Death in Summer
9 best books like Death in Summer (William Trevor): Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, The Chateau, Sour Sweet, So Long, See You Tomorrow, Master Georgie, Continent, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Room Temperature, Invitation to the Waltz
On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently eccentric and endlessly curious, living off crumbs of affection and snippets of gossip. Together, upper lips stiffened,...
| Author | William Maxwell |
| ISBN | 1860468144 |
This is a well-written (Maxwell doesn't write any other way) novel with a nostalgic feel (again, Maxwell doesn't seem to write any other way), with the longer first part (of two) reading almost like a travel diary at times; and just when you're wondering, near the end of that first part, what it might all...
| Author | Timothy Mo |
| ISBN | 0952419327 |
I have not read so many historic Booker nominees this year, but Timothy Mo has been on my radar for some time, so it was an easy decision to pick this one up. It was his second novel, and was shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize.
The story alternates between two groups of characters. On the one hand...
So Long, See You Tomorrow
My heart was sliced to ribbons by this story. The narrator, an elderly man whose boyhood was scarred by a horrendous event, attempts to make sense of it all – and to make amends, as he tells it – 50 years down the road during the course of writing his memoirs.
In his memoirs, he talks about his...
The highly acclaimed New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 1998 and Booker Prize Nominee that reinvents the historical novel.
A misadventure in a brothel links the destiny of the enigmatic George Hardy, a surgeon and amateur photographer, to a foundling who becomes his obsessively devoted...
| Author | Jim Crace |
| ISBN | 0141005440 |
To those who say there's nothing new to be written or read, Jim Crace has responded. For this provocative collection of short stories, Crace created a whole new continent. Unnamed and unspecified, the continent nevertheless resonates with characters, developments, contradictions and examinations...
| Author | George Meredith |
| ISBN | 0140434836 |
Of all nineteenth-century English novels, " claims Edward Mendelson in his Introduction to this edition, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is the most self-consciously literary in its style and structure and the most sexually explicit in its plot and theme." First published in 1859, Meredith's first...
| Author | Nicholson Baker |
| ISBN | 1862070997 |
The fact is a large cadre of klutzes (call them Baker-deniers) consider our man Nicholson to be a lightweight author. An inward bourgeois bore picking fluff from his well-gazed navel. Stephen King is to blame thanks to his ungenerous quote about thumbnail pickings (this coming from a man that publishes...
| Author | Rosamond Lehmann |
| ISBN | 1844083055 |
A diary for her innermost thoughts, a china ornament, a ten-shilling note, and a roll of flame-coloured silk for her first evening dress: these are the gifts Olivia Curtis receives for her seventeenth birthday. She anticipates her first dance, the greatest yet most terrifying event of her restricted...
