The Ambassadors
10 best books like The Ambassadors (Henry James): The Ginger Man, A High Wind in Jamaica, The Alexandria Quartet, The Magnificent Ambersons, Zuleika Dobson, The Adventures of Augie March, Parade's End, Nostromo, U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money, The Way of All Flesh
| Author | J.P. Donleavy |
| ISBN | 0802137954 |
First published in Paris in 1955 and originally banned in America, J. P. Donleavy's first novel is now recognized the world over as a masterpiece and a modern classic of the highest order. Set in Ireland just after World War II, The Ginger Man is J. P. Donleavy's wildly funny, picaresque classic novel...
| Author | Richard Hughes |
| ISBN | 0940322153 |
New edition of a classic adventure novel and one of the most startling, highly praised stories in English literature - a brilliant chronicle of two sensitive children's violent voyage from innocence to experience.
After a terrible hurricane levels their Jamaican estate, the Bas-Thorntons...
| Author | Lawrence Durrell |
| ISBN | 0140153179 |
Lawrence Durrell's series of four novels set in Alexandria, Egypt during the 1940s. The lush and sensuous series consists of Justine(1957) Balthazar(1958) Mountolive(1958) Clea(1960).
Justine, Balthazar and Mountolive use varied viewpoints to relate a series of events in Alexandria before...
| Author | Booth Tarkington |
| ISBN | 1406935735 |
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson...
One woman's beauty fells the whole of Oxford in this sidesplitting classic campus novel.
Nobody could predict the consequences when ravishing Zuleika Dobson arrives at Oxford, to visit her grandfather, the college warden. Formerly a governess, she has landed on the occupation of prestidigitator,...
| Author | Saul Bellow |
| ISBN | 0143039571 |
Augie comes on stage with one of literature’s most famous opening lines. “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.” It’s the “Call me Ishmael” of mid-20th-century American...
| Author | Ford Madox Ford |
| ISBN | 0141186615 |
In creating his acclaimed masterpiece Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time . . . The 'subject' was the world as it culminated in the war. Published in four parts between 1924 and 1928, his extraordinary novel centers...
| Author | Joseph Conrad |
| ISBN | 0486424529 |
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad’s South American novel reminds me somehow of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, perhaps the setting of mines in South America.
The underlying political ideologies are also reminiscent to some extent on Rand’s objectivism, and both author’s guileless mistrust...
| 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 Butler |
| ISBN | 0486434664 |
Written between 1873 and 1884 and published posthumously in 1903, The Way of All Flesh is regarded by some as the first twentieth-century novel. Samuel Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood shines an iconoclastic light on the hypocrisy of a Victorian clerical...
| Author | Arnold Bennett |
| ISBN | 0375754903 |
H.G. Wells described The Old Wives' Tale as "by far the finest long novel written in English and in the English fashion". He was, of course, speaking for his own generation, and a hundred years later the opinion may seem somewhat exaggerated. However, there is no doubt that The Old Wives' Tale is a superb...
| Author | Anthony Powell |
| ISBN | 0226677184 |
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill...
| Author | Henry Green |
| ISBN | 0099285096 |
One of his most admired works, Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe, invading one another's provinces...
| Author | James T. Farrell |
| ISBN | 1931082553 |
An unparalleled example of American naturalism, the Studs Lonigan trilogy follows the hopes and dissipations of its remarkable main character, a would-be "tough guy" and archetypal adolescent, born to Irish-American parents on Chicago's South Side, through the turbulent years of World War I,...
| Author | John Cheever |
| ISBN | 0060528877 |
Meet the Wapshots of St Botolphs. There is Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea-dog and would-be suicide; his licentious older son, Moses; and Moses's adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, and partly based on Cheever's adolescence...
| Author | Aldous Huxley |
| ISBN | 1564781313 |
Aldous Huxley's lifelong concern with the dichotomy between passion and reason finds its fullest expression both thematically and formally in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. By presenting a vision of life in which diverse aspects of experience are observed simultaneously, Huxley characterizes...
| Author | Michael Gorra |
| ISBN | 0871404087 |
Henry James (1843 1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James 's masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady...
