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The Sound of My Voice

10 best books like The Sound of My Voice (Ron Butlin): The Chateau, Manservant and Maidservant, The Rector's Daughter, The Tortoise and the Hare, Frost in May, Sour Sweet, The History of Mr. Polly, The Millstone, The Three Sisters, Fortunes of Richard Mahony

The Chateau
AuthorWilliam Maxwell
ISBN1860468144
This is a well-written (Maxwell doesn't write any other way) novel with a nostalgic feel (again, Maxwell doesn't seem to write any other way), with the longer first part (of two) reading almost like a travel diary at times; and just when you're wondering, near the end of that first part, what it might all...
Manservant and Maidservant
AuthorIvy Compton-Burnett
ISBN0940322633
At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin....
The Rector's Daughter
AuthorF.M. Mayor
ISBN0860689115
Dedmayne Rectory is quietly decaying, its striped chintz and darkened rooms are a bastion of outmoded Victorian values. Here Mary has spent thirty-five years, devoting herself to her sister, now dead, and to her father, Canon Jocelyn. Although she is pitied by her neighbours for this muted existence,...
The Tortoise and the Hare
AuthorElizabeth Jenkins
ISBN0860682722
The magnetic Evelyn Gresham, 52, is a barrister of considerable distinction. He has everything life could offer -- a gracious riverside house in Berkshire, a beautiful young wife, Imogen, who is devoted to him, and their 11-year-old son, a replica of his father.

Their nearest neighbor is...
Frost in May
AuthorAntonia White
ISBN0860680495
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...
Sour Sweet
AuthorTimothy Mo
ISBN0952419327
I have not read so many historic Booker nominees this year, but Timothy Mo has been on my radar for some time, so it was an easy decision to pick this one up. It was his second novel, and was shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize.

The story alternates between two groups of characters. On the one hand...
The History of Mr. Polly
AuthorH.G. Wells
ISBN0141441070
Welcome to Alfred Polly's mid-existence crisis. That's where we meet him, then we backtrack from his infancy through his life up to what might just be a fresh-starting point...

"...filled him with a vague and mystical happiness that he had no words, even mispronounceable words, to express."...
The Millstone
AuthorMargaret Drabble
ISBN0156006197
Margaret Drabble’s affecting novel, set in London during the 1960s, is about a casual love affair, an unplanned pregnancy, and one young woman’s decision to become a mother. Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance...
The Three Sisters
AuthorMay Sinclair
ISBN0860682439
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...
Fortunes of Richard Mahony
AuthorHenry Handel Richardson
ISBN0848259637
Set in Australia during the gold-mining boom, this remarkable trilogy is one of the classics of Australian literature.
Henry Handel Richardson’s great literary achievement, comprising the novels Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima Thule, weaves together many themes. Richard Mahony,...
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
AuthorGeorge Meredith
ISBN0140434836
Of all nineteenth-century English novels, " claims Edward Mendelson in his Introduction to this edition, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is the most self-consciously literary in its style and structure and the most sexually explicit in its plot and theme." First published in 1859, Meredith's first...
The Good Companions
AuthorJ.B. Priestley
Probably the most popular of Priestley's novels, The Good Companions was an instant best-seller when it was first published in July 1929, and, while JBP came to feel its success subsequently overshadowed many more important works, the book has remained popular. It was his third novel and it is certainly...
Room Temperature
AuthorNicholson Baker
ISBN1862070997
The fact is a large cadre of klutzes (call them Baker-deniers) consider our man Nicholson to be a lightweight author. An inward bourgeois bore picking fluff from his well-gazed navel. Stephen King is to blame thanks to his ungenerous quote about thumbnail pickings (this coming from a man that publishes...
Electric Brae
AuthorAndrew Greig
ISBN0571212859
What a wonderful book this is, one of those that lingers with you long after you’ve finished reading it. It’s got a deep melancholy running through it but also lots of passion, love, and light(ish)-hearted comment on Scotland’s east/west divide. Author Andrew Greig has published books on mountaineering,...
I'll Go to Bed at Noon
AuthorGerard Woodward
ISBN0393328007
Colette Jones has had problems of her own with alcohol, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to booze. Her oldest son, Janus, the family's golden boy, has wasted his talents as a concert pianist. His drinking sprees with his brother-in-law, Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket...
A Married Man
AuthorPiers Paul Read
ISBN0380551039
John Strickland is a middle-aged barrister with a wife, Clare, and two children. Staying with his parents-in-law at their house in Norfolk, he reads Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Illych, and this precipitates a mid-life crisis. What has happened to his youthful ideals to do good in the...
The Shrimp and the Anemone
AuthorL.P. Hartley
ISBN0571203825
Oh, L.P. Hartley, why are you forgotten?

This is the second Hartley book I've read (the first was The Go-Between), and if anything this one was even better. Both of the books take a double view, with a main character seeing things from childhood and the reader having access to what the adult world...
Alberta and Jacob
AuthorCora Sandel
ISBN0821407562
But a wound opened inside. Delight and melancholy welled up simultaneously from the depths of her mind. She could not understand why nor protect herself from them. They streamed over her together with the light, making her shrink with painful impatience. Tears came, God knows how. One moment she was...
The Three Paradoxes
AuthorPaul Hornschemeier
ISBN1560976535
The Three Paradoxes is an intricate and complex autobiographical comic by one of the most talented and innovative young cartoonists today. The story begins with a story inside the story: the cartoon character Paul Hornschemeier is trying to finish a story called "Paul and the Magic Pencil." Paul has...
A Legacy
AuthorSybille Bedford
ISBN0141188057
The Kaiser's Germany is the setting of Sybille Bedford's first and best-known novel, in which two families -- one from solid, upholstered Jewish Berlin, the other from the somnolent, agrarian Catholic South -- become comically, tragically, irrevocably intertwined. "Each family," writes the author,...
Death in Summer
AuthorWilliam Trevor
ISBN0140287825
A New York Times Bestseller and Notable Book
From the winner of the 1999 David Cohen British Literature Prize comes an unforgettably chilling novel, written with the compassion and artistry that define Trevor's fiction.
There were three deaths that summer. The first was Letitia's, sudden...
The Unfortunates
AuthorB.S. Johnson
ISBN0330353292

‘How can I place his order, his disintegration?’

Through fragments of a randomized collection of memories called up while wandering through a city, the reader explores the life, loves and losses of the narrator. As such a premise would remind many of Ulysses and Joyce’s incredible...
Pointed Roofs
AuthorDorothy M. Richardson
ISBN1440051437
Dorothy Miller Richardson (1873-1957) was the first writer to publish an English-language novel using what was to become known as the stream-of-consciousness technique. In London, she began moving among Avant-garde Socialist and artistic circles, including the Bloomsbury group. She started...
The Estate
AuthorIsaac Bashevis Singer
ISBN0374149003
The Estate is the second part of the Manor. Heroes of Manor get old, move to other countries, struggle and die. Singer shows the magic of life on the example of his people - Jews and their hart fate in Russia, Prussia, France in the end of 19th and begining of 20th ceturies. The book is very entertaining and...
Invitation to the Waltz
AuthorRosamond Lehmann
ISBN1844083055
A diary for her innermost thoughts, a china ornament, a ten-shilling note, and a roll of flame-coloured silk for her first evening dress: these are the gifts Olivia Curtis receives for her seventeenth birthday. She anticipates her first dance, the greatest yet most terrifying event of her restricted...
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