Book picks similar to
Sorrell and Son by Warwick Deeping


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Walkabout


James Vance Marshall - 1959
    Mary and her younger brother Peter set out on foot, lost in the vast, hot Australian outback. They are saved by a chance meeting with an Aboriginal boy on walkabout, who teaches them to find food and water in the wilderness, but whom Mary can’t bring herself to trust. Though on the surface Walkabout is an adventure story, darker themes lie just beneath. Peter’s innocent friendship with the Aboriginal throws into relief Mary’s no longer childish anxiety, and together raise questions about how Aboriginal and Western culture can meet. And in the vivid descriptions of the natural world, we realize that this story—a deep fairy tale in the spirit of Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal—must also be a story about the closeness of death and the power of nature.

Lost Empires


J.B. Priestley - 1965
    He is knows as Ganga Dun to his enormous audience, and as Uncle Nick to the narrator of the story.Young Herncastle is a good-looking Yorkshire boy, ambitious as a painter, whom his uncle sweeps away from a dreary office job into the nomadic, boozy, evanescently amorous life of Variety performers on tour. With them he learns the exacting craft of the stage and avidly explores the first yearnings and triumphs of both sex and love.

Sermons and Soda-Water


John O'Hara - 1960
    Three Novellas:#1 The Girl on the Baggage Truck#2 Imagine Kissing Pete#3 We're Friends Again

A Burnt-Out Case


Graham Greene - 1960
    Arriving anonymously at a leper colony in the Congo, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper mutilated by disease and amputation. Querry slowly moves towards a cure, his mind getting clearer as he works for the colony. However, in the heat of the tropics, no relationship with a married woman, however blameless, will ever be taken as innocent.

Beau Geste


P.C. Wren - 1924
    Who could have done it? A flashback unravels the mystery of the three English Geste brothers. A classic, rip-roaring tale of adventure.

Eric in the Land of the Insects


Godfried Bomans - 1941
    In this humorous fantasy, nine-year-old Eric enters the landscape painting that hangs on his wall and he discovers a world of meadow insects that is stunningly similar to the world of humans.

Sir Gibbie


George MacDonald - 1879
    Endorsed by C S Lewis's stepson Douglas Gresham, and a number of other authorities on both Lewis and MacDonald, and beautifully illustrated by artist Carrie Stout, this long-awaited aid to understanding Sir Gibbie is a must for all lovers of the 19th century preacher-poet!Order here http://www.worksofmacdonald.com/produ...

Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee


Meera Syal - 1999
    Caught between two cultures, three childhood friends—Chila, Sunita, and Tania—are expected to revert to being obedient mothers and wives. But their world explodes when Tania makes a documentary, starring Chila and Sunita, about contemporary urban Indian Life. The result is an unforgettable story of friendship, marriage, betrayal, and the difficult choices woman face.

A Room with a View / Howards End


E.M. Forster - 1908
    Forster. Both are stories of extreme contrasts--in values, social class and cultural perspectives. Romantic relationships lead to conventional happiness in the delightful social comedy A Room with a View, and to unexpected scandal in the richer, deeply moving novel Howards End.Howards End, which rivals A Passage to India as Forster's greatest work, makes a country house in Hertfordshire the center and the symbol for what Lionel Trilling called a class war about who would inherit England. Commerce clashes with culture, greed with gentility.A Room with a View brings home the stuffiness of upper-middle-class Edwardian society in a tremendously funny comedy that pairs a well-bred young lady with a lusty railway clerk and satirizes both the clergy and the English notion of respectability.Quintessentially British, these two novels have become twentieth-century classics. With an introduction and bibliography by Benjamin DeMott.

Robin Hood


Henry Gilbert - 1912
    Robin Hood is the best-loved outlaw of all time.In this edition, Henry Gilbert tells of the adventures of the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest - Robin himself, Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet, and Alan-a-Dale, as well as Maid Marian, good King Richard, and Robin's deadly enemies Guy of Gisborne and the evil Sheriff of Nottingham.

Einstein's Monsters


Martin Amis - 1987
    A collection of stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results.

Highliners (Highliners, #1)


William B. McCloskey - 1979
    'Highliners' is the commercial fishermen's term for their own elite, the skippers and crews who bring in the biggest hauls. Set in Kodiak, Highliners brings into sharp relief the lives of the men and women who make their living catching salmon, king crab, halibut, and shrimp off the coast of Alaska. Hank Crawford comes to Kodiak as a college student to work in the canneries during the summer. But he is inexorably drawn to the water and to the hard, often brutal existence of the fishermen, and ultimately, he joins their ranks. Highliners chronicles Hank's journey from greenhorn to highliner, and the triumphs and tragedies of the people he comes to know so well. (6 X 9, 408 pages, maps, illustrations)

Palliser Novels


Anthony Trollope - 1880
    "Who will even know that they should be so read?" he complained. Solving this problem in particularly splendid fashion, Oxford is now reissuing the Palliser Novels in an elegantly crafted hard-bound set--with acid-free papers and durable binding--that include the wealth of illustrations that first appeared in the Oxford Illustrated Trollope years ago. Now, a whole new generation of readers can enjoy one of nineteenth-century literature's greatest achievements. While the novels center around the stately politician Plantagenet Palliser, the interest is less in politics than in the lively social scene Trollope creates against a Parliamentary backdrop. His keen eye for the subtleties of character and "great apprehension of the real" impressed contemporary writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James, and in the Palliser Novels we find him at his very best. Between the covers of these books we meet a wonderfully rich variety of men and women, among them Alice Vavasor, whose waverings between suitors--and the resulting mess--prompted Trollope to ask Can Your Forgive Her?; the handsome Irish MP Phineas Finn, who grows to maturity as the novels progress; the beautiful enchantress Lizzie Eustace, whose scandalous diamonds are the talk of London high society; Ferdinand Lopez, the unctuous social climber; the elegant and witty Lady Glencora, Plantagenet's wife; and Palliser himself--first as a cabinet aspirant, later as Prime Minister--who is the connecting thread that holds the series together. Along the way we are also introduced to a host of amusing and sharply-drawn characters of less social status who, much like the bumpkins of Shakespeare, offer a distorting yet insightful fun-house mirror to the main action. Nowhere else did Trollope bring to life in such compelling fashion the teeming world of Victorian society and politics, and nowhere else did he create more memorable and living characters than those who populate these six volumes. As a group the Palliser Novels provide us with the most extensive and telling expose of British life during the period of its greatest prestige.

The Man


Irving Wallace - 1964
    The place is the Cabinet Room of the White House. An unexpected accident and the law of succession have just made Douglass Dilman the first black President of the United States.This is the theme of what was surely one of the most provocative novels of the 1960s. It takes the reader into the storm center of the presidency, where Dilman, until now an almost unknown senator, must bear the weight of three burdens: his office, his race, and his private life.From beginning to end, The Man is a novel of swift and tremendous drama, as President Dilman attempts to uphold his oath in the face of international crises, domestic dissension, violence, scandal, and ferocious hostility. Push comes to shove in a breathtaking climax, played out in the full glare of publicity, when the Senate of the United States meets for the first time in one hundred years to impeach the President.

Deception


Roald Dahl - 2016
    There's still a whole world of Dahl to discover in a newly collected book of his deliciously dark tales for adults . . . 'The cruelest lies are often told in silence . . .' Why do we lie? Why do we deceive those we love most? What do we fear revealing? In these ten tales of deception master storyteller Roald Dahl explores our tireless efforts to hide the truth about ourselves.Here, among many others, you'll read about how to get away with the perfect murder, the old man whose wagers end in a most disturbing payment, how revenge is sweeter when it is carried out by someone else and the card sharp so good at cheating he does something surprising with his life.Roald Dahl reveals even more about the darker side of human nature in seven other centenary editions: Lust, Madness, Cruelty, Innocence, Trickery, War and Fear.