, who needs music as a life crutch. His wife
abandons him just before his father dies, leaving him money that he squanders aimlessly while driving
around America. Near desperation, he meets a bitter young itinerant gambler, Jack (``Jackpot'') Pozzi,
who lures him into a losing poker game with two shady recluses, Flower and Stone.Nashe and Pozzi
must retire their debt by building a stone wall on the premises: what this Herculean labor does to them is
the novel's leitmotif.
Leviathan
The explosion at the start of this book ends the life of its hero, Benjamin Sachs, and brings two FBI
agents to the home of one of Sachs's oldest friends, the writer Peter Aaron. What follows is Aaron's
story, an investigation of another man's life.
The Book of Illusions
A man's obsession with a silent-film star sends him on a journey into
a shadow world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love.
The Hiding Place
The novel is set in the Maltese community of Tiger Bay in Cardiff where the author grew up. Dolores, the
narrator tells the story of her childhood - her father, Frankie, a compulsive gambler who, due to a
misunderstanding at the moment of her birth (he is convinced that his wife will finally give birth to a boy
after a multitude of daughters) loses everything to his rival Joe Medora, head of the Maltese Mafia.
Frankie's gambling leads to the fire which disfigures Dolores.
An Awfully Big Adventure
Told with black humour, this is the story of a group of no-hope rep actors in Liverpool in the mid 50s,
doing Peter Pan. Stella, the heroine who is Tinkerbell, is a sad and lonely young woman who repeatedly
calls the speaking clock for comfort.
The Bottle Factory Outing (1)
Freda and Brenda spend their days working in an Italian-run wine-bottling factory. A work outing offers
promise for Freda, and terror for Brenda, passions run high on that chilly day of freedom, and life after
the outing never returns to normal.
20
Bainbridge,
Beryl
Ballard, J.G.
Barker, Pat
Barnes, Julian
Barth, John
Bawden, Nina
Bayley, John
Bernières, Louis
de
Binchy, Maeve
Birchill, Julie
Booth, Martin
Boyd, William
Boyle, T.
Coreghessan
Every Man for Himself
Recapturing the four crucial days prior to the sinking of the Titanic and the loss of fifteen hundred lives,
this story is told from the perspective of Morgan, the American nephew of the owner of the shipping line,
and reveals how his destiny is linked to other passengers.
Master Georgie (1)
Master Georgie - George Hardy, a surgeon and amateur photographer - stands at the center of this
intense, searing, unsettling novel that takes him from a comfortable life in prosperous nineteenth century
Liverpool to the battlefield at Inkerman and the horrors of the Crimean War. His story begins and ends in
front of a camera, but Master Georgie is more than the subject of a photograph. Three voices record the
series of strange events, bad judgments, good intentions, and ill luck that shape the destiny of Master
Georgie.
Empire of the Sun
The heartrending story of British boy Jim's four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the second
world war.
The Ghost Road
Based on a mix of real and imagined characters and events, this book concentrates on Sarah, a young
woman working in a munitions factory, and on Wilfred Owen.
Another World
Nick's grandfather Geordie lies dying. As Nick watches, Geordie relives the horrors surrounding his
brother's death. Meanwhile the children, who have been organized into decorating the living room, peel
away the wallpaper to reveal an obscene portrait of an Edwardian family.
England, England
Visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman builds replicas of all the major tourist attractions on the Isle of Wight,
from Stonehenge to Manchester United. The project is monstrous, risky and vastly successful - indeed it
gradually begins to rival "Old" England, and threatens to supersede it.
Chimera
In Chimera, John Barth injects his signature wit into the tales of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One
Nights, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, and Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus. In a
book that the Washington Post called stylishly maned, tragically songful, and serpentinely elegant, Barth
retells these tales from varying perspectives, examining the myths relationship to reality and their
resonance with the contemporary world.
Circles of Deceit (1)
Major figures in the life of the narrator, a painter who specializes as a copyist, are Clio, his child-bride,
Helen, his first wife, and his mother Maisie. They confound lies and the truth in a subtle weave, while the
silent agony of the painter's son is a reflection on the busy web of deception.
A Little Love, a Little Learning
The three Boyd children are living with their mother and stepfather in a suburb of London, dealing with
the issues that provide all children with the stumbling blocks of growing up. Joanna is wounded by love;
Kate toys with the dramas of life, while Poll plays the detective. Their stepfather is a loving guide for
them all...but why does no one tell them about their real father?
Iris, a Memoir
The noted literary critic & novelist recounts his life with, and love for, the renowned author Iris Murdoch,
who in the last years of her life suffered from Alzheimer's.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (3)
During WWII the little Greek isle of Cephallonia is occupied by a division of Italian soldiers. A young
Greek woman, Pelagia, betrothed already to a local fisherman, surprises herself by falling in love with the
musical, misplaced and Italian Captain Corelli. But this central love is only one of many different kinds
that shine out from the blackness of war.
Tara Road (3)
The story of two women -- one Irish, one American, both struggling to overcome personal tragedies -who agree to swap houses for the summer. Ria and her husband, Danny, live in a magnificent old house
they have restored together. But her posh Dublin address loses much of its charm when Danny leaves
her for his young, pregnant girlfriend. A chance phone call from grief-stricken Marilyn in New England
provides both women with a welcome refuge from their shattered
lives. But in exchanging houses, they also unwittingly take on aspects of each other's vastly different
lives -- not always without new conflict.
Ambition
The Industry of Souls
The story of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen arrested for spying in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
Presumed dead by the British Government, he survives 20 years in a Soviet labour camp. Eventually
freed, he finds he has no reason to return to the west, and becomes a local schoolmaster.
An Ice-cream War
As millions are slaughtered on the Western Front, a ridiculous and little-reported campaign is being
waged in East Africa - a war they continued after the Armistice because no one told them to stop.
The Brazzaville Beach
A story set in Africa and seen through the eyes of a young woman who is working on a field study of
chimpanzees.
The Tortilla Curtain
When Delaney Mossbacher runs over a Mexican pedestrian, he neither reports the accident nor takes
the man to hospital. He leaves him $20 before returning to his privileged life in California while the
Mexican staggers home to poverty and his pregnant 17-year-old wife.
21
Bradley, Marion
Zimmer
Brink, André
Brookner, Anita
Brown, Dan
Brown, Rita Mae
Burgess,
Anthony
Butler, Robert
Olan
Byatt, A.S.
Caputo, Philip
Carey, Peter
Mists of Avalon (3)
Morgaine, gifted with the Sight and fated with her brother-lover's doom, recounts the glorious tragedy of
Camelot's brief flowering - not as a tale of knightly deeds, but as a woman's rounded view of society in
the crucible of change.
States of Emergency
The nameless narrator of Brink's daring, brilliant novel is a South African writer who struggles to perfect a
love story "untarnished by politics." But the political fact of apartheid intrudes constantly on the storywithin-a-story romance of Philip Malan, married, 50ish professor, and Melissa, his 23-year-old graduate
student and mistress. A second plot is introduced when the narrator discovers the feverish diary of a
white woman recently burned to death who had been romantically involved with a black terrorist fugitive.
These separate love stories collide and interpenetrate in the narrator's imagination, against a backdrop
of escalating racial violence.
Hotel du Lac
Recounts the holiday of Edith Hope, meek, unmarried, and thirty-nine, who, on the mend from a
disastrous love affair, becomes intimately involved with her fellow guests at the Swiss Hotel du Lac.
A Misalliance (1)
Blanche Vernon is one of Brookner's lovable, lonely eccentrics. Recently separated after 20 years of
marriage, she spends her time on such elevating pastimes as visiting art museums and volunteering at
the local hospital. Her fondness for good books and wine disconcerts her earnest friends, who want to
pity her loneliness. After a chance meeting, Blanche becomes entangled in the lives of a small mute child
and her bohemian mother. This rather sad affair, along with her growing awareness of human limitations,
changes the course of Blanche's life.
A Friend from England
Rachel Kennedy and Oscar Livingston were not precisely friends or family. Rachel had been acquanted
with Oscar for some time, first as her father's accountant, and then as her own. Part owner of a London
bookshop, Rachel is thoroughly independent and somewhat distant, determinedly restrained in her
feelings for others, but above all responsible. And it is this trait that leads Oscar and his wife Dorrie to
seek out Rachel as a mentor for their twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Heather. Yet when Heather
seems poised to make an unsuitable romantic decision, Rachel decides to speak out and intervene,
causing an unwitting and devastating insight.
The Da Vinci Code
Harvard Professor Robert Langdon, visiting Paris, is called in when the curator of the Louvre is
murdered. Alongside the body is a series of baffling ciphers. Langton and a gifted French cryptologist,
Sophie Neveu, are amazed to find a trail that leads to the works of Da Vinci - and beyond.
Venus Envy
A misdiagnosis of cancer leads successful art dealer Mary Frazier Armstrong to send letters to her loved
ones in which she comes out of the closet--letters she wants to retrieve when she finds that the
diagnosis was a mistake.
The Kingdom of the Wicked
A 379-page novel about the early days of Christianity.
Enderby's Dark Lady or No End to Enderby (1)
A Dead Man in Deptford
Set in Elizabethan England, Burgess's first novel for four years centres on the life of Christopher
Marlowe, who was killed in suspicious circumstances in a tavern brawl in Deptford 400 years ago. It
portrays a theatre genius riven by sexual and political conflicts.
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
In a collection of bittersweet stories about Vietnamese expatriates living in the American South, Butler
blends Vietnamese folklore and American realities, lyric, dreamlike passages and comic turns, to create
a panoramic tapestry of a people struggling to find a balance between their hearts and their hopes.
Possession (3)
A mystery where the clues lurk in university libraries, old letters and dusty journals. Together with Roland
, a fellow academic and accidental sleuth, Maud discovers a love affair between two Victorian writers.
The Voyage
On a June morning in the century's infancy - Cyrus Braithwaite - without explanation - orders his three
teenage sons to sail from their Maine home and not return until September. The three boys and a friend
board the Braithwaites' forty-six-foot schooner and begin a perilous journey down the East Coast, bound
for the Florida Keys. A storm abruptly ends their passage, leaving them stranded in Cuba, but when they
telegraph their father for help, he does not respond. After their ordeal is over, no one in the family ever
again mentions the voyage.. "Now, almost a century later, Cyrus's great-granddaughter Sybil is
determined to know the hidden heart of the story: Why did Cyrus send his sons to sea? Why was their
mother in a Boston hospital? What role was played in the drama by Lockwood Braithwaite, the enigmatic
child of Cyrus's first marriage? Sybil's discoveries will change the way she thinks about herself, her
family, and the America whose ideals the Braithwaites once embodied.
Oscar and Lucinda
Set on board an ocean liner travelling to Australia in 1864, this novel is both a love story and an historical
tour de force that relates the developing romance between Oscar Hopkins, an Oxford seminarian, and
Lucinda Leplastrier, a Sydney heiress with a fascination for glass.
The True History of the Kelly Gang
Born and raised in the Australian state of Victoria to Irish parents, Ned Kelly and his siblings have been
mired in troubles for as long as they can remember (their father being a former convict and their mother
a member of the Quinn family, notorious local rabble-rousers). After an attempt at leading a straight life
after becoming well acquainted with the insides of various prisons during his early years, young Kelly
soon yields to fate and takes up horse stealing and bank robbery as a means to provide for his mother,
22
his wife, and his unborn child...
Carter, Angela
Cartwright,
Justin
Chabon, Michael
Chang, Jung
Chevalier, Tracy
Clancy, Tom
Clarke, Susanna
Coetzee, John.
M.
Collins, Michael
Nights at the Circus
American journalist Jack Walser travels with an enchanted circus that features literate chimpanzees,
tragic clowns, idealist brigands, a structuralist Siberian shaman, and a six-foot, two-inch blond aerialist
who is part swan and part woman.
Burning your Boats (3)
From reflections on jazz and Japan through vigorous refashionings of classic fairy tales to stunning
snapshots of modern life in all its tawdry glory, Burning Your Boats charts the evolution of Angela
Carter's marvelous magic vision in a volume that assembles her considerable legacy of short fiction,
including early and previously unpublished stories.
In Every Face I Meet
In Every Face I Meet captures the life of an apparently ordinary Englishman - his marriage, his work, his
sexual relationships and his connection to the events and sports of the world around him - until his day
takes on the aspect first of a waking dream then of a true nightmare. Its horrifying conclusion, as
Anthony Northleach runs into a south London prosititute, is shocking because the reader has come to
see his story as both emblematic and savagely observant. Friendship, it seems, is all Anthony has left.
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
A story of adolescence and of the dawning realization that childhood is a country you can never return to.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (3)
In 1939 New York City, Joe Kavalier, a refugee from Hitler's Prague, joins forces with his Brooklyn-born
cousin, Sammy Clay, to create comic-book superheroes inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and
dreams.
Wild Swans. Three Daughers of China (3)
Jung Chang describes the life of her grandmother, a warlord's concubine; her mother's struggles as a
young idealistic Communist; and her parents' experience as members of the Communist elite and their
ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then
worked as a peasant, a "barefoot doctor," a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each
generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving -- and ultimately uplifting -- detail the cycles of
violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.
Girl with a Pearl Earring
A brilliant historical novel on the corruption of innocence, using the famous painting by Vermeer as an
inspiration. Griet, the young daughter of a tilemaker in seventeeth century Holland, obtains her first job,
as a servant in Vermeer's household. Tracy Chevalier shows us, through Griet's eyes, the complicated
family, the society of the small town of Delft, and life with an obsessive genius. Griet loves being drawn
into his artistic life, and leaving her former drudgery, but the cost to her own survival may be high.
Without Remorse (3)
A formative episode in the life of the Clancy's character John Kelly, known as "Mr Clark". In Vietnam,
special operations veteran Kelly was known as "the snake" - the man whose footsteps no one ever
heard. Now, in 1970, back in the USA, footsteps were all around him.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (3)
Centuries ago when magic still existed in England, the greatest magician of them all was the Raven
King. A human child brought up by fairles, the Raven King blended fairy wisdom and human reason to
create English magic. Now at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he is barely more than a legend,
and England, with its mad King and its dashing poets, no longer believes in practical magic. Then the
reclusive Mr Norrell of Hurtfew Abbey appears and causes the statues of York Cathedral to speak and
move. News spreads of the return of magic to England and, persuaded that he must help the
government in the war against Napoleon, Mr Norrell goes to London. There he meets a brilliant young
magician and takes him as a pupil. Jonathan Strange is charming, rich and arrogant. Together, they
dazzle the country with their feats. But the partnership soon turns to rivalry.
Life and Times of Michael K. (1)
Set in a turbulent South Africa, a young gardener decides to take his mother away from the violence
towards a new life in the abandoned countryside, but finds that war follows wherever he goes.
Age of Iron (1)
Set in South Africa, this is the story of a retired university teacher who learns, in the same day, that she
is dying of cancer and that she has a vagrant in her yard. The story describes the contrast between the
dreams of the old woman and the political and social situation around her.
Disgrace
A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his
female students. When discovered by the college authorities he is expected to apologize to save his job,
but instead he refuses and resigns, retiring to live with his daughter on her remote farm.
The Keepers of Truth
It is the mid 80s in post industrial America. In a small town graced with the decaying hulks of defunct
factories, young journalist and college dropout Bill churns out lengthy essays on the death of industry
and of America itself for The Daily Truth, whose scoops rarely rise above the latest home bake contest.
The static summer is punctured when local bad boy Ronny Lawton reports his father missing. A
dismembered finger is found and all suspect the son of murdering his hated father, but nothing can be
proved. The sorry tale of the white trash Lawtons hypnotises the town and Ronny Lawton becomes a
local icon. Bill becomes increasingly obsessed with the story - he gets involved with Ronny's estranged
wife, finds a decomposing human head, and ends up as a suspect in the murder case himself.
23
Coupland,
Douglas
Cunningham,
Michael
Dahl, Tessa
Dangor, Achmat
Deane, Seamus
Delillo, Don
Desai, Anita
Doyle, Roddy
Doylke, Roddy
Drabble,
Margaret
Durrell,
Lawrence
Ellis, Bret Easton
Erdrich, Louise
Girlfriend in a Coma
Karen goes into a coma one night in 1979. Whilst in it, she gives birth to a healthy baby daughter; once
out of it, 18 years later, she finds herself a middle-aged mother whose friends have all gone through all
the normal marital, social and political traumas and back again.
The Hours
Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start
on her new novel. In 1990s New York, Clarissa Vaughan goes shopping for flowers for a party for her
AIDS-suffering poet-friend.
Working for Love (1)
Molly's husband has left her after over seven years. In this scream-of-consciousness first novel, Molly
analyzes, reminisces, and agonizes--ostensibly in a letter to him--about her childhood and failed
marriage. The daughter of an English artist and an American actress (in fact , Dahl is the daughter of
writer Roald Dahl and actress Patricia Neal), Molly's childhood is shocked by repeated traumas, much
the same as Dahl's own: an infant brother is hit by a bus, a sister dies from measles, and her mother
suffers a stroke. Molly longs for her father's love but is always denied it. She ends up letting herself be
victimized by men.
Bitter Fruit
Johannesburg, 1992. This is the story of Silas and Lydia, and especially of their son Mikey, a university
student with a curious mind and a calculating will, as their relationships fracture and their lives go off in
new and surprising directions
Reading in the Dark
The Derry of poet Seamus Deane's first novel, Reading in the Dark is a perilous place. Ghosts haunt the
stairwells of apartment buildings, a curse follows two families down through the generations, close
friends turn out to be police informers and the police are as likely to persecute an innocent man as
protect him. And hovering over all the violence, poverty and despair of 1940s Northern Ireland is the
spectre of the "Troubles". The hero of the novel is an unnamed young man whose life turns upside down
when a policeman frames him. Deception becomes his only means of self-defence.
Underworld (3)
Opens at the Shea Stadium at the World Series Game of 1951, where the ball is caught by a young,
black man in the crowd, and continues to change hands throughout the book. The various recipients of
the ball tell the story of post-war US history giving a panorama of America from the 50s to the 90s.
Fasting, Feasting
Fasting, Feasting, is the tale of plain and lumpish Uma and the cherished, late-born Arun, daughter and
son of strict and conventional parents. So united are her parents in Uma's mind that she conflates their
names. "MamaPapa themselves rarely spoke of a time when they were not one. The few anecdotes they
related separately acquired great significance because of their rarity, their singularity. Uma, as daughter
and female, expects nothing; Arun, as son and male, is lost under the weight of expectation. Now in her
40s, Uma is at home. Attempts at arranged marriages having ended in humiliation and disaster, and she
is at MamaPapa's beck and call, with only her collection of bracelets and old Christmas cards for
consolation.
The Van
The further misadventures of the Rabbitte family in working-class Dublin--from the author of The
Commitments and The Snapper. This story follows Jimmy Rabbitte, Sr., and his best friend through
Dublin, selling cheap grub to the drunk and hungry--keeping one step ahead of the health officials.
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Paddy Clarke, a ten-year-old Dubliner, describes his world, a place full of warmth, cruelty, love, sardines
and slaps across the face. He's confused; he sees everything but he understands less and less.
The Woman who walked into Doors
The story of an ordinary woman from Dublin and her stormy relationship with her husband Charlo.
The Radiant Way
This novel goes back through the lives of three women, a psychoanalyst, an art historian and a “good
woman" who all met at Cambridge in the 1950s.
Constance or Solitary Practices
Less than Zero
Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless
privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago, and snorts
mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his
best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a
dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy
bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.
American Psycho
In a black satire of the eighties, a decade of naked greed and
unparalleled callousness, a successful Wall Street yuppie cannot get enough of anything--including
murder.
Love Medicine
Love Medicine tells the story of two families--the Kashpaws and the Lamartines: a multigenerational
portrait of new truths and secrets whose time has come, of strong men and women caught in an
unforgettable drama of anger, desire, and the healing power that is Love Medicine.
The Bingo Palace
At a crossroads in his life, Lipsha Morrissey is summoned by his grandfather on the reservation. There
he comes to terms with his heritage, his future, and his first true love.
24
Eugenides,
Jeffrey
Evans, Nicholas
Faber, Michel
Fielding, Helen
Fitch, Janet
Fitzgerald,
Penelope
Ford, Richard
Frayn, Michael
Frazier, Charles
Frederiksson,
Marianne
French, Marilyn
Freud, Esther
Galgut, Damon
The Virgin Suicides
This is the story of the disintegration of a captivating American family in 1970s suburban Michigan. The
five Lisbon sisters are embalmed in the memories of the boys who worshipped them and who, twenty
years on, recall their adolescence: the sisters' gauche but breathtaking appearance on the night of the
homecoming dance; the brassière belonging to the beautiful, promiscuous Lux, draped over a crucifix on
the wall; the records the boys played down the phone, trying desperately to penetrate the sisters'
isolation; and the sultry, sleepy street across which they watched fragile lives disappear ...
The Horsewhisperer (3)
In upstate New York, a 13-year-old girl and her horse are hit by a 40-ton truck. They both survive, but
suffer horrible injuries. When the girl's mother hears about a man said to have the gift of healing troubled
horses, they set off for distant Montana, where their lives are changed for ever.
The Crimson Petal and the White (3)
Sugar, an alluring, nineteen-year-old prostitute in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs Castaway, yearns for a
better life. Her ascent through the strata of 1870's London society offers us intimacy with a host of
loveable, maddening and superbly realised characters. At the heart of this panoramic, multi-layered
narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter.
Bridget Jones’s Diary
Bridget Jones wants to have it all - and once she's given up smoking and got down to 8st 7lbs, she will.
This book is about a year in the life of a single girl on an optimistic but doomed quest for selfimprovement.
White Oleander (3)
Young Astrid is an only child with strong attachments to her brilliant if unstable mother, Ingrid, and their
idyllic life together. Astrid's world is shattered, however, when Ingrid murders her lover after a
devastating rejection. Her life becomes a constantly changing whirlwind of strange new faces and foster
homes.
The Beginning of Spring (1)
Nellie Reed disappears from her home at 22 Lipka Street, and her husband Frank--suspecting she has
returned to England--must raise their three young children with the help of beautiful Lisa Ivanovna.
The Gate of Angels (1)
Set in a Cambridge college in 1911, this novel revolves around the disadvantages of thinking and the
mistakes made by scientists.
Independence Day (3)
Estate agent Frank Bascombe moves into his newly-married ex-wife's old home, and is looking forward
to the upcoming Fourth-of-July weekend with his son. But somehow, nothing turns out the way he
expects.
Headlong
Martin Clay, a young would-be art historian, sees a chance of a lifetime: to perform a great public
service, and to make his professional reputation. To obtain the treasure he thinks he has identified
involves him setting up a classic sting and risking everything that is valuable to him.
Cold Mountain (3)
A soldier wounded in the Civil War, Inman turns his back on the carnage of the battlefield and begins the
treacherous journey home to Cold Mountain, and to Ada, the woman he loved before the war began.
As Inman attempts to make his way across the mountains, through the devastated landscape of a soonto-be-defeated South, Ada struggles to make a living from the land her once-wealthy father left when he
died. Neither knows if the other is still alive.
Simon & the Oaks
Our Father (3)
Famed presidential advisor Stephen Upton has suffered a stroke, and his four very different daughters
gather in his perfectly appointed mansion outside Boston to await his death or recovery. In the weeks to
come, each will learn one another's terrible secrets and the astonishing truth about the life they might
have shared.
Her Mother’s Daughter (1)
A story about four generations of magnificent women, celebrating the love, pride, sacrifice, devotion, and
unheralded triumph of all women's lives.
Hideous Kinky (1)
This novel is about a feckless young mother and her two daughters in Morocco in the 1960s. While mum
immerses herself in the Sufi religion, the children begin to rebel: Bea insists on going to school while the
five-year-old narrator dreams of mashed potato.
Peerless Flats
Lisa moves to London, hoping to follow in her sister Rosie's footsteps. Striking out, she tracks her own
path through the city, dabbling with drugs and romance, and refusing to lose faith in her belief that
something fantastic is about to happen to mark the beginning of the rest of her life.
The Good Doctor
When Laurence Waters arrives at his rural hospital posting, Frank is instantly suspicious. Laurence is
everything Frank is not - young, optimistic and full of new schemes. The two become uneasy friends,
while the rest of the staff in the deserted hospital view Laurence with a mixture of awe and mistrust. The
town beyond the hospital is also coping with new arrivals, and the return of old faces. The brigadier - a
self-fashioned dictator from apartheid days - is rumoured still to be alive. And down at Mama's place, a
group of soldiers have moved in with their malign commandant, a man Frank has met before and is keen
to avoid. Laurence wants to help - but in a world where the past is demanding restitution from the
present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last.
25
Garland, Alex
Golden, Arthur
Gordimer,
Nadine
Greene, Graham
Gunesekera,
Romesh
Gurnah,
Abdulrazak
Guterson, David
Haddon, Mark
Hall, Sarah
Harris,
MacDonald
Harris, Thomas
Heller, Zoë
Heyman, Kathryn
Hollinghurst,
Alan
The Coma (1)
A man is attacked on the Underground and awakens to find himself in a hospital, apparently having
emerged from a coma. Or has he?
Memoirs of a Geisha (3)
Summoning up more than 20 years of Japan's most dramatic history, the geisha's story uncovers a
hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. It moves from a small fishing
village in 1929 to the glamorous and decadent Kyoto of the 30s and on to postwar New York.
My Son’s Story
This novel combines a passionate love story and a haunting portrayal of contemporary South Africa. It
describes what it is really like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free.
None to Accompany Me
Set in South Africa, this is the story of Vera Stark, a lawyer and an independent mother of two, who
works for the Legal Foundation representing blacks trying to reclaim land that was once theirs. As her
country lurches towards majority rule, so she discovers a need to reconstruct her own life.
The Captain and the Enemy
Victor Baxter is a young boy when a secretive stranger known as "the Captain" brings him from his
boarding school to London. Victor becomes the surrogate son and companion of a woman named Liza,
who renames him "Jim" and depends on him for any news of the world outside their door
Reef (1)
Reef is a love story set in a spoiled paradise. It is told by Triton, who, at the age of eleven, goes to work
as houseboy to Mister Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed by swamps, sea movements and the
island's disappearing reef. Triton learns to polish silver until it shines like molten sun; to mix a love cake
with ten eggs, creamed butter and fresh cashew nuts; and to steam the exotic parrot fish for his master's
lover. As Triton recounts his story, and extraordinary voice emerges: naive and knowing, fearful and
brave, the voice of a boy becoming a man in a world stumbling to the brink of chaos.
Paradise
Set in an African village, this is a novel about a boy who is taken away at the age of 12 by a
moneylender as security against a loan. He is coming of age and learning of his inheritance. It is also the
story of the corruption of traditional African patterns by white colonialism.
Snow falling on Cedars (3)
A young fisherman is found dead in the nets of his boat off an island in the Pacific Northwest. The novel
tells of love and war and the ways men and women struggle for survival and redemption.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective,
and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He
knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the
truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end
of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey
which will turn his whole world upside down.
The Electric Michelangelo
Beginning as a humble apprentice in Morecambe Bay, Cy flees to America, where he sets up his own
tattoo business on the infamous Coney Island boardwalk. In this carnival environment of roller-coasters
and freak shows, Cy becomes enamoured with Grace, a mysterious circus performer.
Hemingway’s Suitcase
In the winter of 1922 a suitcase containing part of a novel and 20 or so stories by Ernest Hemingway was
stolen from a train. Sixty-five years later, Nils-Frederic Glas, a dilettante writer whose periodic European
journeys have resulted in a Shih Tzu, a Peugeot and a Belgian lover/housemaid, has just returned from
another foray in possession of some of the lost Nick Adams stories. Or are they? With the wary help of
two others on the fringe of L.A.'s book world--his son Alan, an unsuccessful agent, and Wolf, an
antiquarian book dealer--he proposes to publish them.
Silence of the Lambs
Made into a succesful film starring Jodie Foster, and Anthony Hopkins as the homicidal genius and
cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, this is the story of a killer on the loose who knows that beauty is only skin
deep, and a trainee investigator who's trying to save her own hide.
Hannibal (3)
The sequel to "Silence of the Lambs" marks the return of Dr Hannibal Lecter. One of Hannibal's victims,
the influential and rich Mason Verger - a paraplegic confined to a respirator, thanks to Hannibal - is bent
on revenge and Clarice Starling provides the perfect bait.
Notes on a Scandal
When the new teacher first arrives, Barbara immediately senses that this woman will be different from
the rest of her staff-room colleagues. But Barbara is not the only one to feel that Sheba is special, and
before too long Sheba is involved in an illicit affair with a pupil. Barbara finds the relationship abhorrent,
of course, but she is the only adult in whom Sheba can properly confide. So when the liaison is found out
and Sheba's life falls apart, Barbara is there...
The Accomplice
The Accomplice describes one of the most shocking events of the 17th century: the wreck of a Dutch
ship, the Batavia, off the west coast of Australia, and the extraordinary events that befell its stranded
survivors. It is also the story of Judith Bastiaansz, sailing with her family to a new life, who is caught up in
something well beyond her experience: first infatuation, and then, perhaps, something far more
dangerous.
The Swimmingpool-library
This novel centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of
privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, who is searching for someone to write his
biography.
26
Hollinghurst,
Alan
Hope,
Christopher
Hornby, Nick
Hulme, Keri
Irving, John
Ishiguro, Kazuo
James, P.D.
Jhabvala, Ruth
Prawer
Kelman, James
Keneally,
Thomas
Kennedy,
William
Kingsolver,
Barbara
The Folding Star
Set in London and Bruges, this story takes the narrative of "The Swimming Pool Library" into the late
1980s.
The Line of Beauty (3)
Alan Hollinghurst's book takes up where his previous acclaimed work, "The Swimming-Pool Library"
ends. "The Line of Beauty" traces the further history of a decade of change and tragedy. In the summer
of 1983, 20-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens as the
Thatcher boom-years unfold.
Serenity House
Old Max, the giant of Serenity House, North London's "Premier Eventide Refuge", might have been left
to die in peace. But his son-in-law Albert, an MP with an interest in the new War Crimes Bill, has other
ideas.
About a Boy
Will is 36 and doesn't really want children. But then he comes across 12-year-old Marcus and it's pretty
clear that Marcus would like a dad. The trouble is, Marcus is weird - a boy who prefers Joni Mitchell to
Nirvana. He also knows something about Will that he can definitely use.
The Bone People (3)
A story of Kerewin, a despairing part-Maori artist who is convinced that her solitary life is the only way to
face the world. Her cocoon is rudely blown away by the sudden arrival during a rainstorm of Simon, a
mute six-year-old whose past seems to hold some terrible trauma.
A Prayer for Owen Meany (3)
Owen Meany hits a foul ball while playing baseball in the summer of 1953 that kills his best friend's
mother, an accident that Owen is sure is the result of divine intervention.
A Son of the Circus (3)
Born a Parsi in Bombay and educated in Vienna, Dr Farrokh Daruwalla is a Canadian citizen, an
orthopedic surgeon, living in Toronto. Periodically, he returns to India. Once 20 years ago, Dr Darwalla
was the examining physician of two murder victims in Goa. Now, he is reacquainted with the murderer.
An Artist of the Floating World
As Japan rebuilds her cities after the calamity of World War II, the celebrated painter Masuji Ono should
be enjoying a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to a life and career deeply
touched by the rise of Japanese militarism, a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity.
The Remains of the Day
An elderly butler is on a five-day motoring trip through the West Country in the 1950s. The climax of his
journey is to be a reunion with his former housekeeper.
The Unconsoled (3)
A musician of international renown checks into a hotel in eastern Europe. He has the distinct recollection
that he is due to perform in the Civic Concert Hall in a few days' time, but as the hotel porter escorts him
to his room it occurs to him that there is much more to his visit than he expected.
When we were Orphans
In 1930s England, Christopher Banks has become one of the country's most celebrated detectives. His
cases are the talk of London society. Yet one mystery has always haunted him, the mysterious
disappearance of his parents in Old Shanghai, when he was a small boy.
The Children of Men
The year is 2021. No child has been born for a quarter of a century. The human race faces extinction.
Under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiatt, Warden of England, the old are despairing, the young beautiful
but cruel.
A Certain Justice (3)
An Adam Dalgliesh novel. When Venetia Aldridge QC defends young Gary Ashe, accused of the brutal
murder of his aunt, this is just one more opportunity for her to triumph in a distinguished career as a
criminal lawyer. Then Miss Aldridge is found dead at her desk, and Dalgliesh is called in.
Poet and Dancer
Set against the vivid, dreamlike landscape of Manhattan in the recent past, this is the story of two
cousins, whose experimental attachment deepens in adulthood into something complex and perilous.
How Late it was, How Late
Beaten savagely by Glasgow police, the shoplifting ex-con Sammy is hauled off to jail, where he wakes
to a world gone black. For the rest of the novel he stumbles around the rainy streets of Glasgow,
brandishing a sawed-off mop handle and trying in vain to make sense of the nightmare his life has
become.
Schindler’s Ark
In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist became a living legend to the Jews of
Cracow. A womanizer and drinker, he risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Ironweed
In 1938, Francis Phelan, a murderer, is reduced to flop houses and hobo jungles and returns to a
depressed Albany, where--as a gravedigger--he shuffles his rag tag way to survival.
Quinn’s Book
Daniel Quinn is a self-reliant orphan whose pluck, enterpriseand love for the dashing but elusive Maud
Fallonmake him a friend of many notables and eventually a famous war correspondent. But narrative is
not the essence here, though the book is full of incident and adventure, sometimes shocking, often
brutal, nearly always told with the vivid colors of dream.
The Poisonwood Bible (3)
Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible paints an intimate portrait of a crisis-ridden family amid the
larger backdrop of an African nation in chaos.
27
Kosinski, Jerry
Kureishi, Hanif
Leavitt, David
Lessing, Doris
Levy, Andrea
Litt, Toby
Lively, Penelope
Lodge, David
Lurie, Alison
Mackay, Shena
Malamud,
Bernard
The Painted Bird
A dark-haired, olive-skinned boy is forced to fend for himself during the war and wander alone from one
Slav village to another, sometimes hounded and tortured, sometimes sheltered and taught. This is a
portrayal of the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, seen through the eyes of a boy.
The Buddha of Suburbia
This is the story of Karim Amir, "an Englishman born and bred - almost", who lives with his English
mother and Indian father in the South London suburbs.
Love in a Blue Time
Hanif Kureishi, author of "The Buddha of Suburbia", is one of a generation of British writers whose
experience of the United Kingdom is refracted, socially and culturally, through his Pakistani heritage. The
stories in this collection incorporate the humour, bawdiness and aggression of his novels.
The Lost Language of Cranes
The story of Philip Benjamin, a young man haunted by images of his staid, middle-class parents and
frightened by the thought of revealing his homosexual identity to them.
The Body of Jonah Boyd
It's 1969, and Judith "Denny" Denham has just begun an affair with Dr. Ernest Wright, a psychology
professor at Wellspring University, who just happens to be her boss. But her position in the Wright
household is not merely as a mistress. Ernest's wife, Nancy, has taken Denny under her wing as a fourhand piano partner and general confidante, although Denny can never seem to measure up to Anne,
Nancy's best friend from back east. Ernest's eldest son has fled over the Canadian border to escape the
draft, while his only daughter has embarked on a secret affair with her father's protegé;. The remaining
son, Ben, is fifteen, and as delicate and insufferable as only a poetry-writing fifteen-year-old can be.
That autumn, Denny crosses the freeway that separates Wellspring from its less affluent mirror image,
Springwell, to spend Thanksgiving with the Wrights and their assortment of strays, including two honored
guests: the eagerly anticipated Anne and Anne's new husband, the acclaimed novelist Jonah Boyd. The
chain of events set in motion that Thanksgiving will change the lives of everyone involved in ways that
none can imagine, and that won't become clear for decades to come.
The Good Terrorist (3)
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded a W.H. Smith Literary Award in 1985, this novel is set in
the subsidized sub-culture of a Marxist group in Britain.
The Fifth Child (1)
Four children, a beautiful old house, the love of relatives and friends, Harriet and David Lovatt's life is a
glorious hymn to domestic bliss and old-fashioned family values. But when their fifth child is born, a
sickly and implacable shadow is cast over this tender idyll. Large and ugly, violent and uncontrollable,
the infant Ben, 'full of cold dislike,' tears at Harriet's breast. Struggling to care for her new-born child,
faced with a darkness and a strange defiance she has never known before, Harriet is deeply afraid of
what, exactly, she has brought into the world.
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1)
The fourth in Doris Lessing's visionary novel cycle "Canopus in Argos: Archives". It is a mix of fable,
futuristic fantasy and pseudo-documentary accounts of 20th-century history.
Walking in the Shade
This is Doris Lessing's follow-up to the first part of her autobiography, "Under My Skin". Here, we move
into the heyday of her career, sparked off by the international success of her first novel in 1950. She
went on to forge a unique role for herself in British literary and political life.
Small Island (3)
Returning to England after the war Gilbert Joseph is treated very differently now that he is no longer in
an RAF uniform. Joined by his wife Hortense, he rekindles a friendship with Queenie who takes in
Jamaican lodgers. Can their dreams of a better life in England overcome the prejudice they face?
Ghost Story
With a fresh start ahead of them in their new house on the south coast, Agatha and Paddy have
everything to look forward to. But when the builders move out and they move in, their lives have
changed. A personal tragedy threatens to destroy all they have carefully built up and only a small
miracle, it seems, will save them.
Moon Tiger
Claudia Hampton, writer of best-selling popular history books, lies in a London hospital bed and looks
back on her own life, including an unforgettable love affair.
Nice Work
Vic Wilcox a self-made man and managing director of an engineering firm, has little regard for
academics, and even less for feminists. So when Robyn Penrose, a trendy leftist teacher, is assigned to
"shadow" Vic under a government program created to foster mutual understanding between town and
gown, the hilarious collision of lifestyles and ideologies that ensues seems unlikely to foster anything
besides mutual antipathy. But in the course of a bumpy year, both parties make some surprising
discoveries about each other's world's - and about themselves.
Foreign Affairs
American professors of literature Virginia Miner and Fred Turner are both in England to work. "Foreign
Affairs" are not on the agenda, but that's exactly what happens.
The Orchard on Fire
When Percy and Betty Harlency abandon their seedy Streatham pub, for the Copper Kettle Tearoom in
Kent, life for their daughter April changes dramatically. She is befriended by the wonderfully dangerous
Ruby, whose red hair and brutal home life account for her love of fire and by the immaculately dressed
Mr Greenridge who likes to follow her around the village.
God’s Grace
Cohn, the sole human survivor of a nuclear holocaust, is adrift on the oceans. The other survivor is a
chimpanzee, also aboard the research vessel, and the two drift to an island. The chimp has been taught
28
to talk and both Cohn and the chimpanzee work together to survive.
Martel, Yann
Mawer, Simon
McCabe, Patrick
McCarthy,
Cormac
McCourt, Frank
McEwan, Ian
McEwan, Ian
McGahern, John
McInerney, Jay
Miller, Andrew
Life of Pi
The only survivor from the wreck of a cargo ship on the Pacific, 16 year old Pi spends 221 days on a
lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal
Tiger called Richard Parker ...
The Fall
Rob and Jamie are great friends from childhood. They have grown up together and become top climbers,
but have since become estranged. Rob is nevertheless amazed and grief-stricken when he hears of
Jamie's death after a fall on a relatively easy Welsh rockface. The past, though, hides the secret clues
behind the tragedy. Layer by layer Simon Mawer peels back what happened, going not only into the
friends' childhoods but that of their parents - who were also intimate. And there is no escaping that past.
The Butcher Boy
Set in Ireland, this book tells the story of teenage hero Francie Brady. Things begin to fall apart after his
mother's suicide - when he is consumed with fury and commits a horrible crime. Committed to an
asylum, it is only here that he finally achieves peace.
Breakfast on Pluto
Paddy Pussy is a juvenile transvestite from the small town of Tyreelin. A question is raised whether he is
just a transvestite who longs to settle down in a loving relationship or whether he is a cunningly disguised
IRA bomber ready to wreak destruction and death.
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Recounting the adventures of a young man from Tennessee, "The Kid", who has drifted to Texas in the
1840s, this is an apocalyptic novel and mythic vision of a blood-red Early West. At first innocent, "The
Kid" joins a party of crazed and violent Indian hunters.
Angela’s Ashes
Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's sad, funny, bittersweet memoir of growing up in New York in the 30s
and in Ireland in the 40s. It is a story of extreme hardship and suffering, in Brooklyn tenements and
Limerick slums -- too many children, too little money, his mother Angela barely coping as his father
Malachy's drinking bouts constantly brought the family to the brink of disaster. It is a story of courage and
survival against apparently overwhelming odds.
The Child in Time
The story of a father's painful path to recovery two years after his daughter goes missing.
The Innocent
It was 1955 and the corpse of post-war Berlin was crawling with
spies. A British Post Office technician began his descent into ever deeper echelons of electronic
surveillance beneath the surface of Berlin.
Black Dogs (1)
Writing a memoir of his parents-in-law, Jeremy relates the strange events that brought June and Bernard
Tremaine together and set them apart.
Enduring Love
The story of how an ordinary man can be driven to the brink of murder and madness by the delusions of
another. It begins on a windy summer's day in the Chilterns when the calm, organized life of Joe Rose is
shattered by a ballooning accident.
Amsterdam
Two old friends, Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday, both former lovers of the late Molly Lane, meet to pay
their last respects and make a pact that will have unforeseen consequences.
Atonement
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off
her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie
Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of
that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a
boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's
imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the
rest of her life trying to atone.
The Comfort of Strangers (1)
As their holiday unfolds, Colin and Maria are locked into their own intimacy. They groom themselves
meticulously, as though there waits someone who cares deeply about how they appear. Then they meet
a man with a disturbing story to tell and become drawn into a fantasy of violence and obsession.
Amongst Women (1)
Moran is an old Republican, a veteran of the Irish Civil War. His old age, its rhythm and shape, is
dominated by his three daughters. It is they who revive the custom of celebrating Monaghan Day and it is
through their lives that we discover the story of his life.
Story of my Life
Alison Poole, twenty going on 40,000, is a budding actress already fatally well versed in hopping the
clubs, shopping Chanel falling in and out of, lust, and abusing other people's credit cards. As Alison
races toward emotional breakdown, McInerney gives us a hilarious yet oddly touching portrait of a
postmodern Holly Golightly coming to terms with a world in which everything is permitted and nothing
really matters.
Oxygen
It is the summer of 1997. Alec Valentine is returning to England to care for his ailing mother, Alice, a task
that only reinforces his deep sense of inadequacy. In San Francisco, his older brother Larry prepares to
come home as well, preoccupied with an acting career that is sliding toward sleaze and a marriage that
is faltering. In Paris, on the other hand, the Hungarian playwright Lászlo Lázár seems to have it all--
29
Mills, Magnus
Mistry, Rohinton
Mitchell, David
Mo, Timothy
Moore, Brian
Morral, Clare
Morrison, Toni
critical acclaim, a loving boyfriend, and a close circle of friends--yet even he is haunted by guilt and
tragedy. For each of them the time has come to assess the turns taken, the opportunities missed. And
for each there will be one last chance to break free from the past and find redemption in a moment of
clarity and courage.
The Restraint of Beasts
The news couldn't be worse for Tam, Richie and their new supervisor: Mr McCrindle's fence has gone
slack. The three of them are duly dispatched to the McCrindle farm, where they finish off the work, then
go to England where, after rain-sodden days bashing in fence posts, they wolf down baked beans in their
shared caravan and spend their evenings and cash in the local pub. But then they encounter the Hall
Brothers -- butchers, rival fencers and local heroes...
Such a Long Journey
The gathering clouds of the Indo-Pakistan War impinge on the lives of Gustad Noble, a Bombay doctor,
and his family. His dreams, although modest, are denied him as he realizes he is not in control of events.
A Fine Balance (3)
A novel set in India during the Emergency, by the author of "Such a Long Journey". In the tiny flat of the
widowed Dina Dalal, two tailors and a young student struggle to put together a new life of sorts amid
the crisis, and in the course of doing so encounter a vivid cast of characters.
Family Matters (3)
This story centres on a 79-year-old Parsi widower named Nariman who lives with his stepson and
stepdaughter. Nariman's wife died many years before, leaving behind the two children from her first
marriage and the daughter, Roxanna, they had together.
Number 9 Dream
Eiji Miyake arrives in a sprawling Japanese metropolis to track down the father he has never met. But the
city is a mapless place if you are 18, broke, and the only person you can trust is John Lennon. His 8week hunt plunges into the hinterland between the city and the mind, where a Polish art movie is no less
real than the coffee in front of him and letters from an Imperial Army soldier are signposts to next week,
and where he crosses paths with numerologists, staion masters, gateballers, hostesses, organ
harvesters and insane chefs.
Cloud Atlas (3)
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to
his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to
treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where
Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, inveigles his way into the household of an infirm
maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. From there we jump to the West Coast in the
1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and
murder that threatens to claim her life.
The Redundancy of Courage (3)
A brutal and beautiful narration of the guerrilla war against the Indonesians in Timor.
The Colour of Blood
Set in an unnamed East European country, Moore's political thriller concerns a Cardinal who finds
himself caught in the middle of an escalating revolution.
Lies of Silence (1)
Michael Dillon's literary aspirations vanished when he became the manager of a small hotel; he thinks of
himself as ``a failed poet in a business suit.'' Married to a shrewish, dependent woman, he has just
decided to leave her and move to London with his lover, a young Canadian woman, when he is swept
into Northern Ireland's daily violence. A group of IRA thugs invades his home and holds his wife hostage
while Michael is directed to plant a bomb that will kill a Protestant minister. Seamlessly turning what
begins as a drama of domestic unhappiness into a chilling thriller, Moore engages Michael in a moral
dilemma: whether to risk his wife's safety but save countless other lives by informing the police of the
bomb ticking in his car. Once made, Michael's decision leads to yet more excruciating choices,
escalating the tension in a narrative that mirrors the conflict which neither camp can win.
Astonishing Splashes of Colour
'When is the right time to tell someone they're not who they think they are?' Caught in an over-vivid
world, Kitty is tipped off-centre by the loss of her 'child that never was'. And as children all around
become emblems of hope and longing and grief, she's made shockingly aware of the real reason for her
pervasive sense of 'non-existence' .
What mystery at the heart of Kitty's decidedly odd family makes her four brothers so vague about her
mother's life? And why does Dad splash paint on canvas rather than answer his daughter's questions?
On the edges of her dreams Kitty glimpses the kaleidoscope van that took her sister Dinah away - is it a
link to her indistinct childhood?
Beloved
It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from
the abolitionists. For Sethe, Paul D. Halle and the others, the benign imprisonment of Sweet Home is
destroyed.
Jazz
It is 1926 and winter grips Harlem. Joe Trace shoots to death his lover, the impetuous 18-year-old
Dorcas. At the funeral his determined, hardworking wife Violet tries to disfigure the corpse with a knife.
Their story captures the complex humanity of black American urban life at that time.
30
Morrison, Toni
Murdoch, Iris
Naipaul, V.S.
Nolan,
Christopher
Paradise
The theme of this novel is the anatomy of an internecine war, cultural, religious and racial. It is waged
between a community of nuns and the strays and misfits who arrive at their convent for safe haven, and
those who dwell in the surrounding black township in Oklahoma.
Love
May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida-even L: all women obsessed with Bill Cosey. The wealthy owner of
the famous Cosey's Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian,
and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is either
the void in, or the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces-a troubled past and a
spellbinding woman named Celestial.
The Philosopher’s Pupil (3)
The Good Apprentice (3)
Stuart Cuno has decided to become good. Not believing in God, he invents his own methods, which
include celibacy, chastity and the abandonment of a promising academic career. Interfering friends and
relations question his sincerity, his sanity and his motives.
The Book and the Brotherhood (3)
Many years ago Gerard Hernshaw and his friends 'commissioned' one of their number to write a political
book. Time passes and opinions change. 'Why should we go on supporting a book which we detest?'
Rose Curtland asks. 'The brotherhood of Western intellectuals versus the book of history,' Jenkin
Riderhood suggests. The theft of a wife further embroils the situation. Moral indignation must be
separated from political disagreement. Tamar Hernshaw has a different trouble and a terrible secret. Can
one die of shame? In another quarter a suicide pact seems the solution. Duncan Cambus thinks that,
since it is a tragedy, someone must die. Someone dies. Rose, who has gone on loving without hope, at
least deserves a reward.
The Green Knight (3)
In a small circle of friends in London, some disturbing occurrences are taking place: Lucas Graffe, a
reclusive academic, kills a man in self-defense, and disappears immediately after the trial, leaving his
brother, the charismatic actor Clement Graffe, tortured by his absence. Their friend Bellamy James rids
himself of all ties and possessions, even giving away his beloved dog. Yearning for simplicity and
purification, he prepares himself for a monastic life. And outside Clifton, the house where the widowed
Louise Anderson lives with her three eccentric daughters, a very peculiar man is watching. Lucas finally
returns, and during his reunion with his brother they happen to receive a surprising visitor. It soon
becomes clear to the Graffes and their friends that there is a complex mission to fulfill, of revenge, but
also of transformation.
The Enigma of Arrival
Taking its title from the strangely frozen picture by surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, the Enigma of
Arrival is the story of a young Indian from the Crown Colony of Trinidad who arrives in post-imperial
England and consciously, over many years, finds himself as a writer. As he does so, he also observes
the gradual but profound and permanent changes wrought on the English landscape by the march of
"progress", as an old world is lost to the relentless drift of people and things over the face of the earth.
A Way in the World
The story of a writer's lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance language, character, family history - and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical
past: "things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing."
Half a Life
In a corner of India untouched by anti-colonial agitation Willie Chandran's father stood at odds with the
world - aspiring to greatness while living the dreary life marked out for him by his ancestors. In an
attempt to defy his past he lives with a low-caste woman, only to find himself at the mercy of his own
fury. From this unhappy union the compelling character of Willie Chandran emerges: oddly like his father,
naively eager to find something that will place him both in and apart from the world. Willie is drawn to
England and the immigrant community of post-war London, its dingy West End clubs and sexual
encounters. But it is his first experience of love that may bring him the fulfillment he so desperately
seeks. His wife Ana leads him to her homeland in Portuguese Africa, whose inhabitants are uncertainly
living out the last days of colonialism.
Magic Seeds
Abandoning a life he felt was not his own, Willie Chandran (the hero of Half a Life) moves to Berlin where
his sister's radical political awakening inspires him to join a liberation movement in India. There, in the
jungles and dirt-poor small villages, through months of secrecy and night marches, Willie - a solitary,
inward man - discovers both the idealism and brutality of guerilla warfare. When he finally escapes the
movement, he is imprisoned for the murder of three policemen. Released unexpectedly on condition he
return to England, he attempts to climb back into life in the West, but his experience of wealth, love and
despair in London only bedevils him further.
Under the Eye of the Clock (1)
Deprived of oxygen for two hours at birth, Christopher Nolan almost
died, but he lived to write, at age twenty-one, this award-winning autobiography, told as the story of one
Joseph Meehan. Nolan's birth injuries left him quadriplegic and completely unable to communicate, so
for years no one suspected that his mind, though imprisoned in an inert body, was burning to express his
innermost thoughts and ideas to not only his family but the world. Whether he is fighting with the
authorities for the right to go to an ordinary school, or going on a "normal" vacation for the first time,
31
Oates, Joyce
Carol
O'Brien, Edna
O'Doherty, Brian
O'Hagan,
Andrew
Okri, Ben
Ondaatje,
Michael
Oz, Amos
Phillips, Caryl
Pierre, D.B.C.
Pinter, Harold
Nolan's story has a touching, often breathtaking intensity. Nolan recounts his ultimate triumph of finally
being able to share with others the insight and whimsy of his inner world, unlocking the inventive
wordsmith and gifted storyteller within.
Because it is Bitter, and because it is my Heart
Joyce Carol Oates adds to her extraordinary body of work with this stunning novel of violence and love.
At the heart of the story are two people, Iris Courtney, who is white, and handsome Jinx Fairchild, the
black basketball player who, in protecting Iris, kills a white man. Iris is the only witness to the crime. The
two of them are growing up in the early 1950s in a New York industrial town where racial boundaries
keep people apart - or bring them together in explosive scenes of fear or desire. The secret link between
Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a murder...and a bond of passion and guilt is
formed between them.
Foxfire, Confessions of a Girl Gang
Five teenage girls from upstate New York in the 1950s form a blood sisterhood to protect one another
against the world and its oppressors, until their leader's disastrous act of revenge puts all their lives in
turmoil.
Down by the River
The story opens in an idyllic and rural setting in Ireland, but a crime of passion results in an emotional
battlefield for one and all, with opposing factions taking militant sides and in the centre, a young girl
struggles with the conflicts of mind and body.
House of Splendid Isolation
Josie, the ailing, elderly inhabitant of an Irish country mansion dwells in the shadowy world of
remembered pain and loneliness. McGreevy, the terrorist, reintroduces the possibility of compassion and
tenderness, but there is an inevitably violent conclusion to their understanding as the police net closes.
The Deposition of Father McGreevy
In a London pub in the 1950s, editor William Maginn is intrigued by a reference to the reputedly shameful
demise of a remote mountain village in Kerry, Ireland, where he was born. Maginn returns to Kerry and
uncovers an astonishing tale: both the account of the destruction of a place and a way of life which once
preserved Ireland's ancient traditions, and the tragedy of an increasingly isolated village where the
women mysteriously die-leaving the priest, Father McGreevy, to cope with insoluble problems. Looking
back in time, the book traces how, as World War II rages through Europe, McGreevy struggles to
preserve what remains of his parish, and struggles against the rough mountain elements, the grief and
superstitions of his people, and the growing distrust in the town below.
Our Fathers
With violent energy in life, and violent refusal as they near their deaths, the two generations of patriarchs
in Andrew O'Hagan's debut novel aren't easy for a son to bear. Jamie Bawn leaves his childhood home
to escape his father's drunken rages. He joins his grandfather, a powerful city planner in Glasgow, where
he learns the elder man's craft—and then must leave again, rejecting his grandfather's suffocating
idealism and outsized ambitions. Now that old Hugh is dying, Jamie returns to Scotland from his life in
Liverpool. Hugh wants to engage him in a new sort of project: to acknowledge that the socialist housing
utopia was the right dream after all, and—as a finance scandal unfolds—to save the old man's reputation
from the wrecking ball.
The Famished Road (3)
Winner of the 1991 Booker Prize, this phantasmagorical novel is set in the ghetto of an African city
during British colonial rule, and follows the story of Azaro--a "spirit-child" who has reneged on a pact with
the spirit world--and the travails of his impoverished, beleaguered family.
Songs of Enchantment
In this remarkable sequel to his Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road, Okri continues the
story of the spirit-child who is a reluctant but keen observer of his family's turmoil and the political
convulsions of a struggling new Africa. Through his shimmering consciousness and hallucinatory visions,
the boy finds the strength to survive.
Astonishing the Gods (1)
From the author of the 1991 Booker Prize winner, "The Famished Road", comes a novel which carries
the reader to an enchanted island. It is set in a time and place of fairytales, but is evocative of
African consciousness.
The English Patient
Set in 1945, The English Patient explores the lives of four very disparate wartorn people, a young
woman and three men, who take refuge in a damaged villa north of Florence as the war retreats around
them. In an upstairs room lies the badly burned English patient, alive but unable to move. His
extraordinary adventures and turbulent love affair in the North African desert before the war provide the
focus around which the vtales of his companions revolve. His resence will change the destiny of those
around him...
Black Box
Examines the lives of a contemporary Israeli couple whose marriage has ended in disaster.
Crossing the River
In a vastly ambitious and intensely moving novel, the author of Cambridge creates a many-tongued
chorus of the African diaspora in the complex and riveting story of a desperate father who sells his three
children into slavery.
Vernon God Little
Fifteen-year-old Vernon Gregory Little is in trouble, and it has something to do with the recent massacre
of 16 students at his high school. Soon, the quirky backwater of Martirio, barbecue capital of Texas, is
flooded with wannabe CNN hacks, eager for a scapegoat.
The Dwarfs (1)
The Dwarfs is the only novel Harold Pinter has written in his long and distinguished career. Originally
completed in the early 1950s, then revised in 1989, it describes the intertwined lives and concerns of four
32
Pirsig, Robert
Potok, Chaim
Proulx, E. Annie
Pynchon,
Thomas
Robbins, Tom
Roberts, Michèle
Roth, Henry
Roth, Philip
young Londoners in postwar Britain. Through the evolution of their tumultuous and destructive friendship,
Pinter explores the ways in which ordinary lives are molded by the limitations and boundaries of
sexuality, intimacy, and morality, as he illuminates the truths that exist in everyday occurrences.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (3)
A narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions of
how to live. The narrator's relationship with his son leads to a powerful self-reckoning, the craft of
motorcycle maintenance leads to an austerely beautiful process for reconciling science, religion, and
humanism.
Davita’s Harp
For Davita Chandal, growing up in the New York of the 1930s and '40s is an experience of joy and
sadness. Her loving parents, both fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely bright hope of a new and
better world. But as the deprivations of war and depression take a ruthless toll, Davita unexpectedly
turns to the Jewish faith that her mother had long ago abandoned, finding there both a solace for her
questioning inner pain and a test of her budding spirit of independence.
I Am the Clay
As the Chinese and the army of the North sweep south during the Korean War, an old peasant farmer
and his wife flee their village across the bleak, bombed-out landscape. They soon come upon a boy in a
ditch who is wounded and unconscious. Stirred by possessiveness and caring the woman refuses to
leave the boy behind. The man thinks she is crazy to nurse this boy, to risk their lives for some dying
stranger. Angry and bewildered, he waits for the boy to die. And when the boy does not die, the old man
begins to believe that the boy possesss a magic upon which all their lives depend.
The Shipping News
A darkly comic portrait of human life and possibility. Quoyle is a hopeless hack journalist working in New
York. When his two-timing wife dies in a road accident, he retreats to his ancestral home on the coast of
Newfoundland where he must confront the unpredictable forces of nature and society.
Postcards
Postcards is the story of Loyal Blood, a man who spends a lifetime on the run from a crime so terrible
that it renders him forever incapable of touching a woman. The odyssey begins on a freezing Vermont
hillside in 1944 and propels Blood across the American West for 40 years. Denied love and unable to
settle, he lives a hundred different lives: mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils, trapping,
prospecting for uranium and ranching. His only contact with his past is through a series of postcards he
sends home -- not realising that in his absence disaster has befallen his family, and their deep-rooted
connection with the land has been severed with devastating consequences...
Vineland
Thomas Pynchon's first novel for 17 years is set in California in 1984, where a group of people are
struggling against political passions and the consequences of the 1960s.
V. (3)
Pynchon's story involves a self-described schlemiel named Benny Profane who moves to New York and
falls in with a group of go-nowhere youths, dubbed The Sick Crew. Of these, one is pursuing a
mysterious entity, known only as V. Through the book, snatches of V. appear, but always shrouded in
mystery.
Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
When the stock market crashes on the Thursday before Easter, you - an ambitious, though ineffectual
and not entirely ethical young broker - are convinced you're facing the Weekend From Hell. You don't
know the half of it! This is, after all, a Tom Robbins novel. Obviously, before the market reopens on
Monday, you're going to have to scramble and scheme to cover your butt, but there's no way you can
anticipate the baffling disappearance of a 300-pound psychic, the fall from grace of a born-again
monkey, or the intrusion in your life of a tattooed stranger intent on blowing your mind and most of your
fuses.
Daughters of the House (1)
Daughters of the House is Michéle Roberts’ acclaimed novel of secrets and lies revealed in the aftermath
of World War II. Therese and Lonie, French and English cousins of the same age, grow up together in
Normandy. Intrigued by parents and servants, guilty silences and the broken shrine they find in the
woods, the girls weave their own elaborate fantasies, unwittingly revealing the village secret and a deep
shame that will haunt them in their adult lives.
Call it Sleep (3)
Call It Sleep is the magnificent story of David Schearl, the “dangerously imaginative” child coming of age
in the slums of New York.
Deception
A famous writer and his mistress meet in a room without a bed. They talk, play games, make love and
tell lies. The novel explores adultery and the unmasking of illicit lovers, exposing the tenderness and
uncertainty underlying all affairs of the heart.
The Plot Against America
When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin
Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in
America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly
pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the 33rd
president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest
of Europe and whose virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty. What then
followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new novel by Pulitzer-prize winner Philip
Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family - and for a million such families all over the
country - during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who
happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.
33
Roy, Arundhati
Rushdie, Salman
Russo, Richard
Seiffert, Rachel
Sharpe, Tom
Shields, Carol
Smiley, Jane
Smith, Ali
Soueif, Ahdaf
The God of Small Things
Set against a background of political turbulence in Kerala, Southern India, The God of Small Things tells
the story of twins Esthappen and Rahel. Amongst the vats of banana jam and heaps of peppercorns in
their grandmother's factory, they try to craft a childhood for themselves amidst what constitutes their
family - their lonely, lovely mother, their beloved Uncle Chacko (pickle baron, radical Marxist and bottompincher) and their avowed enemy Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grand-aunt).
The Satanic Verses (3)
In this great wheel of a book, where the past and the future chase each other furiously, Salman Rushdie
takes readers on an epic journey of tears and laughter, of bewitching stories and astonishing flights of
the imagination, a journey toward the evil and good that lie entwined within the hearts of women and
men.
Midnight’s Children (3)
The author of The Satanic Verses creates a fascinating family saga about the birth and maturity of a land
and its people--a brilliant incarnation of the human comedy.
The Moor's Last Sigh (3)
"Moor" Zogoiby, only son of a wealthy, artistic Bombay family, finds himself at crisis point. After a tragic
love affair, he plunges into a life of depravity in Bombay before leaving for involvement in financial
scandal in London and, ultimately, violence in Spain.
Empire Falls (3)
The Whiting family, owners of the mills and the shirt factory, have sold out to a multinational. The Whiting
men have invariably married women who make their lives a misery. C.B. Whiting was no exception. Now
his wife, Francine, the last Mrs Whiting, presides like a black widow spider over the declining fortunes of
the town.Its hub is the Empire Grill, with a view down the avenue to the abandoned mill and factory.
Miles Roby, a gentle, funny loser runs the grill and hopes one day to own it. Meantime, though, his wife
has run off with his worst customer, he's anxious about his adored teenage daughter and his one-handed
brother, his incorrigible father sponges off everyone, the police have Miles in their sights, and Mrs
Whiting has her own plans for him.
The Dark Room
At the onset of World War II, a young photographer's assistant is kept out of the war due to a physical
disability, and instead spends his time capturing on film the changing temper of Berlin, the city he loves.
Just weeks after Germany's surrender, a teenage girl whose parents have been taken into allied custody
leads her siblings on a harrowing journey to find their grandmother. And two generations after the war, a
teacher searches for the reason why the Russians imprisoned his beloved grandfather.
Porterhouse Blue
Porterhouse College is world renowned for its gastronomic excellence, the arrogance of its Fellows, its
academic mediocrity and the social cachet it confers on the athletic sons of county families. Sir Godber
Evans, ex-Cabinet Minister and the new Master, is determined to change all this. Spurred on by his
politically angular wife, Lady Mary, he challenges the established order and provokes the wrath of the
Dean, the Senior Tutor, the Bursar and, most intransigent of all, Skullion the Head Porter - with hilarious
and catastrophic results.
The Stone Diaries
The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman's life, a truly sensuous novel which reflects and illuminates
the unsettled decades of our century. This is the story of Daisy Goodwill, from her birth on a kitchen floor
in Manitoba, Canada, to her death in a Florida nursing home nearly ninety years later.
Unless
Reta Winters has a loving family, good friends, and growing success as a writer of light fiction. Then her
eldest daughter suddenly withdraws from the world, abandoning university to sit on a street corner,
wearing a sign that reads only 'goodness'. As Reta seeks the causes of her daughter's retreat, her
enquiry turns into an unflinching, often very funny meditation on society and where we find meaning and
hope.
A Thousand Acres
On a prospering Iowa farm in the 1970s, wealthy farmer Lawrence Cook announces his intentions to
divide the farm among his daughters, setting off a family crisis reminiscent of Shakespeare's "King Lear."
Hotel World
Hotel World takes us through a night in the lives of five people. Three are strangers, two are sisters, one
is dead. Through the course of the evening we are drawn into their different worlds. It's luxurious for
some, but a long drop for others.
The Map of Love (3)
It is the year 1900, and a trip to Egypt marks a new beginning for the recently widowed Lady Anna
Winterbourne. There she meets and falls in love with Sharif Pasha al-Barudi, an Egyptian Nationalist, a
man utterly committed to his country's cause. For Sharif, Anna at first represents the snobberies and
vulgarities of colonialist Britain. For her, Sharif stands for the real, secret Egypt - an Egypt entirely hidden
from her incurious compatriots. The couple fall in love, but fearfully. Can they both adjust to the reality of
love between such conflicting cultures? In 1997, Isabel Parkman, herself a recent divorcee and
descendent of Anna and Sharif, meets and falls in love with Omar-al-Ghamrawi, a New York based
Egyptian. In search of answers to questions she has scarcely framed, she travels to Egypt, carrying with
34
Soyinka, Wole
Spark, Muriel
Swift, Graham
Tartt, Donna
Theroux, Paul
Toibin, Colm
Tremain, Rose
Trevor, William
Tyler, Anne
Unsworth, Barry
her an old family trunk which she delivers to Omar's sister Amal, who lives in Cairo. As the tensions and
dangers in contemporary Egypt build to a threatening climax, Amal unpacks the trunk and unravels from
Anna's notebooks and diaries, the story of her love affair with Sharif and her love affair with Egypt a
hundred years ago.
Isara
Soyinka introduces his family and acquaintances, and shows how traditions are reshaped to fit modern
times. ``This semi-fictionalized, multigenerational family saga by the Nigerian novelist-poet-dramatist
Nobel laureate is rich with the sights, sounds and textures of his native land under colonial rule,'' .
The Finishing School (1)
Passionately determined to write his novel whilst running College Sunrise, a finishing school for both
sexes and mixed nationalities, Rowland Mahler is assisted by his wife, Nina Parker. When a 17-year-old
pupil's own novel takes shape while his own flounders, Rowland becomes increasingly obsessed.
Waterland
Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted
narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness,
the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.
Out of this World
A novel about a disturbed aerial photographer whose career is terminated by the death of his father in a
terrorist attack and the end of his marriage. His daughter is left to try and reconcile the fragments of her
life.
Last Orders
This novel follows four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, who meet to carry out his last
wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea.
The Light of Day
Sarah is in prison. Every fortnight she is visited by George, the private eye she employed to observe the
final stage of her husband's affair. The visits - and the days between - lead George back into Sarah's
past and into events he can picture only too well.
The Secret History (3)
The narrator of this story is a boy who leaves California to attend a college in New England. He falls in
with a group of students of Ancient Greek. Four of their number work themselves into a trance-like
condition one night, and murder a local farmer. Bunny then tries to blackmail the others.
The Mosquito Coast
Abominating the cops, crooks, scavengers and funny-bunnies of the twentieth century, he abandons
civilization and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, quixotic genius keeps
them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable
darkness and terror.
The Blackwater Lightship
Helen's brother is dying, and with two of his friends she waits for the end in her grandmother's crumbling
old house. Her mother and grandmother, after years of strife have come to an uneasy peace. The six of
them, from different generations and beliefs, are forced to come to terms with each other.
The Master
In 1895 Henry James's play "Guy Domville" failed on the London stage. The hapless James had hoped
to make a fortune but instead moved to Rye in Sussex. There he was watchful and witty, relishing
England whilst simultaneously regretting the New England he had left far behind.
Sacred Country
This novel begins in rural East Anglia in 1952. At the age of six, Mary Ward has the revelation that she is
in fact, someone else and will grow up to be a man eventually. One, tragic, ineradicable belief alters a life
in ways unimaginable to the rest of humanity, safe within fixed genders.
Felicia’s Journey
Young and pregnant, Felicia leaves her Irish hometown to search for her boyfriend in the English
Midlands, only to fall in with the obese fiftyish Mr. Hilditch.
The Story of Lucy Gault
Captain Gault has decided that his family must leave Lahardane. They are after all Protestants living in
the big house in rural Cork, and the country is in turmoil. It is 1921. But 8-year-old Lucy can't bear to
leave the seashore, the old house, the woods - so she hatches a plan. It is then that the calamity
happens - an accident almost, but so vicious in its consequences that it blights the lives of the Gaults for
years to come.
Other People’s Worlds
An attractive and polite young actor helps with the gardening in the charming home of his wife to be. The
setting is very English and very tranquil, at least for a while. Through the elderly eyes of the bride's
mother, certain perceptions lead to apprehensions. In a short period of time, with no one to share her
concerns, the groom begins to take on sinister qualities, and the older woman feels instinctive hatred.
The Accidental Tourist
How does a man addicted to routine - a man who flosses his teeth before love-making - cope with the
chaos of everyday life? Macon's attempts to do so are tragically and comically undone.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Pearl Tull is the matriarchal head of the Tull family since being abandoned by her husband Beck 35
years ago. She was left to bring up their three children.
Sacred Hunger (3)
Through the story of an 18th century slave ship, this novel explores moral choices, the corruptions of
greed and material gain, and men's behaviour "in extremis". It also articulates current concerns of
corruption and distress.
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Morality Play
It is the late-14th century, a time beset by war and plague. Nicholas Barber, a young cleric, abandons his
post in the church and joins a troupe of travelling performers. The players re-enact the murder of a young
boy, but as they rehearse they discover the truth has yet to be revealed.
Updike, John
Walker, Alice
Waller, Robert
James
Walsh, Jill Paton
Waters, Sarah
Weldon, Fay
Welsh, Irvine
White, Patrick
Winterson,
Jeanette
Rabbit is Rich
The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit
Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer
Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are
lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides
with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless, Harry Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy
life at last - until his son, Nelson, returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his
lot.
The Witches of Eastwick
The air of Eastwick breeds witches - women whose longings can stir up thunderstorms and fracture
domestic peace. Jane, Alexandra and Sukie, divorced and dangerous, have formed a coven. Into the
void of Eastwick breezes Darryl Van Home, a charismatic magus of a man who entrances the trio.
The Color Purple
The lives of two sisters--Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a southern woman married to a man
she hates--are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years.
The Bridges of Madison Country (1)
When Robert Kincaid drives through the heat and dust of an Iowa summer and turns into Francesca
Johnson's farm lane looking for directions, the world-class photographer and the Iowa farm wife are
joined in an experience of uncommon truth and stunning beauty that will haunt them forever.
Knowledge of Angels
The nature of faith is explored in a spiritual fable, set in the pre-Reformation Mediterranean, about what
happens when a stranger proclaims himself to be an atheist and cardinal prince Severo must decide
whether to kill him for heresy or acquit him for ignorance.
Fingersmith (3)
Set in a den of thieves in 1860's London, this novel focuses on Susan, a pickpocket, who is persuaded
by her cohorts to pose as a lady's maid and infiltrate the household of Maud, a young heiress in
possession of a large inheritance.
Affinity
Following her father's death, Margaret Prior pursues some "good work" with the lady criminals of one of
London's most notorious gaols. Drawn to one of the prisons more unlikely inmates - imprisoned
spiritualist Selina Dawes - she finds herself dabbling in a world of spirits and seances.
The President’s Child
A chilling tale that interweaves the post-Watergate world of American politics and the way in which our
past indiscretions inevitably catch up with us. Isabel Acre's journey through life has taken her from the
Australian outback via the beds and alleys of Fleet Street and the seamier side of Washington high life to
a comfortable home in London, a reputation as a serious journalist, and a husband in the new choresharing, child-rearing mould. Suddenly, however, the past which Isabel had thought safely behind her
becomes the source of actual physical danger. With frightening ease, the worlds of political intrigue and
murderous conspiracy intrude into the cosiness of her domestic life. Whom can she trust? Man? When
she reveals to her husband that she long ago had an affair with a young American senator, a man who is
now challenging for the Presidential nomination itself, and that her son is the love-child of that affair,
even she cannot foresee the consequences. Love got her into the predicament in which she finds
herself; but can love now get her out of it?
The Life and Loves of a She-devil
Ruth Pratchett discovers her husband is having a passsionate affair with romantic novelist, Mary Fisher,
and is so seized by envy that she embarks on a course of destruction which brings her an amazing
reward and those around her their just deserts.
The Cloning of Joanna May
A novel about split personality, about the components of the self and genetic engineering. It tells the fate
of Joanna May, who at the age of 60 discovers that she has been cloned and there are in fact four other
versions of herself in existence.
Darcy’s Utopia
Two journalists, Hugo Vansitart and Valerie Jones, meet while interviewing Eleanor Darcy, the notorious
wife of the former economic adviser to the Cabinet. Falling in love, they hole up together in a hotel to
write their pieces, but Eleanor's view of utopia seems to affect them both strangely
Trainspotting
Trainspotting is the novel that first launched Irvine Welsh's spectacular career-an authentic, unrelenting,
and strangely exhilarating episodic group portrait of blasted lives.Rents, Sick Boy, Mother Superior,
Swanney, Spuds, and Seeker are as unforgettable a clutch of junkies, rude boys, and psychos as
readers will ever encounter.
Flaws in the Glass
A self - portrait of the writer
Oranges Are not the Only Fruit (1)
This is the story of Jeanette, adopted by working-class evangelists in the North of England, in the 1960's.
Brought up to preach the gospel alongside such spiritual giants as Testifying Elsie and Pastor Spratt,
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Winton, Tim
Wolfe, Tom
Jeanette is destined for the missionary field, but her high success rate of converts turns into a
charismatic encounter with one girl in particular. Love and sex were not scheduled into her timetable, but
at 16, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves.
Written on the Body (1)
It's a simple story; love found, love lost, love found again - maybe. The unnamed narrator falls for a
married woman called Louise. Louise leaves her husband but when she finds she has cancer, she
leaves her new lover too. Written on the Body is a journey of self-discovery made through the metaphors
of desire and disease.
The Riders
Fred Scully leaves Australia to carve a new life for his family in Ireland. He and his wife, Jennifer, buy an
old cottage in Ireland and Scully works to make it habitable whilst waiting for Jennifer and their daughter
to join him. But at the airport, only his daughter steps off the plane.
Dirt Music
Georgie Jutland is a mess. At 40, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with
a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Then a dangerous
element enters her life - Luther Fox. Their unlikely alliance is set in Western Australia.
The Bonfire of the Vanities (3)
Sherman McCoy, Wall Street wunderkind, seems to have it all; a salary like a telephone number, a home
on Park Avenue, a beautiful wife and child, a mistress, a Mercedes. He is a Master of the Universel But
then he gets lost one dark night in the Bronx, and his mercedes hits something. That something turns out
to be Henry Lamb, a young black man who is now in a coma; for Sherman meanwhile, everything is
about to unravel so fast he will hardly have time to change his thousand dollar suit...
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