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A Disaffection

10 best books like A Disaffection (James Kelman): The Bird of Night, Pascali's Island, The Deposition of Father McGreevy, Under the Frog, Flying to Nowhere, Swing Hammer Swing!, Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings, Impossible Object, Looking for the Possible Dance, Our Fathers

The Bird of Night
AuthorSusan Hill
ISBN0140040722
Francis Croft, the greatest poet of his age, was mad. His world was a nightmare of internal furies and haunting poetic vision. Harvey Lawson watched and protected him until his final suicide. From his solitary old age Harvey writes this brief account of their twenty years together and then burns all...
Pascali's Island
AuthorBarry Unsworth
ISBN0393317218
The year is 1908, the place, a small Greek island in the declining days of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. For twenty years Basil Pascali has spied on the people of his small community and secretly reported on their activities to the authorities in Constantinople. Although his reports are never acknowledged,...
The Deposition of Father McGreevy
AuthorBrian O'Doherty
ISBN1885983395
In a London pub in the 1950s, editor William Maginn is intrigued by a reference to the reputedly shameful demise of a remote mountain village in Kerry, Ireland, where he was born. Maginn returns to Kerry and uncovers an astonishing tale: both the account of the destruction of a place and a way of life which...
Under the Frog
AuthorTibor Fischer
ISBN0312278713
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Under the Frog follows the adventures of two young Hungarian basketball players through the turbulent years between the end of World War II and the anti-Soviet uprising of 1956. In this spirited indictment of totalitarianism, the two improbable heroes, Pataki and...
Flying to Nowhere
AuthorJohn Fuller
ISBN0907540279
Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Flying to Nowhere is a modern Gothic novel with spiritual overtones that open out a set of classic novelistic quests. Set on a remote Welsh island during the Middle Ages, the tale is woven around two main characters&emdash;Vane, an emissary sent...
Swing Hammer Swing!
AuthorJeff Torrington
ISBN0156001977
Oh the brogue! Now lads and lassies, I don’a mind a bit a brogue, but wha’s a bloke from the States supos’ ta mak’a dis?

“Maggie, god rest’re, never had tae hinge her back tae mend oor fire – bunker aye full tae the gunnels, so it was.” Or this: “Cauld enough tae make a polar bear...
Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings
AuthorManny Farber
Manny Farber (1917–2008) was a unique figure among American movie critics. Champion of what he called "termite art" (focused, often eccentric virtuosity as opposed to "white elephant" monumentality), master of a one-of-a-kind prose style whose jazz-like phrasing and incandescent twists and...
Impossible Object
AuthorNicholas Mosley
ISBN1564784657
"The object of life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended."

In these closing lines from Impossible Object, one has embodied both Nicholas Mosley's subject of love...
Looking for the Possible Dance
AuthorA.L. Kennedy
ISBN0749397586
Learn yerself Scotch Part One (With A.L Kennedy and shovelmonkey1)

Greet - Cry
Stovies - Type of meat stew with potatoes, onions and other root veg
Ken - Know
Nip yer head - to nag someone
Gub - to hit or smack
Wean / Wee yun - child
Birl - to spin
Git yer hole - to get laid

For...
Our Fathers
AuthorAndrew O'Hagan
ISBN0771068352
First Canadian publication of the powerful debut novel from the author of Be Near Me.

Finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Whitbread Award.

Hugh Bawn was a modern hero, a visionary urban planner, a man of the people who revolutionized...
I'll Go to Bed at Noon
AuthorGerard Woodward
ISBN0393328007
Colette Jones has had problems of her own with alcohol, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to booze. Her oldest son, Janus, the family's golden boy, has wasted his talents as a concert pianist. His drinking sprees with his brother-in-law, Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket...
Beside the Ocean of Time
AuthorGeorge Mackay Brown
ISBN0006548628
George Mackay Brown's brilliant swansong reached the Booker shortlist in 1994, raining so much unwanted attention upon this poet and storyteller who rarely left the Orkney Islands that he needed antidepressants. The book is a marvel and might have bagged the unwelcome prize, had not another Scottish...
Scar Tissue
AuthorMichael Ignatieff
ISBN0374527695
At the heart of Michael Ignatieff's riveting novel about a woman's descent into Alzheimer's are the tangled threads of a Midwestern family, frayed by time and tragedy yet still connected - as much by pride, embarrassed love, and sibling rivalry as by the painful ties of family loyalty. More than a tale...
Last Letters from Hav
AuthorJan Morris
ISBN0394532627
Hav is like no place on earth. Rumored to be the site of Troy, captured during the crusades and recaptured by Saladin, visited by Tolstoy, Hitler, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, this Mediterranean city-state is home to several architectural marvels and an annual rooftop race that is a feat of athleticism...
The Orchard on Fire
AuthorShena Mackay
ISBN0749394064
When Percy and Betty Harlency abandon their seedy Streatham pub, for the Copper Kettle Tearoom in Kent, life for their daughter April changes dramatically. She is befriended by the wonderfully dangerous Ruby, whose red hair and brutal home life emphasise her love of fire, and by the immaculately dressed...
The Industry of Souls
AuthorMartin Booth
ISBN0312267533
The remarkably powerful and critically acclaimed novel that was chosen as A New York Times Notable Book of 1999 and shortlisted for The Booker Prize

The Industry of Souls is the story of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen arrested for spying in the Soviet Union in the early 1950's. Eventually...
Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education
AuthorSybille Bedford
ISBN1582431434
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Sybille Bedford's latest novel walks the borderline between autobiography and fiction. It picks up where A Legacy leaves off, leading us from the Kaiser's Germany into the wider Europe of the 1920s and the limbo between world wars. The narrator, Billi, tells the story...
God on the Rocks
AuthorJane Gardam
ISBN0349114064
With the birth of her baby brother, eight-year-old Margaret Marsh is banished from the house every Wednesday afternoon to enjoy the idyllic English seaside—at peace between the world wars—with the family’s new, young, and bawdy maid. Largely ignored, the child has all the freedom she needs...
Eva Trout
AuthorElizabeth Bowen
Eva Trout, Elizabeth Bowen’s last novel, epitomizes her bold exploration of the territory between the comedy of manners and cutting social commentary.

Orphaned at a young age, Eva has found a home of sorts in Worcestershire with her former schoolteacher, Iseult Arbles, and Iseult's husband,...
These Demented Lands
AuthorAlan Warner
ISBN0385491468
After the critical success of his first novel,  Morvern Callar, Alan Warner has written an extraordinary, stirring sequel to Morvern's odyssey, confirming him as one of the most original, uniquely gifted writers to have appeared this decade.

An air-crash investigator haunts the hinterlands...
1982, Janine
AuthorAlasdair Gray
ISBN0224020943
1982, Janine is a liberal novel of the most satisfying kind. Set over the course of one night inside the head of Jock McLeish, an aging, divorced, alcoholic, insomniac supervisor of security installations, as he tipples in the bedroom of a small Scottish hotel, it makes an unanswerable case that republicanism...
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