Appointment in Samarra

Author	Christina Stead
ISBN	0312280440

Gentle warning note added here because it seems fans of this book can find the below review a little disheartening. So if you're a fan, you might want to skip this review. But, everybody knows that one reader's dogpile is another reader's marzipan souffle with attendant hummingbirds. I myself cannot...

Author	Booth Tarkington
ISBN	1406935735

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson...

Author

Max Beerbohm

One woman's beauty fells the whole of Oxford in this sidesplitting classic campus novel.

Nobody could predict the consequences when ravishing Zuleika Dobson arrives at Oxford, to visit her grandfather, the college warden. Formerly a governess, she has landed on the occupation of prestidigitator,...

Author	Saul Bellow
ISBN	0143039571

Augie comes on stage with one of literature’s most famous opening lines. “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.” It’s the “Call me Ishmael” of mid-20th-century American...

Author	Graham Greene
ISBN	0099478420

In a British colony in West Africa, Henry Scobie is a pious and righteous man of modest means enlisted with securing borders. But when he’s passed over for a promotion as commissioner of police, the humiliation hits hardest for his wife, Louise. Already oppressed by the appalling climate, frustrated...

Author

Erskine Caldwell

Back in the early 1980's, when I lived in Augusta, Georgia, there was a country backroad outside of town called Tobacco Road. I had heard of the book with this title and I wondered if this was just a coincidence or was this the setting for the book Tobacco Road.

Curious, I checked the book out of the...

Author	Ford Madox Ford
ISBN	0141186615

In creating his acclaimed masterpiece Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time . . . The 'subject' was the world as it culminated in the war. Published in four parts between 1924 and 1928, his extraordinary novel centers...

Author	Nathanael West
ISBN	0451523482

The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathanael West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by...

Author	Robert Stone
ISBN	0395860253

In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America...

Author	Henry Roth
ISBN	0374522928

When Henry Roth published Call It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with critical acclaim. But in that dark Depression year, books were hard to sell, and the novel quickly dropped out of sight, as did its twenty-eight-year-old author. Only with its paperback publication in 1964 did the...

Author	John Dos Passos
ISBN	0618056831

THE BIG MONEY completes John Dos Passos's three-volume "fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline" (American Heritage) and marks the end of "one of the most ambitious projects that an American novelist has ever undertaken" (Time). Here we come back to America after the war and find...

Author	Iris Murdoch
ISBN	0140014454

Jake Donaghue, garrulous artist, meets Hugo Belfounder, silent philosopher.

Jake, hack writer and sponger, now penniless flat-hunter, seeks out an old girlfriend, Anna Quentin, and her glamorous actress sister, Sadie. He resumes acquaintance with formidable Hugo, whose ‘philosophy’...

Author	Elizabeth Bowen
ISBN	0385720173

The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human...

Author	Samuel Butler
ISBN	0486434664

Written between 1873 and 1884 and published posthumously in 1903, The Way of All Flesh is regarded by some as the first twentieth-century novel. Samuel Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood shines an iconoclastic light on the hypocrisy of a Victorian clerical...

Author	Arnold Bennett
ISBN	0375754903

H.G. Wells described The Old Wives' Tale as "by far the finest long novel written in English and in the English fashion". He was, of course, speaking for his own generation, and a hundred years later the opinion may seem somewhat exaggerated. However, there is no doubt that The Old Wives' Tale is a superb...

Author	Henry Green
ISBN	0099285096

One of his most admired works, Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe, invading one another's provinces...

Author	Anthony Powell
ISBN	0226677141

Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill...

Author	James T. Farrell
ISBN	1931082553

An unparalleled example of American naturalism, the Studs Lonigan trilogy follows the hopes and dissipations of its remarkable main character, a would-be "tough guy" and archetypal adolescent, born to Irish-American parents on Chicago's South Side, through the turbulent years of World War I,...

Author	John Cheever
ISBN	0060528877

Meet the Wapshots of St Botolphs. There is Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea-dog and would-be suicide; his licentious older son, Moses; and Moses's adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, and partly based on Cheever's adolescence...

Author	Bernard Malamud
ISBN	0374504849

Bernard Malamud’s second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who “wants better” for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his...