The Outward Room
10 best books like The Outward Room (Millen Brand): The Vet's Daughter, Lolly Willowes, Cassandra at the Wedding, The Pilgrim Hawk, Great Granny Webster, Wish Her Safe at Home, Irretrievable, A Meaningful Life, A Way of Life, Like Any Other, Written Lives
| Author | Barbara Comyns |
| ISBN | 1590170296 |
The Vet’s Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife’s death, the vet...
| Author | Sylvia Townsend Warner |
| ISBN | 0940322161 |
This is a book about witches. But when I finally put this book down last night, I mostly just thought about my father.
I don’t think it is controversial to say that duty is a bit of an old fashioned word these days. Like honor. It’s one of those words you hear someone say and squirm uncomfortably,...
| Author | Dorothy Baker |
| ISBN | 1590171128 |
Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra,...
| Author | Glenway Wescott |
| ISBN | 0940322560 |
This powerful short novel describes the events of a single afternoon. Alwyn Towers, an American expatriate and sometime novelist, is staying with a friend outside of Paris, when a well-heeled, itinerant Irish couple drops in—with Lucy, their trained hawk, a restless, sullen, disturbingly totemic...
| Author | Caroline Blackwood |
| ISBN | 1590170075 |
Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's masterpiece. Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling raconteur long before she made her name as a strikingly original writer. This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the...
Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city--and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity,...
| Author | Theodor Fontane |
| ISBN | 1590173740 |
Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the appealing married couple at the center of this engrossing book by one of Germany’s greatest novelists, could not be less alike. Christine is a serious soul from a devout background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband...
| Author | L.J. Davis |
| ISBN | 1590173007 |
L.J. Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life, is a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption through real estate, and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Davis’s novel, heads to New York, where he plans to make...
The hero of Darcy O'Brien's A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a child of Hollywood, and once his life was a glittery dream. His father starred in Westerns. His mother was a goddess of the silver screen. The family enjoyed the high life on their estate, Casa Fiesta. But his parents' careers have crashed since...
| Author | Javier Marías |
| ISBN | 0811216896 |
In addition to his own busy career as "one of Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers" (TLS), Javier Marías is also the translator into Spanish of works by Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors is the touchstone of Written Lives. Collected...
| Author | Penelope Mortimer |
| ISBN | 0747518874 |
4.5 stars rounded up
I must admit I haven’t read anything by Mortimer before and on the evidence of this book I should have. It is about a woman in a downward spiral and is an acerbic and humorous (in a very bleak way) comment on marriage, gender relations and being a woman being controlled by men (husbands...
