Best of
Fiction

1934

The Ways of White Folks


Langston Hughes - 1934
    In it, he shares acrid and poignant stories of blacks colliding--sometimes humorously, but often tragically--with whites throughout the 1920s and 1930s.The book consists of fourteen moving stories:"Cora Unashamed""Slave on the Block""Home""Passing""A Good Job Gone""Rejuvenation Through Joy""The Blues I'm Playing""Red-Headed Baby""Poor Little Black Fellow""Little Dog""Berry""Mother and Child""One Christmas Eve""Father and Son"

I, Claudius/Claudius the God


Robert Graves - 1934
    Then he found himself Emperor.From the great days of Augustus and the cruelties of Tiberius to the deified insanity of Caligula, he records a story breathtaking in its murderousness, greed and folly. Throughout the swings of fortune, his own disastrous love affair with the depraved Messalina and surprisingly successful reign, his voice sometimes puzzled, sometimes rueful, always sane, speaks to us across the centuries in two great, classic historical novels.

I, Claudius


Robert Graves - 1934
    Into the 'autobiography' of Clau-Clau-Claudius, the pitiful stammerer who was destined to become Emperor in spite of himself, Graves packs the everlasting intrigues, the depravity, the bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, soon to culminate in the deified insanity of Caligula.I, Claudius and its sequel, Claudius the God, are among the most celebrated, as well the most gripping historical novels ever written.Cover illustration: Brian Pike

Lust for Life


Irving Stone - 1934
    "Vincent is not dead. He will never die. His love, his genius, the great beauty he has created will go on forever, enriching the world... He was a colossus... a great painter... a great philosopher... a martyr to his love of art. "Walking down the streets of Paris the young Vincent Van Gogh didn't feel like he belonged. Battling poverty, repeated heartbreak and familial obligation, Van Gogh was a man plagued by his own creative urge but with no outlet to express it. Until the day he picked up a paintbrush.Written with raw insight and emotion, follow the artist through his tormented life, struggling against critical discouragement and mental turmoil and bare witness to his creative journey from a struggling artist to one of the world's most celebrated artists.

The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death


H.P. Lovecraft - 1934
    P. Lovecraft, the master of twentieth-century horror, including some of his most fantastic tales:THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SARNATH--Hate, genocide, and a deadly curse.THE NAMELESS CITY--Death lies beneath the shifting sands, in a story linking the Dream Cycle with the legendary Cthulhu Mythos.THE CATS OF ULTHAR--In Ulthar, no man may kill a cat...and woe unto any who tries.THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH--The epic nightmare adventure with tendrils stretching throughout the entire Dream Cycle.AND TWENTY MORE TALES OF SURREAL TERROR

The Jeeves Omnibus Vol. 5: Much Obliged, Jeeves / Aunts Aren't Gentlemen and the short stories / Extricating Young Gussie / Jeeves Makes An Omelette / Jeeves and the Greasy Bird


P.G. Wodehouse - 1934
    In these delightful pages you will encounter all the stalwarts who have made the Jeeves novels and short stories the pinnacle of English humour, from Aunts Agatha and Dahlia to Roderick Spode, Tuppy Glossop, Madeline Bassett, Oofy Prosser and Anatole the Chef. At the end even Augustus the cat has come to be much obliged to Jeeves. This volume contains Much Obliged, Jeeves, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen and the short stories Extricating Young Gussie, Jeeves Makes An Omelette and Jeeves and the Greasy Bird.

Dawn's Early Light


Elswyth Thane - 1934
    Dawn’s Early Light is the first novel in the series.            In it, Colonial Williamsburg comes alive. Thane centers her novel around four major characters: the Aristrocratic St. John Sprague, who becomes George Washington’s aide; Regina Greensleeves, a Virginia beauty spoiled by a season in London; Julian Day, a young schoolmaster who arrives from England on the eve of the war and initially thinks of himself as a Tory; and Tibby Mawes, one of his less fortunate pupils, saddled with an alcoholic father and an indigent mother.            But we also see Washington, Jefferson, Lafayette, Greene, Patrick Henry, Francis Marion, and the rest of that brilliant galaxy playing their roles not as historical figures but as men. We see de Kalb’s gallant death under a cavalry charge at Camden. We penetrate to the swamp-encircled camp which was Marion’s stronghold on the Peedee. We watch the cat-and-mouse game between Cornwallis and Lafayette, which ended in Cornwallis’s unlucky stand at Yorktown.            Dawn’s Early Light is the human story behind our first war for liberty, and of the men and women loving and laughing through it to the dawn of a better world.

Independent People


Halldór Laxness - 1934
    Although it is set in the early twentieth century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is simply a masterpiece

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce and Selected Stories


James M. Cain - 1934
    Cain’s indelible hallmarks.The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain’s first novel–the subject of an obscenity trial in Boston, the inspiration for Camus’s The Stranger–is the fever-pitched tale of a drifter who stumbles into a job, into an erotic obsession, and into a murder. Double Indemnity–which followed Postman so quickly, Cain’s readers hardly had a chance to catch their breath–is a tersely narrated story of blind passion, duplicity, and, of course, murder. Mildred Pierce, a work of acute psychological observation and devastating emotional violence, is the tale of a woman with a taste for shiftless men and an unreasoned devotion to her monstrous daughter. All three novels were immortalized in classic Hollywood films. Also included here are five masterful stories–“Pastorale,” “The Baby in the Icebox,” “Dead Man,” “Brush Fire,” “The Girl in the Storm”–that have been out of print for decades.

Kornél Esti


Dezső Kosztolányi - 1934
    Here is a novel which inquires: What if your id (loyally keeping your name) decides to strike out on its own, cuts a disreputable swath through the world, and then sends home to you all its unpaid bills and ruined maidens? And then: What if you and your alter ego decide to write a book together?

They Were Counted


Miklós Bánffy - 1934
    Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament, and the luxury of life in Budapest provide the backdrop for this gripping, prescient novel, forming a chilling indictment of upper-class frivolity and political folly, in which good manners cloak indifference and brutality. Abady becomes aware of the plight of a group of Romanian mountain peasants and champions their cause, while Gyeroffy dissipates his resources at the gaming tables, mirroring the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself. The first book in a trilogy published before World War II, it was rediscovered after the fall of Communism in Hungary and this edition contains a new foreword.

H.G. Wells: Seven Novels


H.G. Wells - 1934
    G. Wells, along with Jules Verne, is credited with inventing science fiction. This new volume collects Wells' best-loved and most critically acclaimed works. In each, the author grounds his fantastical imagination in scientific fact and conjecture while lacing his narrative with vibrant action, not merely to tell a “ripping yarn,” but to offer a biting critique on the world around him. “The strength of Mr. Wells,” wrote Arnold Bennett, “lies in the fact that he is not only a scientist, but a most talented student of character, especially quaint character. He will not only ingeniously describe for you a scientific miracle, but he will set down that miracle in the midst of a country village, sketching with excellent humor the inn-landlady, the blacksmith, the chemist’s apprentice, the doctor, and all the other persons whom the miracle affects.”

Rainbow Cottage


Grace Livingston Hill - 1934
    So she is totally unprepared for her spiteful and vindictive cousin Jacqueline, who does all she can to humiliate Sheila and drive her away from her newfound family!But one of Jacqueline's schemes goes too far, and suddenly Sheila must fight for her very life . . .

Miss Buncle's Book


D.E. Stevenson - 1934
    Times are harsh, and Barbara's bank account has seen better days. Stumped for ideas, Barbara draws inspiration from fellow residents of her quaint English village, writing a revealing novel that features the townsfolk as characters. The smashing bestseller is published under the pseudonym John Smith, which is a good thing because villagers recognize the truth. But what really turns her world around is when events in real life start mimicking events in the book. Funny, charming, and insightful, this novel reveals what happens when people see themselves through someone else's eyes.

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories


William Saroyan - 1934
    One of the first American writers to describe the immigrant experience in the U.S., Saroyan created characters who were Armenians, Jews, Chinese, Poles, Africans, and the Irish. The title story touchingly portrays the thoughts of a very young writer, dying of starvation. All of the tales were written during the great depression and reflect, through pathos and humor, the mood of the nation in one of its greatest times of want.

The Christmas Bride


Grace Livingston Hill - 1934
    He races to the woman's aid and vows to help her overcome her desperate circumstances. Soon though, he realizes that his interest in Margaret is more than that of a benefactor. Captivated by her beauty and indomitable spirit, Greg knows he's falling in love. But before he can share his feelings with Margaret, she disappears without a trace!

Марія


Улас Самчук - 1934
    A gripping story about a village woman’s loves, losses, and daily toil, from the emancipation of serfs in 1861 to one of the most tragic periods in human history– the 1932-33 Holodomor, or Famine-Genocide

Soul


Andrei Platonov - 1934
    In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov’s vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual shock of revolution. For a new generation of innovative post-Soviet Russian writers he figures as a daring explorer of word and world, the master of what has been called “alternative realism.” Depicting a devastated world that is both terrifying and sublime, Platonov is, without doubt, a universal writer who is as solitary and haunting as Kafka.This volume gathers eight works that show Platonov at his tenderest, warmest, and subtlest. Among them are “The Return,” about an officer’s difficult homecoming at the end of World War II, described by Penelope Fitzgerald as one of “three great works of Russian literature of the millennium”; “The River Potudan,” a moving account of a troubled marriage; and the title novella, the extraordinary tale of a young man unexpectedly transformed by his return to his Asian birthplace, where he finds his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech.This prizewinning English translation is the first to be based on the newly available uncensored texts of Platonov’s short fiction.

The New York Stories of Edith Wharton


Edith Wharton - 1934
    Her Manhattan is a city of well-appointed drawing rooms, hansoms and broughams, all-night cotillions, and resplendent Fifth Avenue flats. Bishops’ nieces mingle with bachelor industrialists; respectable wives turn into excellent mistresses. All are governed by a code of behavior as rigid as it is precarious. What fascinates Wharton are the points of weakness in the structure of Old New York: the artists and writers at its fringes, the free-love advocates testing its limits, the widows and divorcées struggling to hold their own.The New York Stories of Edith Wharton gathers twenty stories of the city, written over the course of Wharton’s career. From her first published story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” to one of her last and most celebrated, “Roman Fever,” this new collection charts the growth of an American master and enriches our understanding of the central themes of her work, among them the meaning of marriage, the struggle for artistic integrity, the bonds between parent and child, and the plight of the aged. Illuminated by Roxana Robinson’s Introduction, these stories showcase Wharton’s astonishing insight into the turbulent inner lives of the men and women caught up in a rapidly changing society.

Winged Victory


V.M. Yeates - 1934
    Combat, loneliness, fatigue, fear, comradeship, women, excitement - all are built into a vigorous and authentic structure by one of the most valiant pilots of the then Royal Flying Corps.

Roman Fever and Other Stories


Edith Wharton - 1934
    These short works display Wharton's talent as a satirist "skilled at dissecting the elements of emotional subtleties, moral ambiguities, and the implications of social constrictions" (Cythina Griffin Wolfe, from the Introduction).Roman fever (1934)Xingu (1911)The other two (1904)Souls belated (1899)The angel at the grave (1901)The last asset (1904)After Holbein (1928)Autres temps (1911)

They Knew Mr. Knight


Dorothy Whipple - 1934
    This book begins when he meets Mr Knight, a financier as crooked as any on the front pages of our newspapers nowadays; and tracks his and his family's swift climb and fall.

The Ransom


Grace Livingston Hill - 1934
    But the large elaborate mansion chosen by their deceased stepmother didn't really seem like home. And their father seemed different too--so tired, so weighed down. Christobel wondered if there was any way they could help him. Could they start over again and become a close, loving family?Slowly they learned to trust and love each other. Then, just when it seemed they were indeed becoming a real family, disaster struck! Randall--young, impetuous, Randall who was just beginning to understand what true manhood meant--was kidnapped. Would they be able to come up with the ransom? And would they be in time?

Harriet


Elizabeth Jenkins - 1934
    Elizabeth Jenkins's artistry, however, transforms the bare facts of this case from the annals of Victorian England's Old Bailey into an absolutely spine-chilling exploration of the depths of human depravity.

Mary Poppins


P.L. Travers - 1934
    Travers, the author featured in the major motion picture, Saving Mr. Banks. From the moment Mary Poppins arrives at Number Seventeen Cherry-Tree Lane, everyday life at the Banks house is forever changed. It all starts when Mary Poppins is blown by the east wind onto the doorstep of the Banks house. She becomes a most unusual nanny to Jane, Michael, and the twins. Who else but Mary Poppins can slide up banisters, pull an entire armchair out of an empty carpetbag, and make a dose of medicine taste like delicious lime-juice cordial? A day with Mary Poppins is a day of magic and make-believe come to life!

For Two Thousand Years


Mihail Sebastian - 1934
    Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and gambling, meeting revolutionaries, zealots, lovers and libertines, he adjusts his eyes to the darkness that falls over Europe, and threatens to destroy him. Mihail Sebastian's 1934 masterpiece, now translated into English for the first time, was written amid the anti-Semitism which would, by the end of the decade, force him out of his career and turn his friends and colleagues against him. For Two Thousand Years is a prescient, heart-wrenching chronicle of resilience and despair, broken layers of memory and the terrible forces of history.

Amorelle


Grace Livingston Hill - 1934
    Amorelle accepted, but as time passed she became more and more doubtful. Could they really be happy when George, for all his words of love, didn't seem to know or care about Amorelle's thoughts, beliefs, or innermost feelings?Then, as if in answer to her prayers for guidance, Amorelle unexpectedly found herself sharing a wonderful day with another man. A man who seemed to speak the language of her heart. Now she knew what true love could be--and what she must do. But was it too late to change her mind?

A Pin To See The Peepshow


F. Tennyson Jesse - 1934
    A Pin to See the Peepshow is a fictionalized account of the life of Edith Thompson, one of the three main players in the "Ilford murder" case of 1922.

Cain's Jawbone


E. Powys Mathers - 1934
    One hundred pages. Millions of possible combinations... but only one is correct. Can you solve Torquemada's murder mystery? In 1934, the Observer's cryptic crossword compiler, Edward Powys Mathers (aka Torquemada), released a novel that was simultaneously a murder mystery and the most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle ever written. The pages have been printed in an entirely haphazard order, but it is possible - through logic and intelligent reading - to sort the pages into the only correct order, revealing six murder victims and their respective murderers. Only two puzzlers have ever solved the mystery of Cain's Jawbone: do you have what it takes to join their ranks? Please note: this puzzle is extremely difficult and not for the faint-hearted.NB This is a new edition of the last 100-page puzzle in Torquemada's 1934 "The Torquemada Puzzle Book". It is a limited edition boxed set in which the pages are printed on cards to facilitate solving.

Novellas and Other Writings: Madame de Treymes / Ethan Frome / Summer / Old New York / The Mother’s Recompense / A Backward Glance


Edith Wharton - 1934
    Together they represent nearly a quarter century in the productive life of one of the most accomplished and admired of American writers.Madame de Treymes (1907) is set in fashionable Paris society, where a once free-spirited American woman is trying to extricate herself, with the help of a fellow countryman, from her marriage to an aristocratic Frenchman. Wharton’s keen sense of the American-European contrast shows Paris society as stifling as life in any New England village.Such a village is the scene of Ethan Frome (1911), a tale of marital entrapment even more relentless. Ethan’s unhappy marriage and his desperate love for his wife’s cousin Mattie drive him to an act of shattering violence. The magnificent coda is a classic of American realistic fiction.Set in the same region of the Berkshires, Wharton called Summer (1917) “the Hot Ethan.” It is the story of a young woman’s initiation into the intricate sexual and social mores of a small town—and her revolt against them. The complex relationship between Lawyer Royall and his ward, Charity, is one of Wharton’s most subtle and evocative.Observations of the American scene continue in the four novellas that make up Old New York (1924). They take us from the 1840s of “False Dawn,” where a young man is ostracized for his avant garde taste in art, to the 1870s of “New Year’s Day,” where a domestic scandal unfolds. “The Spark” tells of a seemingly ordinary socialite who nevertheless was touched by his Civil War experiences. “The Old Maid,” a story of illegitimacy in which a mother refuses to claim her parental rights so her daughter might have advantages she cannot offer, is one of Wharton’s most popular.The poignancies of parenthood are also the theme of The Mother’s Recompense (1925). Kate Clephane, a divorced woman who has been living in Europe, returns to New York to find her former lover engaged to her daughter—and to face the emotional tangles of this unusual triangle. Wharton also explores here the changes that have taken place in New York since World War I.The fullest portraits of New York are saved for A Backward Glance (1934), one of the most compelling of American autobiographies. It is a fascinating record of Wharton’s literary career, of her friendships (including a loving appreciation of Henry James), as well as her thoughts on writing.Another perspective is offered in “Life and I,” an autobiographical fragment that shows a younger Wharton writing with great frankness about her early life. It is published here for the first time.

Jonah's Gourd Vine


Zora Neale Hurston - 1934
    Originally published in 1934, it was praised by Carl Sandburg as "a bold and beautiful book, many a page priceless and unforgettable."

Folk and Fairy Tales (Childcraft, Volume 3)


Childcraft International - 1934
    

Fer-de-Lance


Rex Stout - 1934
    When someone makes a present of one to Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin knows he's getting dreadfully close to solving the devilishly clever murders of an immigrant and a college president. As for Wolfe, he's playing snake charmer in a case with more twists than an anaconda -- whistling a seductive tune he hopes will catch a killer who's still got poison in his heart.

The Road To Nowhere


Maurice Walsh - 1934
    

We Ride the Gale


Emilie Loring - 1934
    The change to the country will give the child a chance at health which Sonia, who has lost her position in an architect's office, cannot provide. Meanwhile, he will investigate the truth of the claim that Ruby Carson was legally married to Guy. Michael, after their second meeting, realizes that he is in love with Sonia. She, bitterly resenting his brother's desertion of her sister, detests any man whose name is Farr.

Butcher's Broom


Neil M. Gunn - 1934
    Gunn captures the spirit of Highland culture, the sense of community and tradition, in a manner that speaks to our own time.At the centre of the novel is Dark Mairi who embodies what is most vital and lasting in mankind, whose values encapsulate what was lost in Scotland to make way for progress while her land was cleared to make way for wintering sheep.The weaving of traditional ballads with the lives of Gunn's characters evokes the community that must be destroyed. Elie lost among strangers with her fatherless child while Seonaid defies the invaders, fighting them from the roof of her croft. This is among the most moving of Gunn's works and establishes the belief in a transcendent spirituality that would be so dominant in his later work.

With Love and Irony


Lin Yutang - 1934
    

The Pendragon Legend


Antal Szerb - 1934
    Invited to the family seat--Pendragon Castle in North Wales--Batky receives a mysterious phone call warning him not to go; but he does and finds himself in a bizarre world of mysticism, romance, animal experimentation, and planned murder. His quest to solve the central mystery takes him down strange byways--old libraries and warehouse cellars, Welsh mountains, and underground tombs.

When Worlds Collide / After Worlds Collide


Philip Wylie - 1934
    How does mankind react knowing of the imminent destruction of the Earth, before, during and after.

Prae: Vol. 1


Miklós Szentkuthy - 1934
    With no traditional narration and no psychologically motivated characters, in playing with voices, temporality, and events, while fiction, Prae is more what Northrop Frye calls an anatomy (à la Lucian, Rabelais, & Burton) or Menippean satire: the basic concern of the book is intellectual, its pervading mood is that of a comedy of ideas. As a virtual novel that preempts every possibility for its realization, it is a novel but only virtually so, a book which is actually a prae-paration for an unwritten (unwritable) novel. In this, it maintains the freedom and openness of its potentialities, indicative for instance in the Non-Prae diagonals, a series of passages that intercut the novel and continually fracture space and time to engage in what one of the figures of the book calls the culture of wordplay or dogmatic accidentalism. “The book’s title,” said Szentkuthy, “alludes to it being an overture. A multitude of thoughts, emotions, ideas, fantasies, and motifs that mill and churn as chimes, an overture to my subsequent oeuvre.”By challenging the then prevailing dogmas and conventions of prose writing, Szentkuthy was said to have created a new canon for himself but later derided as insignificant for supposedly not acquiring followers.Largely unread at the time, Prae eventually gained cult status and would be reprinted in 1980 and 2004. To some critics, the book is not only one of the representative experimental works of the early 20th century, but in its attempt to bring ‘impossible literature’ into being, it also presages the nouveau roman by almost 30 years. And in its rejection of sequentiality and celebration of narrative shuffling, long before Burroughs & Gysin, Prae enacts what is conceptually akin to the cut-up. Few of Szentkuthy’s contemporaries would reveal with equal bravura and audacity the new horizons that were opened up for narrative forms after the era of realism.In Frivolities & Confessions, Szentkuthy said that his goal with Prae was “to absorb the problems of modern philosophy and mathematics into modern fashion, love, and every manifestation of life.” Translated for the first time since its original publication in 1934, upon its 80th anniversary, this legendary and controversial Hungarian modernist novel is now at last available in English.

Island Magic


Elizabeth Goudge - 1934
    A magical island... And Two People Bewitched By Love....The Channel Islands were divided in allegiance between France and England. Of French blood, and yet subjects of Queen Victoria, the islanders were curious hybrid creatures. But now, in 1888, England is slowly stretching out her arms to them.Colin du Frocq is eight years old, and his dreams are of the sea that surrounds his home. By day he steals away and takes to the sea in any boat that is sailing. At night he lies in bed listening to the waves beating against the shore. Then one night, in a wild storm, a ship drives onto the nearby cliffs and a strange man enters Colin's life, changing Colin's course forever.A twist of fate brought Ranulph back to a springtime place that had forgotten him. A proud and beautiful woman offered him refuge, even though she did not understand why, as she trembled before his gaze.Now Ranulph could feel the spell of the Island twisting around him, binding him to the world of love and companionship he had rejected forever.A storm-wracked sea had brought him home. It was the magnificent fury of another storm that taught him the splendor of life and the power of love.

With Banners


Emilie Loring - 1934
    An elderly woman she had barely known had left her a beautiful mansion, and then she had met her new neighbor, the handsome, impetuous Mark Trent. She was young, lovely and in love--but why did Mark seem so cold? All too soon she found out. The mansion she thought was hers he claimed as his own. The will that had given it to her he called a fraud--and her a scheming thief. How could she prove him wrong when he was so sure he was right? How could she melt the hatred in his eyes when he saw the piece of paper that seemed to prove her guilty even beyond the shadow of a lover's doubt?

The Skull of the Waltzing Clown


Harry Stephen Keeler - 1934
    Neither did the man like him. In one of the glasses was a Hawaiian concoction which did strange things to men. 'Here's how!' As the drinks went down, each man thought he had outwitted the other."George Stannard later went to Chicago to meet his eccentric uncle, Simon Stannard, collector of old safes. In one of these safes had lain the weird secret of the skull of the waltzing clown."It is about that secret and the romance between its holder and Miss 'O Lily Sing Lee' that this new Keeler novel gyrates as dizzily as a sky-writing plane -- except that, at the end, all the strokes in the sky spell Plot, Mystery and Drama -- in that extraordinary Keeler way!

Lost Island


Barbara Newhall Follett - 1934
    Jane Carey, who is the protagonist, finds love, a deserted island, and struggles with civilization, and yet on her mind is always the iridescent merry nature. Lost Island is undoubtedly Follett's masterpiece in which she develops her themes of love, escape, nature worship, and takes the reader on a romantic adventure into her world.

Good-Bye, Mr. Chips


James Hilton - 1934
    Hilton's classic story of an English schoolmaster.Mr. Chipping, the classics master at Brookfield School since 1870, takes readers on a beguiling journey through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sometimes Chips, as he is affectionately known, is an old man who dreams by the fire; then he's a difficult young taskmaster schooling his students, or a middle-aged man encountering the lovely Katherine, whose "new woman" opinions work far-reaching changes in him. As succeeding generations of boys march onward through Chips' mind, Hilton's narrative remains masterful. He seamlessly interweaves a poignant love story with the jokes and eccentricities of English public school life, while also chronicling a new, uncertain world full of conflict and upheaval that extends far beyond the turrets of Brookfield.

Lumberjack


Stephen W. Meader - 1934
    He developed into a real lumberjack and had plenty of adventures, fighting a forest fire and tracking down the man who started it.“A stirring tale, full of the atmosphere of the great northern forests.”----Hartford Courant.“This is the sort of book, rare today, which is equally enthralling to adults and children. Dan Garland is a very real and very human boy, and his adventures and experiences are completely absorbing. This really is a grand book and one it would not be possible to recommend too highly.”----New York Herald Tribune.

Golden Days: Further Leaves from Mrs. Tim's Journal


D.E. Stevenson - 1934
    Mrs. Tim goes to the Highlands of Scotland and is involved in a plot to rescue a naval officer from the toils of a siren; but, alas, the best laid plans 'gang aft agley'. The characters are skillfully drawn, from the fierce Mrs. London with her heart of gold to the garrulous Mrs. Falconer who always gets things wrong and whose muddled stories of her girlhood make excruciatingly funny reading. The house party amuses itself with picnics and fishing excursions and is suitably thrilled by the flourishing ancestral feud of two rival clans, which has its origin in the dim past. Mrs. Tim observes her fellow men and women with sympathy and humor and records her observations with a racy pen. The result is an attractive and witty story of an unusual character.

Captain Nicholas


Hugh Walpole - 1934
    This novel is a study of human conflict within a conventional family of the 1930's, tested by the invasion of ideas in the person of the family's black sheep, Captain Nicholas. A sequel to The Green Mirror, the character of Captain Nicholas is the most original of all Walpole's creation.

Jane, Stewardess of the Air Lines


Ruthe S. Wheeler - 1934
    

Mary Peters


Mary Ellen Chase - 1934
    The novel is filled with wonderful details of the natural world, both at sea and on land. It also captures the pervasive changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution as coastal people stood on the brink of a new world, slowly turning from the glorious era of sail to serving the incoming tide of wealthy summer vacationers.

Animal Friends and Adventures (Childcraft, Volume 4)


Childcraft International - 1934
    

Beyond the Desert


Eugene Manlove Rhodes - 1934
    

The Bunking of Billy Bunter


Frank Richards - 1934
    

The Cats-Paw


Clarence Budington Kelland - 1934
    

Tiger Girl


Gordon Casserly - 1934
    Casserly wrote other adventure novels with little or mild fantasy ( The Monkey God, The Elephant God, and The Jungle Girl .). This title is by far the weirdest and with strong supernatural content.

Finnley Wren


Philip Wylie - 1934
    An innovative, uproarious sentimental education, this novel marries the mordant satire of Wylie’s Generation of Vipers to what might in other hands have been an ordinary story of frustrated ambition and frustrated love, turning forty-eight hours’ worth of drunken conversation into an emotional and typographical explosion.Philip Wylie (1902–1971) published more than forty books (both fiction and nonfiction), essays, and short stories in his lifetime. A member of the founding staff of the New Yorker, his essays and stories regularly appeared throughout the ’40s and ’50s in Vanity Fair, Redbook, the Saturday Evening Post, and Cosmopolitan.[Source: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/product/...]

One Stayed At Welcome


Maud Hart Lovelace - 1934
    One Stayed At Welcome opens with the founding of Welcome by two young men, Larry and Dan, who have made a lasting friendship of the trek from the East. Their little town grows rapidly and within two years many new faces are to be found on the shores of Lake Welcome. Among the varied newcomers is an old school teacher and his daughter Lillie, whom Dan and Larry remember as a little girl playing on the decks of a Mississippi river steamer. Now she is a matured young woman, and before a winter has passed both boys are in love with her. Soon their hidden jealousy flames up in a youthful quarrel and Welcome rocks with the news that Dan and Larry are no longer sharing their joint claim. Their quarrel reaches its climax the night of a great prairie fire, and with it comes a new friendship through mutual self-sacrifice." (Summary courtesy of the publisher)

Hundred Altars


Juliet Bredon - 1934
    A novel about the people of the little farming village of Hundred Altars, north of Peking/ Author's first novel.