Injury Time
10 best books like Injury Time (Beryl Bainbridge): The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, The Queen of the Tambourine, How Far Can You Go?, Theory of War, The Chymical Wedding, The Old Jest, Picture Palace, The Children of Dynmouth, Docherty (Coronet Books), The Bird of Night
| Author | Iris Murdoch |
| ISBN | 0140041117 |
Swinging between his wife and his mistress in the sacred and profane love machine and between the charms of morality and the excitements of sin, the psychotherapist, Blaise Gavender, sometimes wishes he could divide himself in two. Instead, he lets loose misery and confusion and—for the spectators...
| Author | Jane Gardam |
| ISBN | 0349102260 |
What is truly amazing about this book is how all the different pieces hold together! I would say that this is what characterizes Gardam’s books.
We are given a complicated puzzle that is begging to be solved. For people who love solving puzzles or mysteries, it is a must read.
When...
| 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...
"[A] vivid historical novel--part poignant biographical fiction, part raw frontier epic."
TIME
Taking flight from an extraordinary real-life family history, here is a riveting novel of how the past lives on, generation after generation. THEORY OF WAR is the richly imagined story of one...
| Author | Lindsay Clarke |
| ISBN | 0449001180 |
I read this last December and enjoyed it immensely. It had been recommended to me twenty years ago, and finally I have been able to get to it. I could easily give it five stars, but then I would be only thinking of myself. Truth is, Clarke is a bit verbose for some tastes. And though I prefer more minimalist,...
| Author | Jennifer Johnston |
| ISBN | 0140106987 |
4★
This begins as a light-hearted, affectionate look at a young girl growing up in Ireland in 1920, after the end of WW1, but her childish, secret adventure turns serious and shows the dark divisions in Ireland.
Nancy was orphaned very young and has been raised in a friendly, loving household...
| Author | Paul Theroux |
| ISBN | 0140050728 |
World-famous photographer Maude Coffin Pratt has pointed her lens at the beautiful, obscure, and obscene, and at the private places and public parts of the famous, from Gertrude Stein to Graham Greene. When the seventy-year-old Maude rummages through her archives in preparation for a triumphant...
| Author | William Trevor |
| ISBN | 0140047182 |
CONTAINS SPOILERS
The main character comes across at first as a special ed kid, but as the story evolves we see that he is truly mentally disturbed. He’s an older teenager who is cast aside by his family. He has no father and his mother and older sister are good buddies, laughing, smoking, eating...
| Author | William McIlvanney |
| ISBN | 0340407573 |
His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.
Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his...
| Author | Susan Hill |
| ISBN | 0140040722 |
Francis Croft, the greatest poet of his age, was mad. His world was a nightmare of internal furies and haunting poetic vision. Harvey Lawson watched and protected him until his final suicide. From his solitary old age Harvey writes this brief account of their twenty years together and then burns all...
| Author | Paul Sayer |
| ISBN | 0340508043 |
(Winner of the 1988 Whitbread Award, The Comforts of Madness is narrated by a catatonic who never speaks. To the rest of the world he is an inert body and is subjected to a variety of experiments, but his own consciousness is vital and reflective. This novel draws attention to the fact that we can never really...
| Author | Elizabeth Bowen |
| ISBN | 1400034795 |
In 1914, three eleven-year-old girls buried a box in a thicket on the coast of England, shortly before World War I sent their lives on divergent paths. Nearly fifty years later, a series of mysteriously-worded classified ads brings the women reluctantly together again. Dinah has grown from a chubby,...
A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women
| Author | Amy L. Clark |
| ISBN | 0978984838 |
Fiction. The four chapbooks collected in A PECULIAR FEELING OF RESTLESSNESS, three of them finalists and one of them the winner of the Rose Metal Press first annual short short chapbook contest, all revel in the succinctness of their form, the underlying tension anchored beneath each story of 1,000...
Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty
| Author | Lacey Baldwin Smith |
| ISBN | 0897330560 |
This was not really a biography but more of a study of Henry VIII.A study that mostly succeeds in showing who Henry was behind all the glamour and majesty that was kingship in the Tudor era.Henry was a king,some say a monster but ultimately he was just a man caught up in the power and drama that became his life...
| Author | Margaret Drabble |
| ISBN | 0140029338 |
An interesting book, but very much a period piece. At heart it is another rites of passage story about a young woman from the North breaking away from her family and making a new life for herself in London, but it is also very rooted in Britain's class divisions.
The heroine Clara Maugham comes...
The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War
| Author | Eileen Welsome |
| ISBN | 0385319541 |
When the vast wartime factories of the Manhattan Project began producing plutonium in quantities never before seen on earth, scientists working on the top-secret bomb-building program grew apprehensive. Fearful that plutonium might cause a cancer epidemic among workers and desperate...
| Author | Howard Jacobson |
| ISBN | 0099452030 |
In an ever divided Britain, this wryly observed novel is a timely and thought-provoking read from the Booker-winning author of The Finkler Question.
'A very funny, bitterly intelligent novel...do read it' Malcolm Bradbury
Sefton Goldberg: mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley...
| Author | John Szwed |
| ISBN | 0786884967 |
A vital tool in understanding and appreciating jazz -- introducing the key figures, theory, and the controversies that shaped it development -- that explores how it became North America's most popular music in less than fifty years.
Often called America's only original art form, jazz is also...
| Author | Andre Norton |
| ISBN | 0765352990 |
Enter a world of ancient magic
When his father is called to active duty in Vietnam, Cory Alder is sent to spend the summer with his adopted Native American uncle, Jasper. Accustomed to life in the city, Cory finds the reality of the ranch scary—every shadow is full of menace. But when an encounter...
| Author | Sigrid Nunez |
| ISBN | 1594487669 |
From the critically acclaimed author of "The Last of Her Kind", a breakout novel that imagines the aftermath of pandemic flu, as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy uncertain of his destiny.
His family's sole survivor after a flu pandemic has killed large numbers of people worldwide,...
| Author | Aliza Marcus |
| ISBN | 0814757111 |
The Kurds, who number some 28 million people in the Middle East, have no country they can call their own. Long ignored by the West, Kurds are now highly visible actors on the world's political stage. More than half live in Turkey, where the Kurdish struggle has gained new strength and attention since the...
| Author | William G. Dever |
| ISBN | 0802844162 |
This book addresses one of the most timely and urgent topics in archaeology and biblical studies -- the origins of early Israel. For centuries the Western tradition has traced its beginnings back to ancient Israel, but recently some historians and archaeologists have questioned the reality of Israel...
| Author | Rosemary Horrox |
| ISBN | 0719034981 |
From 1348 to 1350 Europe was devastated by an epidemic that left between a third and one half of the population dead. This source book traces, through contemporary writings, the calamitous impact of the Black Death in Europe, with a particular emphasis on its spread across England from 1348 to 1349....
| Author | Larry Duplechan |
| ISBN | 1551522020 |
First published by St. Martin’s in 1986, Blackbird is a funny, moving, gay coming-of-age novel about growing up black and gay in Southern California. The lead character, Johnnie Ray Rousseau, is a high school student upset at losing the lead role in the school staging of Romeo and Juliet; if that weren’t...
