Staring at the Sun


Julian Barnes - 1986
    This novel enables readers to follow her experience in marriage, her questioning of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China.

The Shadow of the Sun


A.S. Byatt - 1964
    Byatt tells the story of troubled, sensitive seventeen-year-old Anna Severell, who struggles to discover and develop her own personality in the shadow of her father, a renowned novelist. New Introduction by the Author.

Tom Clancy: Two Complete Novels (Red Storm Rising & The Cardinal of the Kremlin)


Tom Clancy - 1993
    Tom Clancy brings a chilling ring of truth to these enduring masterpieces, proving why his gripping novels have sold in excess of 38 million copies.

Providence


Anita Brookner - 1982
    For years. Kitty has been tactfully courting her colleague Maurice Bishop, a detached, elegant English professor. Now, running out of patience, Kitty's amorous pursuit takes her from rancorous academic committee rooms and lecture halls to French cathedrals and Parisian rooming houses, from sittings with her dress-making grandmother to seances with a grandmotherly psychic. Touching, funny, and stylistically breathtaking, Providence is a brightly polished gem of romantic comedy.

Monsignor Quixote


Graham Greene - 1982
    The title character of Monsignor Quixote is a village priest, elevated to the rank of monsignor through a clerical error, who travels to Madrid accompanied by his best friend, Sancho, the Communist ex-mayor of the village, in Greene's lighthearted variation on Cervantes.

Pincher Martin


William Golding - 1956
    Pitted against him are the sea, the sun, the night cold, and the terror of his isolation. At the core of this raging tale of physical and psychological violence lies Christopher Martin’s will to live as the sum total of his life.

Chance


Joseph Conrad - 1913
    from taking the shortest cut towards securing for herself the easiest possible existence.’ It is narrated by different narrators, including Conrad's regular narrator, Charles Marlow, who describe and attempt to interpret various episodes in Flora’s life and is the only book to focus on a female character.Excerpt:I cannot say that any particular moral complexion has been put on this novel but I do not think that any body had detected in it an evil intention. And it is only for their intentions that men can be held respon sible. The ultimate effects of whatever they do are far beyond their control. In doing this book my in tention was to interest people in my Vision of things which is indissolubly allied to the style in which it is expressed. In other words I wanted to write a cer tain amount of pages in prose, which, strictly speaking, is my proper business. I have attended to it conscien tiously with the hope of being entertaining or at least not insufferably boring to my readers. I can not suf ficiently insist upon the truth that when I sit down to write my intentions are always blameless however de plorable the ultimate effect of the act may turn out to be.

Crome Yellow


Aldous Huxley - 1921
    Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by "getting in touch" with his "subconscious," to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive "History of Crome." Denis's stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he endures regarding his plan to write a novel about love and art. Lambasting the post-Victorian standards of morality, Crome Yellow is a witty masterpiece that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, "is too ironic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony."

English Music


Peter Ackroyd - 1992
    In post-World War I London, on the stage of the out-of-the-way Chemical Theatre, Clement Harcombe and his young, motherless son, Timothy, perform acts of spiritual healing, their visionary skills lifting the weight of despair and failure from the shoulders of their small band of followers. For Timothy, a boy with remarkable psychic gifts, it is a thrilling apprenticeship, a wonderful life with an adored father. But in the eyes of the larger world, it is a wayward existence with a suspect parent. And when Timothy is abruptly removed from his father's side, from the familiar twilit world of phantoms and ghosts, and thrust into the simple world of his grandparents' home in the country, he is not too young to feel 'bereft of his past'. Yet nothing can remove him from the realm of his visions. And as he passes from a difficult childhood into a troubled adulthood - his father slipping in and out of his life - it is this other, private world that provides him with his only certainty. In his visions - unanticipated and wholly enveloping - Timothy is drawn into the creations of Charles Dickens and William Blake, Thomas Malory and Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Gainsborough and J.M.W. Turner. Accompanied by Merlin or Miss Havisham, William Byrd or William Hogarth, Crusoe's Friday or Wonderland's Alice, Timothy is swept across time and history. And as his mysterious journeys begin to illuminate the ideas that have shaped them, Timothy comes to discern the power of the writer over his characters, the composer over what is heard, the painter over what is perceived - learns, finally, to hear the 'English music' his father described to him as a child. It is the workings of the

Selected Short Stories


Roald Dahl - 2012
    Whether fictionalizing his dramatic exploits as a Royal Air Force pilot during World War II or concocting the ingeniously plotted fables that were dramatized on television as Tales of the Unexpected, Dahl was brilliant at provoking in his readers the overwhelming desire to know what happens next—and at satisfying that desire in ways that feel both surprising and inevitable.In this collection:-A Fine Son-Death of an Old Man-Parson’s Pleasure-Poison-The Hitch-Hiker-The Wish-Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat-Dip in the Pool-The Landlady-Skin-Lamb to the Slaughter-Man from the South-The Way Up to Heavan-The Umbrella Man-Taste-The Swan-William and MaryFilled with devilish plot twists, his tales display a tantalizing blend of macabre humor and the absurdly grotesque. Dahl’s creations amuse and shock us in equal measure, gleefully reminding us of what might lurk beneath the surface of the ordinary.

An Academic Question


Barbara Pym - 1986
    Yearning for some excitement--and looking after her husband's best interest, of course--Caroline Grimstone steals her dying friend's memoirs, setting in motion a series of academic and amorous rivalries that throw a placid college community into a hilariously muddled uproar.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning


Alan Sillitoe - 1958
    You don't need to give Arthur more than one chance to do the Government or trick the foreman.And when the day's work is over, Arthur is off to the pubs, raring for adventure. He is a warrior of the bottle and the bedroom - his slogan is 'If it's going, it's for me' - for his aim is to cheat the world before it can cheat him. And never is the battle more fiercely joined than on Saturday night.But Sunday morning is the time of reckoning, the time for facing up to life - the time, too, you run the risk of getting hooked!Arthur is no exception.

Greenbanks


Dorothy Whipple - 1932
    An early novel by Persephone's most popular author about an early 20th century family and, in particular, the relationship of the grandmother and granddaughter.

Two Sisters


Gore Vidal - 1970
    In seductive settings from a brothel in a Parisian backstreet to the rooftops of 70s Rome, Vidal assembles his characters, real & imagined: Cocteau & Tennessee Williams, Gide & Mailer rub shoulders with creations as unforgettable as the ageing femme fatale Marietta Donegal & Hollywood hustler & flagellant Murray Morris. All are bound together in a mesmerising fiction that builds to an extraordinary conclusion.

Ann Veronica


H.G. Wells - 1909
    Walking away from her stifling father and the social conventions of her time, she leaves drab suburbia for Edwardian London and encounters an unknown world of suffragettes, Fabians and free love. But it is only when she meets the charismatic Capes that she truly confronts the meaning of her new found freedom. Ann Veronica caused a sensation, damned in the press and preached against from the pulpits when it was first published due to Wells' ground breaking treatment of female sexuality. A fascinating description of the women's suffrage movement, Ann Veronica offers an optimistic depiction of one woman's sexual awakening and search for independence.