His novel is at once a major social document and a story that draws us irresistibly into the twilit world of Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist, and his friends and acquaintances in Grub Street including Jasper Milvain, an ambitious journalist, and Alfred Yule, an embittered critic. Here Gissing brings to life the bitter battles (fought out in obscure garrets or in the Reading Room of the British Museum) between integrity and the dictates of the market place, the miseries of genteel poverty and the damage that failure and hardship do to human personality and relationships.

    With his train of horses he carried salt and silk across distances incomprehensible to his ancient and static community. He brings ideas as well as gifts that have come, by many short journeys, from market town to market town, and from places as distant as the campfires of the Silk Road. John Turner's death in the 18th century leaves an emotional charge Ian and Sal find affects their relationship in the 21st, challenging the perceptions they have of themselves and of each other. A visionary fable firmly rooted in a verifiable place, this novel is an evocation of the lives and the language of all people who are called to the valley of Thursbitch.

    The novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds.Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called "one of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."

    As the straight-man narrator, observer, and regular butt of hundreds of hilarious trials and mishaps, Major Yeates never ceases to be surprised, is usually not amused, and can't stop himself from loving his Irish neighbors.-500 Great Books by Women.

    He observes the gradual but profound changes wrought on the English countryside by the march of progress.

    Nancy Mitford's most famous novel, The Pursuit of Love satirizes British aristocracy in the twenties and thirties through the amorous adventures of the Radletts, an exuberantly unconventional family closely modelled on Mitford's own.The Radletts of Alconleigh occupy the heights of genteel eccentricity, from terrifying Lord Alconleigh (who, like Mitford's father, used to hunt his children with bloodhounds when foxes were not available), to his gentle wife, Sadie, their wayward daughter Linda, and the other six lively Radlett children. Mitford's wickedly funny prose follows these characters through misguided marriages and dramatic love affairs, as the shadow of World War II begins to close in on their rapidly vanishing world.

    Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrissing shadow over his career and respectable image. Wise, witty, deeply satisfying, Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his best.

    Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1933 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.

    Traditional resources—home, parents, lovers, friends, even willpower—are not dependable. And so the characters in these short, compelling stories have learned to depend on small triumphs of wit, irony, and spirit.A widow, surrounded by a small menagerie, comes to terms with her veterinarian husband's death; a young woman entertains her dying friend with trivia and reaffirms her own life; in the aftermath of an abortion, a woman compulsively knits a complete wardrobe for a friend's baby. Buffeted by rude shocks, thwarted by misconnections, the characters recognize that anything can finally become a reason to live.

    Her memories of her childhood in Innisfail, New York are by turns romantic and traumatic. The early violent death of her father and abandonment by her mother have left her with a permanent sense of dislocation and loss. After decades apart, Marya becomes determined to find the mother who gave her away. In searching for her past, Marya changes her present life more than she could ever have imagined. Vividly evoking the natural beauty of rural upstate New York, and the complex emotions of a woman artist, Marya: A Life is one of Joyce Carol Oates's most deeply personal and fully-realized novels.

    A tour de force of menace, malicious comedy, and torrential social bile, this book marks the American debut of an extraordinary writer.

    Stephen Fry's breathtakingly outrageous debut novel, by turns eccentric, shocking, brilliantly comic and achingly romantic.Adrian Healey is magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life; unprepared too for the afternoon in Salzburg when he will witness the savage murder of a Hungarian violinist; unprepared to learn about the Mendax device; unprepared for more murders and wholly unprepared for the truth.The Liar is a thrilling, sophisticated and laugh out loud hilarious novel from a brilliantly talented writer.

    Party Going describes their four-hour wait in a London railway hotel where they shelter from the grim weather and the throngs of workers on the platform below.

    One of the most popular books of a giant of modern French literature, this is a hymn to the pleasures of life that Gide came so close to losing forever while suffering from tuberculosis -- touch, hearing, smell, sight and, more than anything, taste.

    M. Coetzee has been dazzling the literary world. After eight novels that have won, among other awards, two Booker Prizes, and most recently, the Nobel Prize for literature, J.M. Coetzee has once again crafted an unusual and deeply affecting tale. Told through an ingenious series of formal addresses, Elizabeth Costello is, on the surface, the story of a woman's life as a mother, sister, lover, and writer. Yet it is also a profound and haunting meditation on the nature of storytelling.