The Slaves of Solitude
10 best books like The Slaves of Solitude (Patrick Hamilton): The Vet's Daughter, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, The Fountain Overflows, Great Granny Webster, The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard, Mr. Fortune's Maggot; and, The Salutation, Wish Her Safe at Home, Of Love and Hunger, The Fox in the Attic
| 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 | G.B. Edwards |
| ISBN | 1590172337 |
Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated, and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late twentieth century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France...
| Author | Brian Moore |
| ISBN | 0316579661 |
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is an unflinching and deeply sympathetic portrait of a woman destroyed by self and circumstance. First published in 1955, it marked Brian Moore as a major figure in English literature (he would go on to be short-listed three times for the Booker Prize) and established...
| Author | Rebecca West |
| ISBN | 1590170342 |
The lives of the talented Aubrey children have long been clouded by their father's genius for instability, but his new job in the London suburbs promises, for a time at least, reprieve from scandal and the threat of ruin.
Mrs. Aubrey, a former concert pianist, struggles to keep the family afloat,...
| 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...
| Author | Arthur Conan Doyle |
| ISBN | 0940322730 |
Having killed off Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began a new series of tales on a very different theme. Brigadier Gerard is an officer in Napoleon's army—recklessly brave, engagingly openhearted, and unshakable, if not a little absurd, in his devotion to the enigmatic Emperor. The Brigadier's...
| Author | Sylvia Townsend Warner |
| ISBN | 0940322838 |
After a decade in one South Seas mission, a London bank-clerk-turned-minister sets his heart on serving a remote volcanic island. Fanua contains neither cannibals nor Christians, but its citizens, his superior warns, are like children—immoral children. Still, Mr. Timothy Fortune lights out...
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 | Julian Maclaren-Ross |
| ISBN | 0141187115 |
An interesting novel set in 1939 in the months before the start of war. It opens a window of an England now mostly disappeared; landladies, jobs easy to get and lots of smoking!!. However the themes of love and loss are eternal. The shadow of war is ever present. The main character isn't likeable but the...
| Author | Richard Hughes |
| ISBN | 0940322293 |
A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." Set in the early 1920s, the book centers on Augustine, a young man from an aristocratic Welsh family who has come of age...
| Author | Angus Wilson |
| ISBN | 0140174249 |
Gerald Middleton is a sixty-year-old self-proclaimed failure. Worse than that, he’s "a failure with a conscience." As a young man, he was involved in an archaeological dig that turned up an obscene idol in the coffin of a seventh-century bishop and scandalized a generation. The discovery was in...
Treacherous mud clutched at the wheels and the Wellington up-ended. End of mission. The great bomber had been giving the crew trouble since leaving Italy. Finally over occupied France, it settles like a weary, wounded eagle on what seemed to Franklin a hard, smooth field. The five members of the crew...
| Author | L.P. Hartley |
| ISBN | 0940322803 |
The three books gathered together as Eustace and Hilda explore a brother and sister's lifelong relationship. Hilda, the older child, is both self-sacrificing and domineering, as puritanical as she is gorgeous; Eustace is a gentle, dreamy, pleasure-loving boy: the two siblings could hardly be more...
| Author | Max Beerbohm |
| ISBN | 0940322544 |
In Seven Men the brilliant English caricaturist and critic Max Beerbohm turns his comic searchlight upon the fantastic fin-de-siècle world of the 1890s—the age of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and the young Yeats, as well of Beerbohm's own first success. In a series of luminous sketches, Beerbohm...
| Author | Olivia Manning |
| ISBN | 1590173031 |
Jerusalem in 1945 is a city in flux: refugees from the war in Europe fill its streets and cafés, the British colonial mandate is coming to an end, and tensions are on the rise between the Arab and Jewish populations. Felix Latimer, a recently orphaned teenager, arrives in Jerusalem from Baghdad, biding...
| Author | William Dean Howells |
| ISBN | 1590171098 |
William Dean Howells's Indian Summer tells of a season in the life of Theodore Colville. Colville, just turned forty, has spent years as a successful midwestern newspaper publisher. Now he sells his business and heads for Italy, where as a young man he had dreamed of a career as an architect and fallen...
| Author | Mavis Gallant |
| ISBN | 1590170601 |
Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories...
| 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 | Millen Brand |
| ISBN | 1590173597 |
The Outward Room is a book about a young woman’s journey from madness to self-discovery. It created a sensation when it was first published in 1937, and has lost none of its immediacy or its power to move the reader.
Having suffered a nervous breakdown after her brother’s death in a car...
| 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...
| Author | Anthony Powell |
| ISBN | 0753158205 |
With their lives drastically remodeled by World War II, the characters of The Dance to the Music of Time series continue their colorful exploits. Nicholas Jenkins, the narrarator, now in his thirties, is second-lieutenant in an infrantry regiment and life in the army is examined at startingly close...
| Author | Mollie Panter-Downes |
| ISBN | 0953478076 |
For fifty years Mollie Panter-Downes' name was associated with "The New Yorker", for which she wrote a regular 'Letter from London', book reviews and over thirty short stories; of the twenty-one in "Good Evening, Mrs Craven", written between 1939 and 1944, only two had ever been reprinted - these very...
