Book picks similar to
Blindness by Henry Green
1001-books
1001
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fiction
The Heather Blazing
Colm Tóibín - 1992
Every summer the family stays in a beautiful house on the coast at Ballyconnigor. It is here, one summer, that Eamon reflects on his life as a judge.
Looking for the Possible Dance
A.L. Kennedy - 1993
A first novel which dissects the intricate difficulties of human relationships, from a Scotswoman's passionate attachment to her father and her more problematic involvement with her lover, to the wider social relations between pupil and teacher, employer and employee, individual and state.
The Case Worker
George Konrád - 1969
The daily routine of a man in charge of children at a state welfare organization and the demands that are made upon him are depicted in this novel set in present day Hungary.
Camilla
Frances Burney - 1796
The path of true love, however, is strewn with intrigue, contretemps and misunderstanding.An enormously popular eighteenth-century novel, Camilla is touched at many points by the advancing spirit of romanticism. As in Evelina, Fanny Burney weaves into her novel strands of light and dark, comic episodes and gothic shudders, and creates a pattern of social and moral dilemmas which emphasize and illuminate the gap between generations.
Felicia's Journey
William Trevor - 1994
She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with the fat, fiftyish, unfailingly reasonable Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to join the five other girls in his Memory Lane. But the strange, sad, terrifying tricks of chance unravel both his and Felicia's delusions in a story that will magnetize fans of Alfred Hitchcock and Ruth Rendell even as it resonates with William Trevor's own "impeccable strength and piercing profundity" (The Washington Post Book World).
Quartet
Jean Rhys - 1928
Alone, stranded in Paris after her Polish husband is jailed, Marya is befriended by an English couple who take her home with them. Slowly they overwhelm her with their passions as Marya drifts into an affair with the husband, an affair the wife seems strangely eager to promote. The husband demands, the wife fosters, and Marya is left - as always - to comfort herself.
The Lion of Flanders
Hendrik Conscience - 1838
It is generally regarded as the masterpiece of Conscience, which earned him the title "the man who taught his people to read".
In the Heart of the Seas
S.Y. Agnon - 1934
It combines elements of the supernatural and mystic with the story of their physical and spiritual adventures.
Life Is a Caravanserai
Emine Sevgi Özdamar - 1992
This is a women’s world: the mother, Fatma, nurtures her three children, with the grandmother Ayşe and the “aunties” of the neighbourhood, while Mustafa, the often unemployed father, recites Orhan Veli and drinks copious rakı, dreaming of building a larger family home. Here is the Turkey of the 1950s and early 1960s, with its political struggles, growing urbanisation, the Korean War, American comic books and the departure of the first wave of workers to Germany. The Anatolian grandparents carry with them their sagas of the war and the nascent Turkish Republic, enriched by wisdom, humour and village folklore. The author’s wonderful use of local narrative, storytelling, proverbs and prayers, and a prose that moves from the lyrical to gritty humour, re-creates this microcosm of neighbourhoods from a young girl’s intimate perspective. We follow her as she sits in school, visits relatives, dreams, listens to stories and experiments with early passions. Reality merges into mythological visions as, naïve, witty and explorative, she absorbs the colourful world around her.
Professor Martens' Departure
Jaan Kross - 1984
The character of Professor Martens is based on an actual official of the czarist reign, a distinguished Estonian jurist curiously reminiscent of Henry Kissinger.Faced with a dire financial crisis in Russia, Professor Martens orchestrates a major loan from the French government to stave off famine; as time passes, however, he realizes that he has managed to perpetuate a brutal regime that keeps its political prisoners in chains.This fictional memoir, written at the end of Martens’ life, finds him reliving his past and questioning the degree to which he has sacrificed himself to maintain a corrupt regime, one that ultimately disdains both him and his people. Considered an outsider by the czar’s adviser, Martens is nonetheless needed for his skills. Still, he is marginalized and kept in the shadows.Far more than just a political or philosophical novel, Professor Martens’ Departure is an astonishing reconstruction of czarist Russia.
The Safety Net
Heinrich Böll - 1979
The Tolm family, for example, abandons the most difficult problem to the enormously bloated police apparatus, depending on whether the individuals are more likely to belong to the suspects or the vulnerable or even to both categories. This increases compulsively, as the signs pile up, threatening a new stop. But Fritz Tolm achieves a new clarity.
Mercier and Camier
Samuel Beckett - 1970
While their travels are fraught with complications and intrigue, Mercier and Camier at least “did not remove from home, they had that good fortune.”
Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris
Paul Gallico - 1958
One day, when tidying Lady Dant's wardrobe, she comes across the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life - a Dior dress. In all the years of her drab and humble existence, she's never seen anything as magical as the dress before her and she's never wanted anything as much before. Determined to make her dream come true, Mrs Harris scrimps, saves and slaves away until one day, after three long, uncomplaining years, she finally has enough money to go to Paris. When she arrives at the House of Dior, Mrs Harris has little idea of how her life is about to be turned upside down and how many other lives she will transform forever. Always kind, always cheery and always winsome, the indomitable Mrs Harris takes Paris by storm and learns one of life's greatest lessons along the way. This treasure from the 1950s introduces the irrepressible Mrs Harris, part charlady, part fairy-godmother, whose adventures take her from her humble London roots to the heights of glamour.
Hell
Henri Barbusse - 1908
Alternately voyeur and seer, he obsessively studies the private moments and secret activities of his neighbors: childbirth, first love, marriage, betrayal, illness and death all present themselves to him through this spy hole. Decades ahead of its time, "Hell" shocked and scandalized the reviewing public when first released in English in 1966. Even so, the New Republic praised "the beauty of the book's nervous yet fluid rhythms... The book sweeps away life's illusions."
The Guiltless
Hermann Broch - 1950
Broch's characters—an apathetic man who can barely remember his own name (Broch mostly refers to him as A.); a high-school teacher and his lover who return from the brink of a suicide pact to carry on a dishonest relationship; Zerline, the lady's maid who enslaves her mistresses, prostitutes the young country girl Melitta to gentleman A., and metes out her own justice against the "empty wickedness" of her betters—are trapped in their indifference, prisoners of a sort of "wakeful somnolence." These men and women may mention the "imbecile Hitler," yet they prefer a nap or sexual encounter to any social action. In Broch's mind this kind of ethical perversity and political apathy paved the way for Nazism.Broch believed that writing can purify, and by revealing Germany's underlying guilt he hoped to purge indifference from his own and future generations. In The Guiltless, Broch captures how apathy and ennui?very human failings—evolve into something dehumanizing and dangerous.About the Translator:Ralph Manheim translated Hourglass by Danilo Kis and numerous works by Gunter Grass, including The Tin Drum. He has edited and translated novels and plays by Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Hesse, and Erich Maria Remarque.