The Bottle Factory Outing
10 best books like The Bottle Factory Outing (Beryl Bainbridge): Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, The Black Sheep, The History Man, Pictures from an Institution, Sybil, or the Two Nations, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, The Ascent Of Rum Doodle, Ennui, The Harpole Report, Augustus Carp, Esq. by Himself, Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man
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 | Malcolm Bradbury |
| ISBN | 0099149109 |
[4.5] For 25 years I'd mistakenly conflated Malcolm Bradbury with old Catholic tut-tutter Malcolm Muggeridge (arguably the male Mary Whitehouse) and as a result I'd missed out on some awesome fun in this book. I'd always been a little bemused as to why Bradbury was mentioned alongside more famous writers...
| Author | Randall Jarrell |
| ISBN | 0226393747 |
Beneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women’s college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits. Randall Jarrell’s classic novel was originally published to overwhelming critical acclaim in 1954, forging...
| Author | Benjamin Disraeli |
| ISBN | 0809594447 |
The book is a roman à thèse, or a novel with a thesis -- which was meant to create a furor over the squalor that was plaguing England's working class cities. The general reader whose attention has not been specially drawn to the subject which these volumes aim to illustrate, the Condition of the People,...
| Author | Eric Hodgins |
| ISBN | 0743262328 |
The classic tale of leaving the city and building a house in the country, only to find country life isn't so simple. But it is hilarious. Mr. Blandings, a successful New York advertising executive, and his wife want to escape the confines of their tiny midtown apartment. They design the perfect home in...
First published in 1956, The Ascent of Rum Doodle quickly became established as a mountaineering classic. As an outrageously funny spoof about the ascent of a 40,000-and-a-half-foot peak, many thought it inspired by the 1953 conquest of Everest. But Bowman had drawn on the flavour and tone of earlier...
| Author | Maria Edgeworth |
| ISBN | 1409765539 |
The shiftless Lord Glenthorn has money and a title but suffers from ennui—from boredom. When it is revealed to him that he is not, in fact, an Anglo-Irish earl, but the peasant Christy O’Donoghoe, he must face his changed circumstances in order to provide for a life and future for the woman with whom...
| Author | J.L. Carr |
| ISBN | 0140069208 |
The Harpole Report is the third novel by J. L. Carr, published in 1972. The novel tells the story mostly in the form of a school log book kept by George Harpole, temporary Head Teacher of the Church of England primary school of "Tampling St. Nicholas". Like all of Carr's novels, it is grounded in personal...
| Author | Henry Howarth Bashford |
| ISBN | 1598180355 |
It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary. In an age when every standard of decent conduct has either been torn down or is threatened with destruction;...
| Author | William Gerhardie |
| ISBN | 1853754455 |
The Polyglots is the story of an eccentric Belgian family living in the Far East in the uncertain years after World War I and the Russian Revolution. The tale is recounted by their dryly conceited young English relative, Captain Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, who comes to stay with them during...
| Author | Mike Stocks |
| ISBN | 1846880246 |
White Man Falling is a tale of domestic catastrophe, deluded match-making and mystical absurdity set in a small town in South India. Police sub-inspector Swami has lost his job after suffering a stroke while beating up a Very Guilty Suspect. He can no longer talk properly, command the respect of his...
| Author | Robert Plunket |
| ISBN | 0060973900 |
This is an out-of-print book. It used to be harder tracking such things down. Then I realized there are places to go for them. I found a copy of this through 3rd-party selling at Amazon.
Robert Plunket has apparently stopped writing novels, and more's the pity. He made his debut with this and,...
Fireflies tells the story of Trinidad's most venerated Hindu family, the Khojas. Rigidly orthodox, presiding over acres of ill-kept sugarcane and hoards of jewellery enthusiastically guarded by old Mrs. Khoja, they seem to have triumphed more by default than by anything else. Only 'Baby' Khoja,...
Johnson, a young native in the British civil service, is a clerk to Rudbeck, Assistant District Officer in Nigeria, and imagines himself to be a very important cog of the King's government. He is amusingly tolerant of his fellow Africans, thinking them uncivilized; he is obsessed with the idea of bringing...
Pitting greed against Green a new town is being planned in England's green and pleasant land. Usually the champion of greed, conservative M.P. Leslie Titmuss is thrown off his political course, since the new development threatens his own Rapstone Manor. Bringing us up-to-date on the quirks, quarrels,...
Gils Blas recounts the education and swashbuckling adventures of an adaptable young valet as he progresses from one master to the next, making his way from naive youth to cunning servant to landed proprietor and nobleman--with a stint in jail, bereavements, and fits of remorse along the way. Finally,...
| Author | Michael Frayn |
| ISBN | 0571225578 |
The Council Estate
Before the internet in Britain, there was a thing called Fleet Street. This was as much a culture as a location. It sat culturally and geographically midway between the commercial city of London and the seat of government in Westminster. It produced something called newspapers,...
"Warning to Scholars: This book is fundamentally unsound." Master Will Shakespeare and his struggles to finish his new play are at the center of this classic 1941 satire of Elizabethan England, said by many to be the inspiration behind the recent film Shakespeare in Love. Joining Master Will in Brahms...
| Author | George Barr McCutcheon |
| ISBN | 1406956155 |
With the passing of his beloved grandfather, Monty Brewster inherits a long-anticipated million dollars. But he suddenly discovers that he can inherit seven times as much from his eccentric uncle if he spends every cent of his grandfather's money within a year. The carefree prospect of running through...
| Author | Peter De Vries |
| ISBN | 0226143899 |
It is 1963 in an unnamed town in North Dakota, and Anthony Thrasher is languishing for a second year in eighth grade. Prematurely sophisticated, young Anthony spends too much time reading Joyce, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas but not enough time studying the War of 1812 or obtuse triangles. A tutor is hired,...
| Author | Leslie Thomas |
| ISBN | 0749325208 |
There is always a danger that when you revisit something from the past that you loved it will disappoint. Films look cheap, games are tacky, food doesn’t taste the same and books can leaving you wondering “what was I thinking..” Nevertheless I have recently bought a couple of books that I felt deserved...
| Author | Thorne Smith |
| ISBN | 0375753079 |
The beloved characters--mortal and immortal--of Topper return in this uproarious romp through the south of France. One of Thorne Smith's best-loved comedies, it proves once again that he is the undisputed master of urbane wit and sophisticated repartee.
Cosmo Topper, the...
| Author | J.P. Donleavy |
| ISBN | 0871132648 |
A Fairy Tale of New York is a funny, lusty, and sad novel of comic genius. Returning from study abroad, Cornelius Christian enters customs with his luggage and his dead wife. His first encounter in New York is with a funeral director, with whom he reluctantly takes employment to pay for the burial expenses....
| Author | Angela Thirkell |
| ISBN | 1559213221 |
Middle-aged Catherine Middleton, married to an obtuse but endearing older man, is the still center of a swirl of two generations of gentry on the brink of WW II. The activities of youngsters and contemporaries go on around her and it is only gradually that one sees how, without conscious manipulation,...
