Sweet Dreams
10 best books like Sweet Dreams (Michael Frayn): The Sound of His Horn, The Glamour, The Unlimited Dream Company, The Anti-Death League, The Mandelbaum Gate, Falstaff, The Old Men at the Zoo, The Disenchanted, The Fox in the Attic, Fourth Mansions
| Author | Sarban |
| ISBN | 0722176511 |
Alan Querdilion, a young naval lieutenant, is captured by the Germans and wakes up in a hospital bed - more than 100 years later. The Germans have won the war, and the Third Reich stretches from the Urals to the Atlantic. Non Aryans are bred as slaves. Deprived of speech and intelligence by the surgeon's...
| Author | Christopher Priest |
| ISBN | 0575075791 |
Cameraman Richard Grey's memory has blanked out the few weeks before he was injured in a car bomb explosion. When he is visited by a girl who seems to have been his lover, his attempts to recall the forgotten period produce an odyssey through France and conflicting accounts of what happened. When Susan...
| Author | J.G. Ballard |
| ISBN | 0871404192 |
When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is transformed. Vultures invade rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet...
| Author | Kingsley Amis |
| ISBN | 0575008156 |
Brian Leonard, a Monty Python of secret agents, meets James Churchill, a young officer at an English army base where preparations are under way for Operation Apollo. To complicate matters, Churchill has gone round-the-bend for a parole from the mental ward. Thrown amongst these loose cannons is a...
| Author | Muriel Spark |
| ISBN | 1566492262 |
To rendezvous with her archeologist fiance in Jordan, Barbara Vaughn must first pass through the Mandelbaum Gate--which divides strife-torn Jerusalem. A half-jewish convert to Catholicism, an Englishwoman of strong and stubborn convictions, Barbara will not be dissuaded from her ill-timed...
The most beloved comic figure in English literature decides that history hasn't done him justice -- it's time for him to tell the whole unbuttoned story, his way. Irascible and still lecherous at eighty-one, Falstaff spins out these outrageously bawdy memoirs as an antidote to legend, and in the process...
| 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 | Budd Schulberg |
| ISBN | 0850315204 |
Halliday won his success as a writer - and won the wife who loved him - after the First War. Then came the wild Twenties and years of high-pressure speakeasy carousing. Halliday was attractive, Halliday was charming, Halliday was weak. He flashed through the skies like a comet.
This overwhelmingly...
| Author | Richard Hughes |
| ISBN | 0940322293 |
A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." Set in the early 1920s, the book centers on Augustine, a young man from an aristocratic Welsh family who has come of age...
| Author | R.A. Lafferty |
| ISBN | 0441245900 |
Fourth Mansions was inspired by Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle, & contains quotations from the book, which quotations Lafferty uses as chapter headings. The Interior Castle is a metaphor for an individual's soul; its different rooms, different states of the soul. In the middle of the Castle...
| Author | Joy Chant |
| ISBN | 0345021789 |
When I was a young girl Joy Chant was part of the triarchy from whom I bought and read everything I could get my hands on (the other two being Joan D. Vinge and Elizabeth A. Lynn). So I thought it was about time after all those years to get re-acquainted with my childhood dreams.
As things turned out...
| Author | Thomas Burnett Swann |
| ISBN | 0583123945 |
Lost Monsters
Thea watched their torch-bearing captors recede into the distance and leave them to the cave's darkness. Her brother Icarus whispered "forgive me - I wanted to come to the Country of the Beasts, not to the Cave of the Minotaur".
Then they heard the soft padding of feet...
| Author | Phyllis Eisenstein |
| ISBN | 0345276426 |
"This is the story about a boy whose mother is a sorceress who uses spiders to make magic. The boy does not know his father and was told he died. He goes in search for him and to learn about himself. He does not want to be a sorcerer, but a knight like his father. He does not know that his father was really a sorcerer....
| Author | Brian Moore |
| ISBN | 0452278678 |
When an appalling boating accident off the coast of Nice allegedly kills Dr. Alex Davenport, his attractive young wife Marie finds herself in the ironic position of widow of a husband she had been planning to leave for another man. But Alex's body suddenly disappears from the morgue, and his plane ticket...
| Author | Brian W. Aldiss |
| ISBN | 0061000639 |
Charmed Malacia! In the wilderness beyond its fortress walls, in dreary chasm, tangled forest, or endless mountainside, the forces of many kinds of evil struggled for supremacy. Within our winding streets serenity seemed to prevail.
"seemed" is the key word in this brief introduction...
| Author | Nadine Gordimer |
| ISBN | 0140056149 |
Liz Van Den Sandt's ex-husband, Max, an ineffectual rebel, has drowned himself. In prison for a failed act of violence against the government, he had betrayed his colleagues. Now Liz has been asked to perform a direct service for the black nationalist movement, at considerable danger to herself. Can...
| Author | L.P. Hartley |
| ISBN | 0241901685 |
The dystopian society that emerges after World War Three is based on a collective sense of guilt. Citizens of this new world, officially labelled 'delinquents' by their Dictator, are named after murderers and are obliged to wear sackcloth and ashes. Individualism is stamped out. Privilege, which...
| Author | Mordecai Richler |
| ISBN | 0771075103 |
In the swinging culture of sixties’ London, Canadian Mortimer Griffin is a beleaguered editor adrift in a sea of hypocrisy and deceit. Alone in a world where nobody shares his values but everyone wants the same things, Mortimer must navigate the currents of these changing times. Richler’s eccentric...
| Author | Rex Warner |
| ISBN | 1566630258 |
First published in 1941, The Aerodrome is one of the few works of fiction in the twentieth century to understand the dangerous yet glamorous appeal of fascism and the less than satisfactory answer of traditional democracy - and to transmute their deadly opposition into terms of enduring art. Rex Warner...
| Author | William Kotzwinkle |
| ISBN | 1569247870 |
synopsis: a noirish adventure in Europe, mid-19th century. The psychic Lazare captivates the upper classes of Paris. The redoubtable Inspector Picard is less than captivated.
William Kotzwinkle is perhaps most well-known for his World Fantasy Award-winning novel Doctor Rat, or for his...
Perhaps I should say why I have read this book in the first place: Rudy Rucker is a mathematician, a set theorist to be precise, and this book, his opera prima, was written around a central theme: infinity. To write fiction trying to convey Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers is no minor feat, and that...
| Author | Bernard Malamud |
| ISBN | 0374528829 |
With a new introduction by Thomas Mallon
Dubin's Lives (1979) is a compassionate and wry commedia, a book praised by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times as Malamud's "best novel since The Assistant. Possibly, it is the best he has written of all."
Its protagonist is one...
| Author | A.E. van Vogt |
| ISBN | 0881847887 |
This is a short novel, even for A.E. van Vogt works.
The description on the book is pulp-fiction standard, and the story is relatively simple with a few characters. It is a good quick read.
The rating might be not so good(3.41 when I write this review), but it is not overrated by zealous...
| Author | James Blish |
| ISBN | 0671698605 |
This is an omnibus book of the novella Black Easter and its sequel The Day After Judgement. What Stoker's Dracula and King's Salem's Lot is to vampires, The Devil's Day is to demons. Blish said in his Author's Note to Black Easter that every one of the "novels, poems and plays about magic and witchcraft"...
