Sybil, or the Two Nations
10 best books like Sybil, or the Two Nations (Benjamin Disraeli): Nightmare Abbey, The Way We Live Now, The Riddle of the Sands, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, The Black Sheep, Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady, U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money, Malone Dies, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, The Bottle Factory Outing
| Author | Thomas Love Peacock |
This 1818 novel is set in a former abbey whose owner, Christopher Glowry, is host to visitors who enjoy his hospitality and engage in endless debate. Among these guests are figures recognizable to Peacock's contemporaries, including characters based on Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Mr....
| Author | Anthony Trollope |
| ISBN | 1853262552 |
”There are a thousand little silly softnesses which are pretty and endearing between acknowledged lovers, with which no woman would like to dispense, to which even men who are in love submit sometimes with delight; but which in other circumstances would be vulgar,— and to the woman distasteful....
| Author | Erskine Childers |
| ISBN | 0812966147 |
While on a sailing trip in the Baltic Sea, two young adventurers-turned-spies uncover a secret German plot to invade England. Written by Childers—who served in the Royal Navy during World War I—as a wake-up call to the British government to attend to its North Sea defenses, The Riddle of the Sands...
On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently eccentric and endlessly curious, living off crumbs of affection and snippets of gossip. Together, upper lips stiffened,...
| Author | Honoré de Balzac |
| ISBN | 0140442375 |
The novel begins in 1792 with a long and rather dull preamble givinge history to the Rouget family, and as it happens this is vital to understanding the last part of the tale. Agathe Rouget is the daughter of a rather nasty doctor, that seems to be putting it mildly, and Balzac laces the tale of Doctor Rouget...
| Author | Samuel Richardson |
| ISBN | 0140432159 |
Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage...
| Author | John Dos Passos |
| ISBN | 1883011140 |
In the novels that make up the U.S.A.trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—Dos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their...
| Author | Samuel Beckett |
| ISBN | 0802151175 |
Written and published in French in 1951, and in Samuel Beckett’s English translation in 1956, Malone Dies is the second of his immediate post-war novels, written during what Beckett later referred to as ‘the siege in the room’.
‘Malone’, writes Malone, ‘is what I am called now.’...
| Author | Walter Scott |
| ISBN | 0140431292 |
Early in 1817 Scott received in an unsigned letter the seed of The Heart of Mid-Lothian and began immediately to shape from historical fact the story of Jeanie Deans, a dairymaid who, while refusing to lie to save her sister’s life, journeys to London to beg for a reprieve. Set in the 1730s in a Scotland...
| Author | Beryl Bainbridge |
| ISBN | 0786701463 |
Ten cheers for Beryl, I intend to read everything by her eventually. Her career was a major successful brow-swerve - she wasn't highbrow, lowbrow or middlebrow, she just banged along on her rickety typewriter smoking 25 ciggies per hour and coughing her lungs out, entirely in her own bubble, and such...
If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.
Inflated Footnotes: "Lanark - A Life in Four Books" by Alasdair Gray
(Original Review, 1981-03-10)
I don't have problem with intertextual interpretation as such. It's only that...
| Author | Stevie Smith |
| ISBN | 0811212394 |
Sometimes it's not what a book is about that keeps me reading, but how it's written. The trouble is, it's much harder to talk about how a book is written than to simply tell what it's about.
About, about. There are a lot of 'abouts' in the beginning of this review, aren't there? But 'about' is a word...
| Author | Anthony Powell |
| ISBN | 1557132844 |
Afternoon Men follows the trivial encounters and idle pastimes of the social set through William Atwater. With a glee in upending pretense that rivals the works of Max Beerbohm and Evelyn Waugh, Powell attacks artistic pretension, aristocratic jadedness, and the dark side of the glamorous life.Afternoon...
| Author | Arnold Bennett |
| ISBN | 0140009973 |
Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was a British writer. He went to work for his father but was unhappy working for his father and earning very little money. The theme of parental miserliness occurs in his works. At 21 he went to London to clerk for a solicitor. He then began working for a magazine called Women....
| Author | Andrew O'Hagan |
| ISBN | 0156029677 |
Growing up on the Scottish Isle of Bute, Maria Tambini is a young girl with dreams of escape from her Italian immigrant family. When her amazing singing voice wins her a talent show at the tender age of thirteen, she is whisked off to London and instant stardom.
But even as Maria is celebrating...
| Author | Stan Barstow |
| ISBN | 0140016694 |
All about love, lust, and loneliness, the book introduces Vic Brown, a young working-class Yorkshireman. Vic is attracted to the beautiful but demanding Ingrid, and as their relationship grows and changes, he comes to terms the hard way with adult life and what it really means to love. The influence...
| Author | Julian Maclaren-Ross |
| ISBN | 0141187115 |
An interesting novel set in 1939 in the months before the start of war. It opens a window of an England now mostly disappeared; landladies, jobs easy to get and lots of smoking!!. However the themes of love and loss are eternal. The shadow of war is ever present. The main character isn't likeable but the...
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...
In Hanky Park, near Salford, Harry and Sally Hardcastle grow up in a society preoccupied with grinding poverty, exploited by bookies and pawnbrokers, bullied by petty officials and living in constant fear of the dole queue and the Means Test. His love affair with a local girl ends in a shotgun marriage,...
| Author | William Cobbett |
| ISBN | 0140435794 |
Between 1821 and 1836 William Cobbett toured the southern English countryside by foot and on horseback, and Rural Rides is his remarkable account of what he saw. A prolific writer and journalist of genius, Cobbett matured into a radical left-wing politician, and a farmer who ensured his labourers...
| Author | Susan Ferrier |
| ISBN | 0192838938 |
Marriage (1818) is the shrewdly observant tale of a young woman's struggles with parental authority and courtship. Like her contemporaries, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, Susan Ferrier adopts an ideal of rational domesticity, illustrating the virtues of a reasonable heroine who learns to act...
| Author | Georges Arnaud |
| ISBN | 2266128590 |
Las Piedras, port d'échouage. Ils sont des centaines, venus d'on ne sait où, oublier sous les tropiques l'impasse de leur existence. Pour une poignée de dollars, ces sans-grade sont prêts à tout. Prêts à affronter des kilomètres de piste impraticables, au volant d'un camion délabré, pour...
