Lucky Jim

Author	Saul Bellow
ISBN	0142437298

This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around him - he has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost the affection of his wife to his best friend - Herzog sees himself as a survivor, both of his private disasters...

Author	Martin Amis
ISBN	0099461889

Here to Stay

The enduring legacy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher isn’t conservatism as a political programme but narcissism as a mode of living. As the aptly named John Self says in Money, “You just gave us some money... but you hate me, don’t you. Yes you do. Because I’m the new...

Author	Evelyn Waugh
ISBN	0141187492

Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of the "Daily Beast", has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another. Acting on a dinner-party tip from Mrs Algernon Smith,...

Author	Graham Greene
ISBN	0099478471

A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. Greene's gripping thriller, exposes a world of loneliness and fear,...

Author	Martin Amis
ISBN	0099748614

Samson Young, first-person narrator of this Martin Amis novel, is a somewhat jaded, frequently sarcastic and acerbic 40-something intellectual literary writer from, not surprisingly, New York City. But his hard-edged Big Apple voice is absolutely pitch-perfect for the story he...

Author	Evelyn Waugh
ISBN	0316926345

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian...

Author	Stella Gibbons
ISBN	0143039598

Update I've just watched the film. It's even better than the book, by a long way. It's very affectionate, and very much played for gentle laughs. The cast is fantastic, some of the best actresses around including Eileen Atkins and Joanna Ab Fab Lumley, Stephen Fry and Ian McKellan. The attention to detail...

Author	Alan Sillitoe
ISBN	0452269091

To Arthur Seaton, Key worker on a lathe in a Nottingham cycle factory, life is one long battle with authority. You don't need to give Arthur more than one chance to do the Government or trick the foreman.

And when the day's work is over, Arthur is off to the pubs, raring for adventure. He is a warrior...

Author	David Lodge
ISBN	0140170987

Changing Places is the first of David Lodge's "Campus" series, this one being set in 1969 and published in 1975. The sexual revolution, Vietnam, student sit-ins and smoking "pot" are all highly topical themes; the novel is pure "psychedelic '60's." The style is redolent of Lodge's dry, sardonic humour,...

Author	Randall Jarrell
ISBN	0226393747

Beneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women’s college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits. Randall Jarrell’s classic novel was originally published to overwhelming critical acclaim in 1954, forging...

Author	Evelyn Waugh
ISBN	0316926051

Laced with cynicism and truth, "A Handful of Dust" satirizes a certain stratum of English life where all the characters have wealth, but lack practically every other credential. Murderously urbane, it depicts the breakup of a marriage in the London gentry, where the errant wife suffers from terminal...

Author	Iris Murdoch
ISBN	0140014454

Jake Donaghue, garrulous artist, meets Hugo Belfounder, silent philosopher.

Jake, hack writer and sponger, now penniless flat-hunter, seeks out an old girlfriend, Anna Quentin, and her glamorous actress sister, Sadie. He resumes acquaintance with formidable Hugo, whose ‘philosophy’...

Author

David Storey

The north of England in the 1950s, Arthur (not that other great Northern bellower given to us by Alan Sillitoe) wants out of the flat on your back, working yourself to death, working class lifestyle that he was born in to and the only way he can see to escape is through excelling at sport. He's got some physicality...