The Rector's Daughter

Author	Alan Hollinghurst
ISBN	0739464469

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions...

Author	Rebecca West
ISBN	0812971221

"I heard, amazed, his step ring strong upon the stone, for I had felt his absence as a kind of death from which he would emerge ghostlike, impalpable."

Two women await the return of a soldier, Chris, from World War I. His wife, Kitty, is an upper-class woman, still mourning the death of their child....

Author

Elizabeth Taylor

Harriet and Vesey meet when they are teenagers, and their love is as intense and instantaneous as it is innocent. But they are young. All life still lies ahead. Vesey heads off hopefully to pursue a career as an actor. Harriet marries and has a child, becoming a settled member of suburban society. And then...

Author	Antonia White
ISBN	0860680495

4.5 stars
This is an autobiographical novel about life in a Catholic Girls school, quite closely based on White’s own life. Like the protagonist of the novel, Nanda, White was a Catholic convert at the age of nine and was sent to a school very like the one in the book. Nanda wants to be a good Catholic...

Author	Elizabeth Taylor
ISBN	1853816841

Spending the holiday with friends, as she has for many years, Camilla finds that their private absorptions - Frances with her painting and Liz with her baby - seem to exclude her from the gossipy intimacies of previous summers. Anxious that she will remain encased in her solitary life as a school secretary,...

Author

Winifred Watson

Miss Pettigrew, an approaching-middle-age governess, was accustomed to a household of unruly English children. When her employment agency sends her to the wrong address, her life takes an unexpected turn. The alluring nightclub singer, Delysia LaFosse, becomes her new employer, and Miss Pettigrew...

Author

William Maxwell

My heart was sliced to ribbons by this story. The narrator, an elderly man whose boyhood was scarred by a horrendous event, attempts to make sense of it all – and to make amends, as he tells it – 50 years down the road during the course of writing his memoirs.

In his memoirs, he talks about his...

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	May Sinclair
ISBN	0860682439

Author, poet, critic, and suffragist Mary Amelia St. Clair was a contemporary of and acquainted with Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West, among others. She served as an ambulance driver in World War I, and produced poetry and fiction based on it. Her novel...

Author	Bruce Chatwin
ISBN	0140115765

Utz collects Meissen porcelain with a passion. His collection, which he has protected and enlarged through both World War II and Czechoslovakia's years of Stalinism, numbers more than 1,000 pieces, all crammed into his two-room Prague flat. Utz is allowed to leave the country each year, and although...

Author

Thomas Malory

An immortal story of love, adventure, chivalry, treachery and death. Edited and first published by William Caxton in 1485, Le Morte D'Arthur is Sir Thomas Malory's unique and splendid version of the Arthurian legend. Mordred's treason, the knightly exploits of Tristan, Lancelot's fatally divided...