Falstaff

Author	Patrick White
ISBN	1590170024

Patrick White's brilliant 1961 novel, set in an Australian suburb, intertwines four deeply different lives. An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed—and stricken—with visionary experiences that may or may not allow them...

Author	David Lodge
ISBN	0140057463

This 1980 novel by Lodge (whom you may have noticed I've been reading a lot of and enjoying this year) follows a group of young English Catholics over a period of about 20 years, enabling us to see the ways their religion affects their lives (and their lives affect their religion), particularly in the shadow...

Author	Joyce Cary
ISBN	0940322196

The Horse's Mouth, the third and most celebrated volume of Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, is perhaps the finest novel ever written about an artist. Its painter hero, the charming and larcenous Gulley Jimson, has an insatiable genius for creation and a no less remarkable appetite for destruction. Is he...

Author	Malcolm Bradbury
ISBN	0099149109

[4.5] For 25 years I'd mistakenly conflated Malcolm Bradbury with old Catholic tut-tutter Malcolm Muggeridge (arguably the male Mary Whitehouse) and as a result I'd missed out on some awesome fun in this book. I'd always been a little bemused as to why Bradbury was mentioned alongside more famous writers...

Author	John Updike
ISBN	0449242595

The Coup describes violent events in the imaginary African nation of Kush, a large, landlocked, drought-ridden, sub-Saharan country led by Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû. (“A leader,” writes Colonel Ellelloû, “is one who, out of madness or goodness, takes upon himself the woe of a people....

Author	Nevil Shute
ISBN	1842322737

 Theodore Honey is a shy, inconspicuous engineer whose eccentric interests are frowned upon in aviation circles. When a passenger plane crashes in Newfoundland under unexplained circumstances, Honey is determined to prove his unorthodox theory about what went wrong to his superiors, before...

Author	Mary McCarthy
ISBN	0156027879

Henry Mulcahy, a literature instructor at progressive Jocelyn College, is informed that his appointment will not be continued. Convinced he is disliked by the president of Jocelyn because of his abilities as a teacher and his independence of mass opinion, Mulcahy believes he is being made the victim...

Author	Michael Frayn
ISBN	0140040633

An utter delight.

Even though it was written in the 1970s, it still feels completely fresh & topical today. It's a lovely, optimistic satire of man & covers many of the Big Ideas. I know when Life of Pi was so very popular, various reviews said it would affirm/renew your faith in God (a...

Author	J.G. Ballard
ISBN	0871404192

When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is transformed. Vultures invade rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet...

Author	Kingsley Amis
ISBN	0575008156

Brian Leonard, a Monty Python of secret agents, meets James Churchill, a young officer at an English army base where preparations are under way for Operation Apollo. To complicate matters, Churchill has gone round-the-bend for a parole from the mental ward. Thrown amongst these loose cannons is a...

Author	Muriel Spark
ISBN	1566492262

To rendezvous with her archeologist fiance in Jordan, Barbara Vaughn must first pass through the Mandelbaum Gate--which divides strife-torn Jerusalem. A half-jewish convert to Catholicism, an Englishwoman of strong and stubborn convictions, Barbara will not be dissuaded from her ill-timed...

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	Budd Schulberg
ISBN	0850315204

Halliday won his success as a writer - and won the wife who loved him - after the First War. Then came the wild Twenties and years of high-pressure speakeasy carousing. Halliday was attractive, Halliday was charming, Halliday was weak. He flashed through the skies like a comet.

This overwhelmingly...

Author	Richard Hughes
ISBN	0940322293

A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." Set in the early 1920s, the book centers on Augustine, a young man from an aristocratic Welsh family who has come of age...

Author	John Barth
ISBN	0385240864

MJ Nicholls inquires:

"I have been tempted to read this for some time, but Nate's review put me off. What do you make of his thoughts?:

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/..."


The first part.
I am an not an impartial commentator on John Barth's work. I...

Author	Nadine Gordimer
ISBN	0140056149

Liz Van Den Sandt's ex-husband, Max, an ineffectual rebel, has drowned himself. In prison for a failed act of violence against the government, he had betrayed his colleagues. Now Liz has been asked to perform a direct service for the black nationalist movement, at considerable danger to herself. Can...

Author	L.P. Hartley
ISBN	0241901685

The dystopian society that emerges after World War Three is based on a collective sense of guilt. Citizens of this new world, officially labelled 'delinquents' by their Dictator, are named after murderers and are obliged to wear sackcloth and ashes. Individualism is stamped out. Privilege, which...

Author	Mordecai Richler
ISBN	0771075103

In the swinging culture of sixties’ London, Canadian Mortimer Griffin is a beleaguered editor adrift in a sea of hypocrisy and deceit. Alone in a world where nobody shares his values but everyone wants the same things, Mortimer must navigate the currents of these changing times. Richler’s eccentric...

Author	Rex Warner
ISBN	1566630258

First published in 1941, The Aerodrome is one of the few works of fiction in the twentieth century to understand the dangerous yet glamorous appeal of fascism and the less than satisfactory answer of traditional democracy - and to transmute their deadly opposition into terms of enduring art. Rex Warner...

Author	Bernard Malamud
ISBN	0374528829

With a new introduction by Thomas Mallon

Dubin's Lives (1979) is a compassionate and wry commedia, a book praised by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times as Malamud's "best novel since The Assistant. Possibly, it is the best he has written of all."

Its protagonist is one...

Author	Brian Moore
ISBN	0586087397

I read this book for the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.

Famously The Prime Minister’s wife blackballed The Doctor’s Wife for the Booker due to the sex scenes.

Trying to find out more about Moore the author, and a little underwhelmed with this book, I came across an obituary in...

Author	William Faulkner
ISBN	0394702824

In this, the final book of Faulkner’s “Snopes” trilogy, we see the completion of the narrative that follows the rise of Flem Snopes from son of poor tenant farmer to bank president living in The Mansion.

Actually, the bank presidency was achieved by the end of the last novel, The Town....

Author	Erica Jong
ISBN	1585424994

This book charts the daily life of Erica Jong's alter ego, Isadora Wing, as she navigates her way through a maze of work, fans, friends, lovers, and an emotional vacuum of a husband. This is NYC in the 70's, and apparently everyone has a shrink, an avocado plant, and an affair. Isadora is no exception. Jong's...

Author	William Golding
ISBN	0571225462

Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground...

Author	C.P. Snow
ISBN	1842324284

'Time of Hope' is the first in narrative order (despite being published later than 'George Passant' and 'The Light and the Dark', in the 'Strangers and Brothers' series and tells the story of Lewis Eliot's early life.

As a child he is faced with his father's bankruptcy. As a young man, he finds...