Picture Palace

Author	Pauline Melville
ISBN	1582340269

Pauline Melville conjures up vivid pictures both of savanna and forest and of city life in South America where love is often trumped by disaster. Unforgettable characters illuminate theme and plot: Sonny, the strange, beautiful and isolate son of Beatrice and Danny, the brother and sister who have...

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	A.L. Kennedy
ISBN	0224077864

Ms Kennedy should have a category of her own with different coloured stars, or the option to have the stars squared, 3D at the very least. She's a writer who expects a lot of her reader, and I like that. The opening chapter of this novel is a struggle, even the second time round it's not a smooth ride, no familiar...

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

Joan Brady

"[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	Nicholas Mosley
ISBN	1564782425

-- A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student of physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jewess and political radical. Together and apart, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which...

Author	Patrick Neate
ISBN	0802140564

This rich and epic novel is written with each chapter a phrase of a twelve bar blues structure, each of the different pieces of the harmonic progression coordinating with a different storyline.

The book begins with a Prologue set in the mythical Afican kingdom of Zimindo in 1790, where two young...

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	Beryl Bainbridge
ISBN	0349116113

"He almost took the wrong turning at the next roundabout. Muriel remained silent but pointed a contemptuous finger, at the last moment, in the correct direction"

Its that little clause at the last moment that captures the delight of this odd awkward story. The awkwardness is not of the writing,...

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	Robert Irwin
ISBN	1585673862

Set in London, Paris, and Munich in the 1940s and 1950s, Exquisite Corpse is, like Irwin’s cult classic, The Arabian Nightmare, a novel about the strange and ever-morphing powers of the imagination. At once a love story, a mystery, and an investigation into the ideas of absurdist art, "Irwin's novel...

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	Sonya Hartnett
ISBN	0670865036

This book is so hard for me to rate - on one hand Sonia Hartnett's writing is stunning and I love how this is like an Aussie version of Faulkner's The Sound and the fury, one of my all time favourite novels. I'd go as far to say that Hartnett's writing is right up there with the greats. I just found that firstly,...

Author	Bob Shacochis
ISBN	0802140599

A calypso singer named Lord Short Shoe consorts with a vampish black singer to bilk an American out of his pride and his only companion-a monkey. An entire island bureaucracy casually confounds the attempts of Tillman, a hotel owner, in his attempt to get his dead mother out of the freezer and into a real...

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	Raphael Selbourne
ISBN	0955647673

Beauty - in both name and appearance - is a twenty-year-old Bangladeshi, back in
England having disgraced her family by fleeing an abusive arranged marriage. Forced onto
the jobseeker's treadmill and under extreme domestic pressure, she cracks and runs away.
Her encounters with officialdom,...

Author	Jason Burke
ISBN	0141024356

From the bestselling author of Al-Qaeda, Jason Burke's On the Road to Kandahar reveals the true face of Islam in an age of global conflict.

In the summer of 1991 Jason Burke set off to join Kurdish guerillas fighting in Iraq. It was the start of a remarkable journey that would take him from the sands...

Author	Patrick Bishop
ISBN	0007257783

Afghanistan, Summer 2006. This is war.

Afghanistan in the summer of 2006. In blazing heat in remote outposts the 3 Para battlegroup is pitted against a stubborn enemy who keep on coming. Until now, the full story of what happened there has not been told. This is it.

In April 2006, the...

Author	Drew Pinsky
ISBN	0060096551

Dr. Drew Pinsky is best known as the cohost of the long-running radio advice program Loveline. But his workday is spent at a major Southern California clinic, treating the severest cases of drug dependency and psychiatric breakdown. In this riveting book, Pinsky reveals the intimate and often shocking...