The Well
10 best books like The Well (Elizabeth Jolley): Possession, The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Harp in the South, The Man Who Loved Children, For the Term of His Natural Life, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins, The Stone Diaries, Hotel du Lac, House Made of Dawn, Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story
| Author | A.S. Byatt |
| ISBN | 0679735909 |
Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from...
| Author | William Styron |
| ISBN | 0679736638 |
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
In 1831 Nat Turner awaits death in a Virginia jail cell. He is a slave, a preacher, and the leader of the only effective slave revolt in the history of 'that peculiar institution'. William Styron's ambitious and stunningly accomplished novel is Turner's confession,...
| Author | Ruth Park |
| ISBN | 0140008535 |
Since it was first published in 1948, this compassionate novel has become a favourite with generations of Australian readers.
The Harp in the South is a nostalgic and moving portrait of the eventful family life of the Darcys of Number Twelve-and-a-Half Plymouth Street in Surry Hills, a Sydney...
| Author | Christina Stead |
| ISBN | 0312280440 |
Gentle warning note added here because it seems fans of this book can find the below review a little disheartening. So if you're a fan, you might want to skip this review. But, everybody knows that one reader's dogpile is another reader's marzipan souffle with attendant hummingbirds. I myself cannot...
| Author | Marcus Clarke |
| ISBN | 1406512036 |
“We convicts have the advantage over you gentlemen. You are afraid of death; we pray for it. It is the best thing that can happen to us. Die! They were going to hang me once. I wish they had. My God, I wish they had!”
For The Term Of His Natural Life is the best-known novel by Australian author,...
Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins
| Author | Emma Donoghue |
| ISBN | 0064407721 |
Thirteen tales are unspun from the deeply familiar, and woven anew into a collection of fairy tales that wind back through time. Acclaimed Irish author Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliances--sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with...
The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman's story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell...
| Author | Anita Brookner |
| ISBN | 0679759328 |
In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?" It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her...
| Author | N. Scott Momaday |
| ISBN | 0072434201 |
The magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a proud stranger in his native land.
He was a young American Indian named Abel, and he lived in two worlds. One was that of his father, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, the ecstasy of the drug called peyote. The...
| Author | Oliver La Farge |
| ISBN | 0618446729 |
Capturing the essence of the Southwest in 1915, Oliver La Farge's Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel is an enduring American classic. At a ceremonial dance, the young, earnest silversmith Laughing Boy falls in love with Slim Girl, a beautiful but elusive "American"-educated Navajo. As they experience...
The Optimist's Daughter is the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Alone in the old...
| Author | Stevie Smith |
| ISBN | 0811212394 |
Sometimes it's not what a book is about that keeps me reading, but how it's written. The trouble is, it's much harder to talk about how a book is written than to simply tell what it's about.
About, about. There are a lot of 'abouts' in the beginning of this review, aren't there? But 'about' is a word...
