I'll Go to Bed at Noon

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	Achmat Dangor
ISBN	0802170064

With the publication of Kafka's Curse, Achmat Dangor established himself as an utterly singular voice in South African fiction. His new novel, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award, is a clear-eyed, witty, yet deeply serious look at South Africa's political history...

Author	Ivy Compton-Burnett
ISBN	0940322633

At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin....

Author	F.M. Mayor
ISBN	0860689115

Dedmayne Rectory is quietly decaying, its striped chintz and darkened rooms are a bastion of outmoded Victorian values. Here Mary has spent thirty-five years, devoting herself to her sister, now dead, and to her father, Canon Jocelyn. Although she is pitied by her neighbours for this muted existence,...

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...

Author	Molly Keane
ISBN	1844083241

I do know how to behave - believe me, because I know. I have always known...'

Behind the gates of Temple Alice the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy...

Author	Brian O'Doherty
ISBN	1885983395

In a London pub in the 1950s, editor William Maginn is intrigued by a reference to the reputedly shameful demise of a remote mountain village in Kerry, Ireland, where he was born. Maginn returns to Kerry and uncovers an astonishing tale: both the account of the destruction of a place and a way of life which...

Author	May Sinclair
ISBN	0860682439

Author, poet, critic, and suffragist Mary Amelia St. Clair was a contemporary of and acquainted with Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West, among others. She served as an ambulance driver in World War I, and produced poetry and fiction based on it. Her novel...

Author	Michael Collins
ISBN	0743218035

The last of a manufacturing dynasty in a dying industrial town, Bill lives alone in the family mansion and works for the "Truth," the moribund local paper. He yearns to write long philosophical pieces about the American dream gone sour, not the flaccid write-ups of bake-off contests demanded by the...

Author	Henry Handel Richardson
ISBN	0848259637

Set in Australia during the gold-mining boom, this remarkable trilogy is one of the classics of Australian literature.
Henry Handel Richardson’s great literary achievement, comprising the novels Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima Thule, weaves together many themes. Richard Mahony,...

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

J.B. Priestley

Probably the most popular of Priestley's novels, The Good Companions was an instant best-seller when it was first published in July 1929, and, while JBP came to feel its success subsequently overshadowed many more important works, the book has remained popular. It was his third novel and it is certainly...

Author	Ron Butlin
ISBN	0862411262

Morris Magellan has a house in the suburbs, nice wife and kids. But Morris is also a chronic alcoholic, heading fast towards self-destruction. Morris is not hoping to meet Ms. Right and acquire the two kids that will straighten everything out. He already has all this and it hasn't kept him off the bottle....

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	Piers Paul Read
ISBN	0380551039

John Strickland is a middle-aged barrister with a wife, Clare, and two children. Staying with his parents-in-law at their house in Norfolk, he reads Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Illych, and this precipitates a mid-life crisis. What has happened to his youthful ideals to do good in the...

Author	L.P. Hartley
ISBN	0571203825

Oh, L.P. Hartley, why are you forgotten?

This is the second Hartley book I've read (the first was The Go-Between), and if anything this one was even better. Both of the books take a double view, with a main character seeing things from childhood and the reader having access to what the adult world...

Author	Cora Sandel
ISBN	0821407562

But a wound opened inside. Delight and melancholy welled up simultaneously from the depths of her mind. She could not understand why nor protect herself from them. They streamed over her together with the light, making her shrink with painful impatience. Tears came, God knows how. One moment she was...

Author	Paul Hornschemeier
ISBN	1560976535

The Three Paradoxes is an intricate and complex autobiographical comic by one of the most talented and innovative young cartoonists today. The story begins with a story inside the story: the cartoon character Paul Hornschemeier is trying to finish a story called "Paul and the Magic Pencil." Paul has...

Author	Sybille Bedford
ISBN	0141188057

The Kaiser's Germany is the setting of Sybille Bedford's first and best-known novel, in which two families -- one from solid, upholstered Jewish Berlin, the other from the somnolent, agrarian Catholic South -- become comically, tragically, irrevocably intertwined. "Each family," writes the author,...

Author	William Trevor
ISBN	0140287825

A New York Times Bestseller and Notable Book
From the winner of the 1999 David Cohen British Literature Prize comes an unforgettably chilling novel, written with the compassion and artistry that define Trevor's fiction.
There were three deaths that summer. The first was Letitia's, sudden...

Author	Madeleine St. John
ISBN	0786706791

Nicola only went to buy cigarettes and upon returning finds a stranger in her apartment. He looks like her live-in boyfriend, Jonathan, but he can't actually be the dependable known quantity whom Nicola loves that goes by the name of Jonathan. Can he? Before Nicola stands a man who is strong and adorable...

Author	Andrew Miller
ISBN	0340728264

Oxygen

Andrew Miller

Having enjoyed Andrew Miller’s beautifully crafted prose in ‘Pure’ it wasn’t surprising to discover the same elegantly perceptive writing in “Oxygen” except that my enjoyment was heightened by the sensitive unravelling of his characters facing...

Author

Louise Dean

After more than half a century of marriage, Dorothy and George are embarking on their first journey abroad together. Three decades younger, Jan and Annemieke are taking their last, as illness and incompatibility bring their unhappy union to an end. At first the luxury of a Caribbean resort is no match...

Author	Michael Redhill
ISBN	0385659504

“There is a vast part of this city with mouths buried in it . . . . Mouths capable of speaking to us. But we stop them up with concrete and build over them and whatever it is they wanted to say gets whispered down empty alleys and turns into wind. . . .”

These are among the last words of Professor David...

Author	John Bemrose
ISBN	0719566703

A stunning debut novel of power and grace that tells the story of a family that slips from fortune's favour in a southwestern Ontario mill town during the mid-1960s

Within a bend in the Attawan River lies the Island, a small neighbourhood of white-washed houses and vine-freighted fences, black...