Sour Sweet

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	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	Elizabeth Jenkins
ISBN	0860682722

The magnetic Evelyn Gresham, 52, is a barrister of considerable distinction. He has everything life could offer -- a gracious riverside house in Berkshire, a beautiful young wife, Imogen, who is devoted to him, and their 11-year-old son, a replica of his father.

Their nearest neighbor is...

Author	Antonia White
ISBN	0860680495

4.5 stars
This is an autobiographical novel about life in a Catholic Girls school, quite closely based on White’s own life. Like the protagonist of the novel, Nanda, White was a Catholic convert at the age of nine and was sent to a school very like the one in the book. Nanda wants to be a good Catholic...

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	John Fuller
ISBN	0907540279

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Flying to Nowhere is a modern Gothic novel with spiritual overtones that open out a set of classic novelistic quests. Set on a remote Welsh island during the Middle Ages, the tale is woven around two main characters&emdash;Vane, an emissary sent...

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	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	Gerard Woodward
ISBN	0393328007

Colette Jones has had problems of her own with alcohol, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to booze. Her oldest son, Janus, the family's golden boy, has wasted his talents as a concert pianist. His drinking sprees with his brother-in-law, Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket...

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	Alice Thomas Ellis
ISBN	0140067043

My 2nd foray into AT Ellis's world. Not wholly satisfying. . .

Valentine is my favorite - unflappable and sure in her belief, an infinity symbol of philosophical circularity that assures salvation (and makes a pretty cute bracelet if so bended metallically around a wrist).

The other...

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	Isaac Bashevis Singer
ISBN	0374149003

The Estate is the second part of the Manor. Heroes of Manor get old, move to other countries, struggle and die. Singer shows the magic of life on the example of his people - Jews and their hart fate in Russia, Prussia, France in the end of 19th and begining of 20th ceturies. The book is very entertaining and...

Author	Michèle Roberts
ISBN	1853816000

Man Booker Prize Nominee (1992)

Booker Prize Finalist, Daughters of the House is Michèle Roberts' acclaimed novel of secrets and lies revealed in the aftermath of World War II. Thérèse and Leonie, French and English cousins of the same age, grow up together in Normandy. Intrigued by parents'...

Author	Jan Morris
ISBN	0394532627

Hav is like no place on earth. Rumored to be the site of Troy, captured during the crusades and recaptured by Saladin, visited by Tolstoy, Hitler, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, this Mediterranean city-state is home to several architectural marvels and an annual rooftop race that is a feat of athleticism...