Theory of War
10 best books like Theory of War (Joan Brady): Every Man for Himself, Day, How Far Can You Go?, Poor Things, Hopeful Monsters, Felicia's Journey, Twelve Bar Blues, The Chymical Wedding, The Old Jest, Picture Palace
| Author | Beryl Bainbridge |
| ISBN | 0786704675 |
The story of the maiden voyage of the Titanic is a familiar one, but Bainbridge still managed an impressively fresh reimagination of the personal experiences of a rich young Anglo-American who has been adopted by the family of J.P. Morgan. His journey is somewhat picaresque - he spends most of the voyage...
| Author | A.L. Kennedy |
| ISBN | 0224077864 |
Ms Kennedy should have a category of her own with different coloured stars, or the option to have the stars squared, 3D at the very least. She's a writer who expects a lot of her reader, and I like that. The opening chapter of this novel is a struggle, even the second time round it's not a smooth ride, no familiar...
| Author | David Lodge |
| ISBN | 0140057463 |
This 1980 novel by Lodge (whom you may have noticed I've been reading a lot of and enjoying this year) follows a group of young English Catholics over a period of about 20 years, enabling us to see the ways their religion affects their lives (and their lives affect their religion), particularly in the shadow...
| Author | Alasdair Gray |
| ISBN | 0747562288 |
One of Alasdair Gray's most brilliant creations, Poor Things is a postmodern revision of Frankenstein that replaces the traditional monster with Bella Baxter - a beautiful young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of an infant. Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect...
| Author | Nicholas Mosley |
| ISBN | 1564782425 |
-- A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student of physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jewess and political radical. Together and apart, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which...
| 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 | Patrick Neate |
| ISBN | 0802140564 |
This rich and epic novel is written with each chapter a phrase of a twelve bar blues structure, each of the different pieces of the harmonic progression coordinating with a different storyline.
The book begins with a Prologue set in the mythical Afican kingdom of Zimindo in 1790, where two young...
| Author | Lindsay Clarke |
| ISBN | 0449001180 |
I read this last December and enjoyed it immensely. It had been recommended to me twenty years ago, and finally I have been able to get to it. I could easily give it five stars, but then I would be only thinking of myself. Truth is, Clarke is a bit verbose for some tastes. And though I prefer more minimalist,...
| Author | Jennifer Johnston |
| ISBN | 0140106987 |
4★
This begins as a light-hearted, affectionate look at a young girl growing up in Ireland in 1920, after the end of WW1, but her childish, secret adventure turns serious and shows the dark divisions in Ireland.
Nancy was orphaned very young and has been raised in a friendly, loving household...
| Author | Paul Theroux |
| ISBN | 0140050728 |
World-famous photographer Maude Coffin Pratt has pointed her lens at the beautiful, obscure, and obscene, and at the private places and public parts of the famous, from Gertrude Stein to Graham Greene. When the seventy-year-old Maude rummages through her archives in preparation for a triumphant...
| Author | William McIlvanney |
| ISBN | 0340407573 |
His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.
Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his...
| Author | Susan Hill |
| ISBN | 0140040722 |
Francis Croft, the greatest poet of his age, was mad. His world was a nightmare of internal furies and haunting poetic vision. Harvey Lawson watched and protected him until his final suicide. From his solitary old age Harvey writes this brief account of their twenty years together and then burns all...
| Author | Paul Sayer |
| ISBN | 0340508043 |
(Winner of the 1988 Whitbread Award, The Comforts of Madness is narrated by a catatonic who never speaks. To the rest of the world he is an inert body and is subjected to a variety of experiments, but his own consciousness is vital and reflective. This novel draws attention to the fact that we can never really...
| Author | Jeff Torrington |
| ISBN | 0156001977 |
Oh the brogue! Now lads and lassies, I don’a mind a bit a brogue, but wha’s a bloke from the States supos’ ta mak’a dis?
“Maggie, god rest’re, never had tae hinge her back tae mend oor fire – bunker aye full tae the gunnels, so it was.” Or this: “Cauld enough tae make a polar bear...
| Author | Jo Shapcott |
| ISBN | 0571254705 |
Jo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott...
| Author | Bob Shacochis |
| ISBN | 0802140599 |
A calypso singer named Lord Short Shoe consorts with a vampish black singer to bilk an American out of his pride and his only companion-a monkey. An entire island bureaucracy casually confounds the attempts of Tillman, a hotel owner, in his attempt to get his dead mother out of the freezer and into a real...
| Author | Yannick Haenel |
| ISBN | 2070123111 |
Varsovie, 1942. La Pologne est dévastée par les nazis et les Soviétiques. Jan Karski est un messager de la Résistance polonaise auprès du gouvernement en exil à Londres. Il rencontre deux hommes qui le font entrer clandestinement dans le ghetto, afin qu'il dise aux Alliés ce qu'il a vu, et qu'il...
| Author | Christopher Reid |
| ISBN | 0955455367 |
Memories. Weighty emptinesses. I live in a memory
the size and shape of a house.
As so often seems to happen to me, this collection came into my hands by serendipity. Perusing the shelves with poetry in the native language in the local library, A Scattering apparently had wandered off to...
| Author | Christopher Nolan |
| ISBN | 0330303163 |
A remarkable work by several measures, Under the Eye of the Clock is the autobiography--told slyly through a third person alter-ego--of Christopher Nolan, struck at birth with brain damage and left paralyzed, spastic and mute. His first book, Dam-Burst of Dreams, written when he was a teen, was a collection...
| Author | Richard Wright |
| ISBN | 0060909919 |
Anyone who has read Richard Wright’s Black Boy knows it to be one of the great American autobiographies. Covering Wright’s early life in the South, the book concludes with his departure in 1934 for a new life in the North. American Hunger (first published more than thirty years after the appearance...
| Author | Andrew Larsen |
| ISBN | 1771472677 |
When he was a child in the 1840s, Andrew Carnegie and his family immigrated to America in search of a new beginning. His working-class Scottish family arrived at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Carnegie worked hard, in factories and telegraphy. He invested in railroads, eventually becoming...
Un matin d'octobre 1941, dans un château sinistre au fin fond du Périgord, Henri Girard appelle au secours : dans la nuit, son père, sa tante et la bonne ont été massacrés à coups de serpe. Il est le seul survivant. Toutes les portes étaient fermées, aucune effraction n'est constatée. Dépensier,...
| Author | Pascal Bruckner |
| ISBN | 2246800285 |
C'est l'histoire d'un enfant à la santé fragile, né après guerre et envoyé aussitôt dans un village d'Autriche pour soigner ses poumons. Sous la neige, il chante la gloire de Dieu et baragouine un patois allemand. Chaque soir, sous le regard aimant de sa mère, le chérubin prie le Seigneur pour...
| Author | Paul Gallico |
| ISBN | 0140026819 |
I read this first when I was a teenager. When I met my husband many years later I firmly believe this book had a role in me falling in love with him. So I will always be grateful for that. These days when superficial perfection is so much in the forefront of the modern media - this book should be compulsory reading...
