The Talk of the Town

Author	Edna O'Brien
ISBN	0297607324

Based on a horrendous true crime, IN THE FOREST is the story of Mich O'Kane -- 'not all there in the head' it's said -- who shoots three people dead in the woods of Ireland. Edna O'Brien traces the events that lead to such horror. Mich O'Kane hears voices; he cannot stop mourning the death of his mother. Theft...

Author	Pak Kyongni
ISBN	0710305087

Pak Kyongni (December 2, 1926 – May 5, 2008) was a prominent South Korean novelist. She was born in Tongyeong, South Gyeongsang Province, and later lived in Wonju Gangwon Province. Pak made her literary debut in 1955, with Gyesan (계산, Calculations). She is, however, most well known for her 16-volume...

Author

Dan Sleigh

This novel of epic proportions from South Africa, set between 1650 and 1710, covers the first fifty years of the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope. Beautifully rendered, this is a world and a time never before dealt with in fiction-a period when powerful colonizers took over the lands of Hottentot...

Author	William Trevor
ISBN	0140253602

Felicia is unmarried, pregnant, and penniless. She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with the fat, fiftyish, unfailingly reasonable Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to...

Author	Peter Manson
ISBN	1859332226

While some may love this type of poetry. I could not stand any of it. It is bits and pieces of verbiage thrown together to make an unintelligible, nonsequential babbling of thought. If you are concrete-sequential like me, skip it. While the author is taking segments of conversations and news around him...

Author	A.L. Kennedy
ISBN	0375707476

From the prodigiously talented A. L. Kennedy comes a flamboyantly stylish and fiercely emotional novel about fathers and daughters, creation and self-destruction, and love’s paradoxical power to heal its most devastated victims. One such victim is Nathan Staples, a writer whose hilarious contempt...

Author	Elizabeth Bowen
ISBN	1400031052

In A World of Love, an uneasy group of relations are living under one roof at Montefort, a decaying manor in the Irish countryside. When twenty-year-old Jane finds in the attic a packet of love letters written years ago by Guy, her mother’s one-time fiance who died in World War I, the discovery has explosive...

Author	James Plunkett
ISBN	0815969090

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Author	John Banville
ISBN	1567920969

A historian, trying to finish a long-overdue book on Isaac Newton, rents a cottage not far by train from Dublin for the summer. All he needs, he thinks, is a few weeks of concentrated work. Why, he must unravel, did Newton break down in 1693? What possessed him to write that strange letter to his friend John...

Author	Péter Esterházy
ISBN	0060501049

Harmonia Caelestis is the product of a decade of labour: a monumental, part-autobiographical family history. If Helping Verbs of the Heart was an homage to his mother, then this is a memorial to his father. It is actually two works in one. Book 1, "Numbered Sentences from the Life of the Esterházy Family",...

Author	Iain Sinclair
ISBN	0141014822

Dining on Stones is Iain Sinclair's sharp, edgy mystery of London and its environs.

Andrew Norton, poet, visionary and hack, is handed a mysterious package that sees him quit London and head out along the A13 on an as yet undefined quest. Holing up in a roadside hotel, unable to make sense of his...

Author	Shashi Deshpande
ISBN	0670892513

Shashi Deshpande's latest novel explores the lives of two women, one obsessed with music and the other a passionate believer in Communism, who break away from their families to seek fulfilment in public life. Savitribai Indorekar, born into an orthodox Hindu family, elopes with her Muslim lover and...

Author

Ismail Kadare

From behind the closed door, the man shouts, 'Be on your way - you have no business here!'
'Open up, I am the messenger of Death'.

As spring arrives in the Albanian mountain town of B, some strange things are emerging in the thaw. Bank robbers strike the National Bank. Old terrors are dredged...

Author	Hanif Kureishi
ISBN	0743217136

Gabriel's father, a washed-up rock musician, has been chucked out of the house. His mother works nights in a pub and sleeps days. Navigating his way through the shattered world of his parents' generation, Gabriel dreams of being an artist. He finds solace and guidance through a mysterious connection...

Author	Peter Ackroyd
ISBN	0385514611

Mary Lamb is confined by the restrictions of domesticity: her father is losing his mind, her mother watchful and hostile. The great solace of her life is her brother Charles, an aspiring writer. It is no surprise when Mary falls for the bookseller’s son, antiquarian William Ireland, from whom Charles...

Author	David Dabydeen
ISBN	1845230140

This novel that echoes the styles of Joseph Conrad and V. S. Naipaul follows a young Guyanese engineer appointed to help save and shore up a Kent coastal village's sea defenses, and his relationship with the old woman with whom he lodges. Learning more about the village's history through his relationship...

Author	Gillian Rose
ISBN	0805210784

A devastating confrontation with mortality leads Gillian Rose, one of England's most distinguished thinkers, to illuminate the deepest issues of our lives: love, friendship, sex, illness, and death. Rose's crisis gives her search the force of immediacy and intimacy; her willingness to face life...

Author	Cees Nooteboom
ISBN	0330392603

A profound and searching new work from one of Europe's major contemporary writers. Arthur Daane, a documentary film-maker and inveterate globetrotter, has lost his wife and child in a plane crash. In ALL SOULS' DAY we follow Arthur as he wanders the streets of Berlin, a city uniquely shaped by history....

Author	Jáchym Topol
ISBN	0945774451

Winner of the Egon Hostovský Prize as the best Czech book of the year, this epic novel powerfully captures the sense of dislocation that followed the Czechs’ newfound freedom in 1989. More than just the story of its young protagonist—who is part businessman, part gang member, part drifter—it...

Author	Eilís Dillon
ISBN	0905169964

I liked this a lot: it's beautifully written and well observed.

However, the writing style is very odd to an early twenty-first century reader. We've got used to reading a third person limited point of view in contemporary fiction: i.e. third person that's very close to first person -- we're...

Author	Pat Barker
ISBN	0312203977

Plagued by nightmarish memories of the trenches where he saw his brother die, Nick's grandfather Gordie lays dying as Nick struggles to keep the peace in his increasingly fractious home. As Nick's suburban family loses control over their world, Nick begins to learn his grandfather's buried secrets...