The Old Men at the Zoo

Author

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, was one of the big guns of Victorian literature. His books were bestsellers and he garnered considerable critical acclaim as well. And yet today he is not merely mostly unread, he has become a byword by bad writing, with a literary competition...

Author

Gwyneth Jones

Three extraordinary people in some most extraordinary times: It's Dissolution Summer and as the United Kingdom prepares to break up into separate nations, the Counterculturals have gathered for a festival where everything's allowed. Among them is a talented little brat called Fiorinda, rock and...

Author

John Cowper Powys

First published in 1932, here is John Cowper Powys's masterwork, an epic novel of terrific cumulative force and lyrical intensity. In it he interweaves the ancient with the modern as he probes the mystical and spiritual ethos of the small English village of Glastonbury and the effect upon its inhabitants...

Author	Michael Moorcock
ISBN	0684861410

Three hospital outpatients all find that they hear voices - the voices of London's past. As they explore the city of their present day, they also explore its recent past and its forgotten people. Through the lives of those on the fringe of society, we learn what it is like - and what it has always been like...

Author	Ramsey Campbell
ISBN	0812516389

Sometimes evil refuses to die.

Rowan's great-aunt Queenie is dead. After all the misery she caused her family while she was alive, most of them are secretly relieved. But Queenie did not want to die, and she will do anything to live again…including possessing young Rowan. She haunts the child's...

Author	Michael Frayn
ISBN	0140040633

An utter delight.

Even though it was written in the 1970s, it still feels completely fresh & topical today. It's a lovely, optimistic satire of man & covers many of the Big Ideas. I know when Life of Pi was so very popular, various reviews said it would affirm/renew your faith in God (a...

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

Robert Nye

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	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	Michael G. Coney
ISBN	0575019743

It was an alien planet - yet not too alien from Earth. It had its differences; its ice goblins, its curious furry lorrin, its thickening water, and its unearthly tides, but for a young man like Alika-Drove thinking of a vacation by the sea these oddities were the norm.

But this vacation was different....

Author	Jed Mercurio
ISBN	0224072862

A truly stunning novel — spare, powerful and ultimately awesome — Ascent will propel Jed Mercurio into the first rank of British novelists.

Yefgenil Yeremin is a flyer and he is a phantom.

In the Korean War he shoots down more American jets than any other pilot in history. He becomes...

Author	Ken MacLeod
ISBN	1841496510

Can you imagine a future where religious fundamentalists have caused so much damage that the world embraces a politics of 'radical secularism', marginalising all faiths and denominations by effectively failing to recognise their existence?

Sounds like paradise on Earth, right? So speaks...

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	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	Brian Moore
ISBN	0586087397

I read this book for the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.

Famously The Prime Minister’s wife blackballed The Doctor’s Wife for the Booker due to the sex scenes.

Trying to find out more about Moore the author, and a little underwhelmed with this book, I came across an obituary in...

Author	Anthony Burgess
ISBN	0140067469

The dying Freud hustled out of Vienna into exile
A Broadway musical on the subject of Trotsky in New York
The last throes of the planet Earth in AD 2000
These are all items on
The End of the World News

Psychoanalysis, international socialism and The End - three themes, three stories...

Author	Marghanita Laski
ISBN	0897330978

A small, but perfectly formed, chilling tale of psychological horror, from a very simple premise.

The GR summary, in its entirety, says, "Tells the story of a young married woman who lies down on a chaise-longue and wakes to find herself imprisoned in the body of her alter ego ninety...

Author	Andrew Miller
ISBN	0156006006

James Dyer is dangerous man. He’s dangerous because he does not care. And such people are always dangerous. Endowed with special gift or maybe a curse he’s imperious to pain, both physical and emotional. And hence his lack of empathy, ordinary human kinship, a bit of compassion and concern . That...

Author	Alan Garner
ISBN	0007127863

A disturbing exploration of the inevitability of life. Under Orion's stars, bluesilver visions torment Tom, Macey and Thomas as they struggle with age-old forces. Distanced from each other in time, and isolated from those they live among, they are yet inextricably bound together by the sacred power...

Author

Richard Jefferies

The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the...

Author	Charles Brockden Brown
ISBN	1598186213

Excerpt from Wieland or the Transformation
Genius and knowledge command respect; but superior genius and profound knowledge, combined with exalted moral purity, cannot fail to excite unmingled admiration. The reputation of an author in whom these qualities are united may be circumscribed...

Author	Marie Darrieussecq
ISBN	1565844424

You have this friend, she’s been out of work for months. Then she gets this gig at a perfume counter, which also involves being a prostitute. She is routinely abused by her “clients” who use her for increasingly perverse sexual practices. She is also, at that time, transforming into a sow. You keep...