The Children of Dynmouth
10 best books like The Children of Dynmouth (William Trevor): The Old Jest, Picture Palace, The Bird of Night, Vintage Baldwin, Praxis, Flying to Nowhere, An Awfully Big Adventure, Collected Stories and Later Writings, Persian Nights, Sleepwalker in a Fog
| Author | Jennifer Johnston |
| ISBN | 0140106987 |
4★
This begins as a light-hearted, affectionate look at a young girl growing up in Ireland in 1920, after the end of WW1, but her childish, secret adventure turns serious and shows the dark divisions in Ireland.
Nancy was orphaned very young and has been raised in a friendly, loving household...
| Author | Paul Theroux |
| ISBN | 0140050728 |
World-famous photographer Maude Coffin Pratt has pointed her lens at the beautiful, obscure, and obscene, and at the private places and public parts of the famous, from Gertrude Stein to Graham Greene. When the seventy-year-old Maude rummages through her archives in preparation for a triumphant...
| Author | Susan Hill |
| ISBN | 0140040722 |
Francis Croft, the greatest poet of his age, was mad. His world was a nightmare of internal furies and haunting poetic vision. Harvey Lawson watched and protected him until his final suicide. From his solitary old age Harvey writes this brief account of their twenty years together and then burns all...
| Author | James Baldwin |
| ISBN | 1400033942 |
Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions.
“One of the few genuinely indispensable writers.” —The Saturday Review
In his internationally acclaimed novels, short stories, plays...
| Author | Fay Weldon |
| ISBN | 0340595809 |
Praxis is an interesting book to come back to for many reasons, but as I read it in tandem with Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, the two books worked, rather curiously with no small amount of synchronicity–odd really as the books are about entirely different things, for while Life after Life explores...
| 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 | Beryl Bainbridge |
| ISBN | 0349116156 |
Another little gem from the 1990 Booker shortlist. Beryl Bainbridge was a perennial Booker bridesmaid - she never won the prize, but was shortlisted five times and also longlisted once. This is my first experience of her writing, and it left me wanting to read more.
This is a black comedy set...
Collected Stories and Later Writings
| Author | Paul Bowles |
| ISBN | 1931082200 |
Paul Bowles had already established himself as an important composer when at age 39 he published The Sheltering Sky and became recognized as one of the most powerful writers of the postwar period. From his base in Tangier he produced globally ranging novels, stories, and travel writings that set exquisite...
| Author | Diane Johnson |
| ISBN | 0452279585 |
Chloe Fowler is the most unliberated woman she knows: disarmingly delicate and pretty, and not averse to putting either attribute to its best use, married, young, and satisfied with her normal American life as wife and mother. Yet Chloe is about to be liberated from everything she has ever known—in...
By "the most original, tactile, luminous voice in Russian prose today" (Joseph Brodsky), Sleepwalker in a Fog is a collection of seven stories and a novella set in contemporary Russia. Here is Denisov, who fears his greatest accomplishment in life will be the treatise he wrote and tore up. He is betrothed...
| Author | Henry Green |
| ISBN | 1564782662 |
Written almost completely in dialogue, Henry Green's final novel is a biting comedy of manners that exposes the deceptive difference between those who love and those who "dote." Arthur Middleton is a middle-aged member of the upper-middle class living in post-World War II London with his wife. Stuck...
| Author | Stanley Elkin |
| ISBN | 0879232536 |
In Searches & Seizures, Elkin tells the story of the criminal, the lovelorn, and the grieving, each searching desperately for fulfillment, while on the verge of receiving much more than they bargained for. Infused with Elkin's signature wit and richly drawn characters, The Bailbondsman, The...
| Author | James Wood |
| ISBN | 0375752633 |
This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov,...
| Author | Zbigniew Herbert |
| ISBN | 0880010991 |
Blessed is the nation that in the course of a century could give the world two poets of Czeslaw Milosz's and Zbigniew Herbert's scope. Doubly blessed is the English-reader, for in this volume he gets Zbigniew Herbert's work rendered by Czeslaw Milosz: like the poor, or better yet like nature herself,...
Somewhere in an unnamed Eastern bloc country, someone is out to silence Cardinal Bern. Is it the Secret Police, or is it - more shockingly - fanatical Catholic activists who believe that Bern, by keeping the peace between Church and State, has finally compromised himself too far?
Narrowly...
| Author | Penelope Lively |
| ISBN | 0060971991 |
I read this book as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.
This link contains a plot description – as well as one of the three central characters (who all appear as point of view characters, in some cases all three observing the same scene)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accordi...
I...
| Author | Kingsley Amis |
| ISBN | 0140050965 |
One reads Jake's Thing now in a mood of embarrassed depression: embarrassed by the details we're given of a failing middle-aged libido and the efforts undergone to fix it, and depressed by the general context of 1970s suburban England, which here seems desperately poky and insular – a succession...
| Author | Konstantin Georgiyevich Paustovsky |
| ISBN | 0394710142 |
Đây là cuốn sách lí luận văn học gối đầu giường từ thời học chuyên. Hầu hết các truyên trong đó như Bụi quý, Vết khắc trên đá, Tuyết, Lẵng quả thông, Bình minh mưa... đã trở thành những điển cố nằm lòng, luôn được thủ sẵn...
| Author | David Gates |
| ISBN | 0575068248 |
The author of the highly acclaimed novels Jernigan (Pulitzer Prize Finalist) and Preston Falls (National Book Critics Cirlce Award Finalist) offers up a mordantly funny collection of short stories about the faulty bargains we make with ourselves to continure the high-wire act of living meaningful...
| Author | Deborah Eisenberg |
| ISBN | 0374524920 |
When Deborah Eisenberg's first book of stories, Transactions in a Foreign Currency, was published, John Updike noted: "Whenever a new writer arrives, a new window of life is opened, and this has happened here." The scope and depth of Eisenberg's idiosyncratic vision were even more apparent in her...
| Author | Joy Williams |
| ISBN | 0679733310 |
These prize winning stories confirm what readers of 'State Of Grace' and 'Taking Care' already suspected: that Joy Williams is a writer of unparalleled empathy and emotional candor, who can render the 'hopeless and uncomprehending love' between a little girl and her alcoholic mother, the panicky...
| Author | Francis Steegmuller |
| ISBN | 1590171160 |
Francis Steegmuller's beautifully executed double portrait of Madame Bovary and her maker is a remarkable and unusual biographical study, a sensitive and detailed account of how an unpromising young man turns himself into one of the world's greatest novelists. Steegmuller starts with the young...
| Author | Rebecca West |
| ISBN | 0860686620 |
Through a vivid canvas layered with intrigue, conspiracy and murder, Rebecca West has created a story that is at once a family saga, a political thriller, a philosophical drama and a historical novel.
Rebecca West’s gripping psychological mystery—part thriller, part historical novel—The...
