Something to Answer For
10 best books like Something to Answer For (P.H. Newby): True History of the Kelly Gang, The Siege of Krishnapur, Heat and Dust, The Famished Road, Life and Times of Michael K, Offshore, Staying On, Hotel du Lac, The Old Devils, The Sea, The Sea
Author | Peter Carey |
ISBN | 0375724672 |
“I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.”
In True History of the Kelly Gang, the...
India, 1857--the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.
Farrell's story...
Author | Ruth Prawer Jhabvala |
ISBN | 1582430152 |
Set in colonial India during the 1920s, Heat and Dust tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an important English civil servant. Longing for passion and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of the Nawab, a...
Author | Ben Okri |
ISBN | 0385425139 |
In the decade since it won the Booker Prize, Ben Okri's Famished Road has become a classic. Like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, it combines brilliant narrative technique with a fresh vision to create an essential work of world literature.
The...
In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. Life and Times of Michael...
Author | Penelope Fitzgerald |
ISBN | 0006542565 |
On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the great river’s tides. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they cling to one another in a motley yet kindly society. There is...
Author | Paul Scott |
ISBN | 0099443198 |
Tusker and Lily Smalley stayed on in India. Given the chance to return 'home' when Tusker, once a Colonel in the British Army, retired, they chose instead to remain in the small hill town of Pangkot, with its eccentric inhabitants and archaic rituals left over from the days of the Empire. Only the tyranny...
Author | Anita Brookner |
ISBN | 0679759328 |
In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?" It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her...
Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining,...
Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor both professionally and personally, and to amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung...
Author | Roddy Doyle |
ISBN | 2264022442 |
I hate to be facetious about this, but it’s true. I love to read good books as much as I love to discover which ones are actual impostors—that is, which ones are overrated past the norm, books like “On the Road,” “Catcher in the Rye,” or anything by Ayn Rand. Yuck. Well, this one won the Booker,...
Author | Nadine Gordimer |
ISBN | 0140047166 |
Money doesn't buy happiness, and happiness doesn't buy safety.
During the South Africa's apartheid period, "Mehring" is one of many white business men, industrialist, powerful, very wealthy. In a sudden lordship impulse he acquires a country house, to escape the city on weekends. His life...
Author | Pat Barker |
ISBN | 0452276721 |
The final book in the Regeneration Trilogy, and winner of the 1995 Booker Prize
"The Ghost Road" is the culminating masterpiece of Pat Barker's towering World War I fiction trilogy. The time of the novel is the closing months of the most senselessly savage of modern conflicts. In France, millions...
Author | Graham Swift |
ISBN | 0330489674 |
Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea. For reasons best known to herself, Jack's widow, Amy, declines to join them. On the surface the tale of a simple if increasingly bizarre day's outing, Last Orders is Graham...
Author | Penelope Lively |
ISBN | 0802135331 |
The elderly Claudia Hampton, a best-selling author of popular history; lies alone in a London hospital bed. Memories of her life still glow in her fading consciousness, but she imagines writing a history of the world. Instead, Moon Tiger is her own history, the life of a strong, independent woman, with...
Author | William Golding |
ISBN | 0571209432 |
Well, William Golding, sir. You achieved something that not many men have done. You brought me very close to tears.
This novel really produced an amazingly strong emotional response in me. Odd, in that it keeps the reader at arm's length for much of Edmund Talbot's narrative. Young William is a prig...
Author | Bernice Rubens |
ISBN | 0349130221 |
Norman is the clever one of a close-knit Jewish family in the East End of London. Infant prodigy; brilliant barrister; the apple of his parents' eyes... until at forty-one he becomes a drug addict, confined to his bedroom, at the mercy of his hallucinations and paranoia.
For Norman, his committal...
Author | Barry Unsworth |
ISBN | 0393311147 |
Sacred Hunger is a stunning and engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed. Filled with the "sacred hunger" to expand its empire and its profits, England entered full into the slave trade and spread the trade throughout its colonies. In this Booker Prize-winning work, Barry Unsworth...
One Sunday morning in Glasgow, shoplifting ex-con Sammy awakens in an alley, wearing another man's shoes and trying to remember his two-day drinking binge. He gets in a scrap with some soldiers and revives in a jail cell, badly beaten and, he slowly discovers, completely blind. And things get worse:...
Author | Stanley Middleton |
ISBN | 0907123430 |
Edwin Fisher is on holiday at the English seaside - but this revisiting of childhood haunts is no ordinary holiday. Edwin is seeking to understand the failure of his marriage to Meg, but it turns out that her parents are staying at the same resort - whether by accident or design - and are keen to patch up the...
Author | John Berger |
ISBN | 0679736549 |
In this luminous novel — winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize — John Berger relates the story of "G.," a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of this century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and...
Author | David Storey |
ISBN | 0380018896 |
Saville centers around Colin, a young boy growing up in the fictional Yorkshire mining village of Saxton during the Second World War and the postwar years.
This is the story of a miner's son, and his growth from the 1930s on, his rise in the world by way of grammar school and college. At first there...
Author | V.S. Naipaul |
ISBN | 1400030552 |
No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread,...
Author | William Trevor |
ISBN | 0140107487 |
This is another very quirky book from the 1970 Booker shortlist - another book with comic elements and a dark human story at its centre, which is clearly something the judges that year liked, as both the winner The Elected Member and Eva Trout have similarities.
The setting for this one is O'Neill's...