Downriver
10 best books like Downriver (Iain Sinclair): Hopeful Monsters, I Was Dora Suarez, Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu, Indigo, The House of Doctor Dee, The Best of Michael Swanwick, Heart of Empire, or The Legacy of Luther Arkwright, Crackpot Palace, Fun with Your New Head, The Dream Archipelago
| Author | Nicholas Mosley |
| ISBN | 1564782425 |
-- A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student of physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jewess and political radical. Together and apart, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which...
An ax-wielding psychopath cares young Dora Suarez into pieces. On the same night in London, a firearm blows the top off the head of Felix Roatta, part-owner of the seedy Parallel Club. The unnamed narrator, a police sergeant, becomes fixated on Dora and is determined to solve her murder. Then a photo...
Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu
| Author | Slinkachu |
| ISBN | 0752226649 |
"They're Not Pets, Susan," says a stern father who has just shot a bumblebee, its wings sparkling in the evening sunlight. A lone office worker, less than an inch high, looks out over the river in his lunch break, "Dreaming of Packing it All In." A tiny man makes his way back to a tiny car, with a tiny shopping...
| Author | Graham Joyce |
| ISBN | 0671039385 |
Indigo is a color the human eye can never truly see, a slice of the spectrum imbued with the promise of invisibility. But in the dark world occupied by Jack Chambers' father, indigo will also lead to places of unknown treachery, and ultimately, to madness. As Jack tries to fulfill the terms of his father's...
| Author | Peter Ackroyd |
| ISBN | 0140171177 |
I’ll begin with a recommendation and warning: after reading the majority of this book in an evening, I had extremely vivid and unsettling dreams that were clearly inspired by it. There is very little fiction that genuinely manages to capture the feeling of dreaming, so this is a rare example to list...
| Author | Michael Swanwick |
| ISBN | 1596061782 |
It's here at last the first comprehensive overview of the extraordinary career of master storyteller Michael Swanwick. Covering over a quarter of a century, from his first two published stories both of them Nebula finalists to his most recent, these works bear witness to one of the most vivid and far-ranging...
| Author | Bryan Talbot |
| ISBN | 1593077262 |
In a future alternate-reality Earth—one existence in a swirling maelstrom of parallel worlds—a vicious totalitarian British Empire reigns supreme. But in Rome, the dying pope sets into motion a dark plan to place the throne of Britannica under papal control—by any means necessary. And while...
| Author | Jeffrey Ford |
| ISBN | 0062122592 |
Eclectic is certainly an adjective that can be used to describe the work of the phenomenal Jeffrey Ford—along with imaginative, provocative, mesmerizing, and brilliant. His powerful dark fantasy, The Physiognomy, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; his novel, The Girl in the Glass, won...
Contents:
The Roaches (1965)
Come to Venus Melancholy (1965)
Linda and Daniel and Spike (1967)
Flight Useless, Inexorable the Pursuit (1968)
Descending (1964)
Nada (1964)
Now Is Forever (1964)
The Contest (1967)
The Empty Room (1967)
The Squirrel Cage...
| Author | Christopher Priest |
| ISBN | 0684861526 |
Christopher Priest is among the most inventive authors I’ve encountered in fifty years of voracious reading. Whenever I feel inspired to launch into new vistas of imagination, all I need do is read (or listen via audible) to yet again another one of his books.
Thanks, Christopher,...
| Author | Lucius Shepard |
| ISBN | 1596061332 |
Lucius Shepard writes from the darkest, truest heart of America—not the heart of the United States or of North America, but all of America—and he writes of it with rare passion, honesty and intelligence. His earliest stories, the ones that made his name a quarter of a century ago, were set in the jungles...
| Author | Kōbō Abe |
| ISBN | 4770016905 |
Beyond the Curve, Kōbō Abe
Collection of fiction which explores many of modern man's dilemmas in an insightful, yet highly surrealistic style. Called by The New York Times, "The bestJapanese novelist (since) Mishima and Kawabata"..., Abe is one of the most highly regarded writers in Japan...
| Author | Rachel Lichtenstein |
| ISBN | 1862073295 |
David Rodinsky lived above a synagogue in the heart of the old Jewish East End of London, and sometime in the late 1960s he disappeared. His room, a chaos of writings, annotated books and maps, gramophone records and clothes, was left undisturbed for 20 years. Rodinsky's world captured the imagination...
| Author | Jim Crace |
| ISBN | 0140276009 |
Victor, an eighty-year-old multimillionaire, surveys his empire from the remoteness of his cloud-capped penthouse. Expensively insulated from the outside world, he nonetheless finds that memories of his impoverished childhood will not be kept so easily at bay. Focusing on the one area of vitality...
| Author | Jáchym Topol |
| ISBN | 0945774451 |
Winner of the Egon Hostovský Prize as the best Czech book of the year, this epic novel powerfully captures the sense of dislocation that followed the Czechs’ newfound freedom in 1989. More than just the story of its young protagonist—who is part businessman, part gang member, part drifter—it...
| Author | Caryl Phillips |
| ISBN | 0679757945 |
From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa. It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant...
| Author | Adam Thorpe |
| ISBN | 0749397047 |
At the heart of this novel lies the fictional village of Ulverton. It is the fixed point in a book that spans three hundred years. Different voices tell the story of Ulverton: one of Cromwell's soldiers staggers home to find his wife remarried and promptly disappears, an eighteenth century farmer carries...
| Author | Angus Wilson |
| ISBN | 1842324446 |
You know you’re in the presence of literary genius when there are large parts of a novel you feel out of your depth in. I felt like I fell into a torrent at one end and could only touch the bottom about once every 50 or so pages. But, somehow, I enjoyed it. Not quite sure why though.
This is the story...
| Author | Felix Gilman |
| ISBN | 0553806777 |
In this stunning follow-up to his acclaimed debut, Thunderer, Felix Gilman’s brave hero returns from one thrilling and dangerous quest only to confront another. In a magical landscape where time is meaningless, reality precarious, and countless selves work toward countless possible futures,...
| Author | Dino Buzzati |
| ISBN | 0865471002 |
Contains:
-The Seven Messengers
-The End of the World
-Appointment with Einstein
-The Saucer Has Landed
-The Survivor's Story
-Prank
-The Walls of Anagoor
-Human Greatness
-The Colomber
-The Writer's Secret
-The Bewitched Jacket
-The Elevator
-The...
| Author | Matthew LeMay |
| ISBN | 0826429009 |
Many albums could be cited to support the claim that great suffering yields great art. Elliott Smith's XO should not be one of them. Smith's 1998 major label debut defies the "tortured singer-songwriter" stereotype, and takes up this defiance as a central theme. At a time when Smith was being groomed...
London Under London: A Subterranean Guide
| Author | Richard Trench |
| ISBN | 0719552885 |
One of the most popular books on London (it has reprinted six times since it was first published in 1984) London under London has now been updated to take into account the latest subterranean developments. A new section covers: the pioneering deep level water main 80 kilometres in length, much longer...
Long regarded as one of the finest novels ever written by a New Zealander, Maurice Gee's Plumb introduces us to the intolerant, irascible clergyman George Plumb, one of the most memorable characters in New Zealand literature &- half saint, half monster, superhuman in his spiritual strength and...
