Best of
British-Literature

1946

Doreen


Barbara Noble - 1946
    Describes the mind of a child torn between her mother, whom she leaves behind in London, and the couple who take her in.

The Four Graces


D.E. Stevenson - 1946
    Stevenson Mr. Grace is vicar of a country parish in World War II England. Blessed with four grown-up daughters, three of whom live at home, he has constant help tending to his regular duties and responsibilities toward the war effort. Liz, Sal, and Tilly Grace have more than enough to keep them busy, but their responsibilities are put on hold when they're tempted with potential suitors. Reminiscent of Little Women, The Four Graces showcases Stevenson's talent for capturing love, family, and the humor and delight found in everyday life.

Bright Day


J.B. Priestley - 1946
    Priestley was especially fond of this novel of his: "I am not one for favourites," he wrote in the introduction to the Everyman edition, "and I have always been irritated by questions about my favourite this, that and the other. But if I have a favourite among my novels, it is Bright Day, which I wrote towards the end of the war."The novel was written towards the end of World War II. JBP disclaimed any autobiographical roots in the work, but it is nontheless resonent with his early youth and coincided with JBP's recoil from the commercial film world. Bright Day was the only serious novel that he wrote in the first person.Gregory Dawson, the novel's hero, is a middle-aged film script writer who goes off to Cornwall to complete a script. At his hotel he spots Lord and Lady Harndean, and realizes that they are the Malcolm and Eleanor Nixey he knew when he worked as a clerk in a Bruddersford wool firm. They represent the beginning of the break-up of the bright day which had preceded the year 1914, and thus the story starts to unfold...Vincent Brome, one of JBP's biographers, wrote: "Bright Day is one of Priestley's two most important and successful novels. The other is Angel Pavement."

Miss Ranskill Comes Home


Barbara Bower - 1946
    She lives for three years on a desert island before being rescued by a destroyer in 1943. When she returns to England it seems to her to have gone mad: she cannot buy clothes without 'coupons', and she is considered uncivilised if she walks barefoot or is late for meals.

Britannia Mews


Margery Sharp - 1946
    The heroine of this book is Adelaide Culver, forthright, independent; irresistible to Henry, with whom she went to live in the Mews when it was a slum; indispensable to Gilbert, for whom she brought fame and fortune to the Mews, and to themselves.

The King's General


Daphne du Maurier - 1946
    Set in the seventeenth century, it tells the story of a country and a family riven by war, and features one of fiction's most original heroines.Honor Harris is only eighteen when she first meets Richard Grenvile, proud, reckless - and utterly captivating. But following a riding accident, Honor must reconcile herself to a life alone. As Richard rises through the ranks of the army, marries and makes enemies, Honor remains true to himAs the English Civil war is waged across the country, Richard rises through the ranks of the army, marries and makes enemies, and Honor remains true to him, and finally discovers the secret of Menabilly.Decades later, an undaunted Sir Richard, now a general serving King Charles I, finds her. Finally they can share their passion in the ruins of her family's great estate on the storm-tossed Cornish coast-one last time before being torn apart, never to embrace again.

The River


Rumer Godden - 1946
    Her sister is no longer a playmate, her brother is still a child. The comforting rhythm of her Indian childhood - the noise of the jute works, the festivals that accompany each season and the eternal ebb and flow of the river - is about to be shattered.

This Side of Innocence


Taylor Caldwell - 1946
    Beautiful Amalie Maxwell, low-born, but driven by limitless desires, came to Riversend and instantly touched off a holocaust of passion, hatred and intrigue that blazed through three generations of the lordly Lindseys...

Jane's Country Year


Malcolm Saville - 1946
    The account is divided into months, recounting her adventures in discovering the countryside. Beautifully illustrated throughout.

Neither Man Nor Dog


Gerald Kersh - 1946
    Kersh (1911-1968) published more than thirty books, including the noir classic Night and the City (1938) and Fowlers End (1957), which Anthony Burgess called "one of the great comic novels of the century," as well as hundreds of short stories which were once ubiquitous in British and American magazines. But though he has been championed by Angela Carter, Harlan Ellison, Ian Fleming, Michael Moorcock and others, Kersh has undeservedly fallen into neglect since his death. This is the first-ever reprint of Neither Man Nor Dog (1946), one of the author’s scarcest volumes. Kersh’s novels Fowlers End and The Great Wash and the short story collections Nightshade and Damnations, On an Odd Note, and Clock Without Hands are also available from Valancourt.CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS“[B]rutal but highly talented ... at least one [story] is ... a little masterpiece, and all of them possess the virtue of being highly readable.” – J.D. Beresford, The Guardian “[E]xplosive with violence . . . The best of them are very good. The unfailing fertility of his imagination is indeed to be wondered at . . . For entertainment of a strong kind, Mr. Kersh would be hard to beat.” – Times Literary Supplement “Kersh tells a story, as such, rather better than anybody else.” – Pamela Hansford Johnson, Daily Telegraph

The Wind Cannot Read


Richard Mason - 1946
    They began a romance but she is regarded as the enemy and she is not accepted by his countrymen. Later, he is captured by the Japanese army when he is patrolling with a brigadier and a Indian driver in a zone controlled by the Japanese. He escapes and returns to his own lines, only to discover that his fiancée has fallen perilously ill...

Confessions of a Book Reviewer


George Orwell - 1946
    . . He is a man of 35, but looks 50. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if only his pair were not chronically lost.”http://www.newstatesman.com/books/200...

Bernard Shaw


Eric Bentley - 1946
    When it arrived in the late 1940's, this book was hailed by the great poet William Carlos Williams as "the best treatise on contemporary manners I think I have ever read. I was fascinated and rewarded in the depths of my soul." Even Shaw himself described the book as "the best critical description of my public activities I have yet come across."

Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers


Robert Louis Stevenson - 1946
    0584 (purple)

Dickens, Dali and Others


George Orwell - 1946
    Included are such classics as "Charles Dickens," "The Art of Donald McGill," "Boys' Weeklies," "Raffles and Miss Blandish," and "Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali."Contents:Charles DickensBoys' WeekliesWells, Hitler and the World StateThe Art of Donald McGillRudyard KiplingW.B. YeatsBenefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador DaliArthur KoestlerRaffles and Miss BlandishIn Defence of P.G. Wodehouse

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands


Gerald Butler - 1946