Erewhon
10 best books like Erewhon (Samuel Butler): Nightmare Abbey, The Coming Race, A Tale of a Tub, News from Nowhere, Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., Bold as Love, A Glastonbury Romance, Mother London, Albigenses, Castle Richmond
Author | Thomas Love Peacock |
This 1818 novel is set in a former abbey whose owner, Christopher Glowry, is host to visitors who enjoy his hospitality and engage in endless debate. Among these guests are figures recognizable to Peacock's contemporaries, including characters based on Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Mr....
Author | Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, was one of the big guns of Victorian literature. His books were bestsellers and he garnered considerable critical acclaim as well. And yet today he is not merely mostly unread, he has become a byword by bad writing, with a literary competition...
Author | Jonathan Swift |
ISBN | 0141018879 |
'A Tale of a Tub' was the first big work written by Jonathan Swift. It is arguably his most difficult satire, and perhaps his most masterly. The Tale is a prose parody which is divided into sections of "digression" and a "tale" of three brothers, each representing one of the main branches of western Christianity....
Author | William Morris |
ISBN | 0192801775 |
News from Nowhere(1890) is the best-known prose work of William Morris and the only significant English utopia to be written since Thomas More's. The novel describes the encounter between a visitor from the nineteenth century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future. Set...
Author | Edith Anna Oenone Somerville |
ISBN | 1879941406 |
Absolutely hilarious. The British judge, Major Yeates the RM (for Royal Magistrate), arrives in rain, soon offered a horse by his savvy landlord who's already overcharging: "…a stout grey animal. I recognised with despair that I was about to be compelled to buy a horse. Jolting to my entrance gate...
Three extraordinary people in some most extraordinary times: It's Dissolution Summer and as the United Kingdom prepares to break up into separate nations, the Counterculturals have gathered for a festival where everything's allowed. Among them is a talented little brat called Fiorinda, rock and...
First published in 1932, here is John Cowper Powys's masterwork, an epic novel of terrific cumulative force and lyrical intensity. In it he interweaves the ancient with the modern as he probes the mystical and spiritual ethos of the small English village of Glastonbury and the effect upon its inhabitants...
Author | Michael Moorcock |
ISBN | 0684861410 |
Three hospital outpatients all find that they hear voices - the voices of London's past. As they explore the city of their present day, they also explore its recent past and its forgotten people. Through the lives of those on the fringe of society, we learn what it is like - and what it has always been like...
Author | Charles Robert Maturin |
Un gran novelón gótico. Con Maturin ya sabes que te puedes esperar: páginas y páginas de historias que se entremezclan entre sí y que están tan bien narradas que son capaces de llevarte al tiempo y lugar donde sucedieron. Las descripciones del autor son muy precisas y al igual que con Melmoth la...
Author | Anthony Trollope |
ISBN | 1406930245 |
Castle Richmond, one of Trollope’s standalone novels, is the story of two families―the Fitzgeralds of Castle Richmond of the title and the Desmonds of Desmond Court, set in the backdrop of the Irish famine. The story opens with Owen Fizgerald, a cousin of the Castle Richmond Fitzgeralds, falling...
Author | Maria Edgeworth |
ISBN | 0140436448 |
A great early nineteenth-century episodic novel of an orphan boy's rise to the upper classes, in the tradition of Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews et al. The eponymous Harry Ormand is raised side-by-side with the son of the local lord, Sir Ulick O'Shane; his low-birth, however, keeps him from developing the...
With the growth of his militant egoism, there had developed in Godwin Peak an excess of nervous sensibility which threatened to deprive his character of the initiative rightly belonging to it. Self-assertion is the practical complement of self-esteem. To be largely endowed with the latter quality,...
Author | Theodor Fontane |
ISBN | 1571130241 |
Theodor Fontane (1819-98), widely regarded as Germany's most significant novelist between Goethe and Thomas Mann, pioneered the German novel of manners and upper-class society, following a trend in European fiction of the period. The Stechlin is Fontane's last book and his political testament....
Author | Walter Scott |
ISBN | 1406932531 |
Set on the eve of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, The Monastery is full of supernatural events, theological conflict, and humor. Located in the lawless Scottish Borders, the novel depicts the monastery of Kennaquhair (a thinly disguised Melrose Abbey, whose ruins are still to be seen near...
Author | Tobias Smollett |
ISBN | 1847024920 |
Does the above book cover for Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle look like an invitation to a frolicking, sexually charged escapade all in the spirit of good, clean fun? That's precisely what the publisher of this edition is aiming for.
Much, much different from...
2133 pages, consisting of 536 letters (plus conclusion and author's postscript) all cross-referenced - the author must have been a madman. A madman with an impressive filing system.
This is the kind of book that draws you in slowly but completely, with not much happening most of the time. So...
Author | Henry Fielding |
ISBN | 1426413807 |
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not...
Author | Walter Pater |
ISBN | 0140432361 |
It was as a critic and a humanist that Pater (1839-1894), professor at Oxford, became a powerful influence on his own and succeeding generations, claiming disciples as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound. This has been described as "the most highly finished of all his works and the expression of...
Author | Angus Wilson |
ISBN | 0586049029 |
Set in a near future (the novel was first published in 1961 and is set in the period 1970–73), this is Angus Wilson's most allegorical novel, about a doomed attempt to set up a reserve for wild animals. Simon Carter, secretary of the London Zoo, has accepted responsibility and power to the prejudice...
Author | Michael G. Coney |
ISBN | 0575019743 |
It was an alien planet - yet not too alien from Earth. It had its differences; its ice goblins, its curious furry lorrin, its thickening water, and its unearthly tides, but for a young man like Alika-Drove thinking of a vacation by the sea these oddities were the norm.
But this vacation was different....
Author | Jed Mercurio |
ISBN | 0224072862 |
A truly stunning novel — spare, powerful and ultimately awesome — Ascent will propel Jed Mercurio into the first rank of British novelists.
Yefgenil Yeremin is a flyer and he is a phantom.
In the Korean War he shoots down more American jets than any other pilot in history. He becomes...
The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the...