Tom Brown's Schooldays

Author	William Maxwell
ISBN	1860468144

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...

Author	Ivy Compton-Burnett
ISBN	0940322633

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....

Author	F.M. Mayor
ISBN	0860689115

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,...

Author	Antonia White
ISBN	0860680495

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...

Author	Timothy Mo
ISBN	0952419327

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...

Author

R.M. Ballantyne

I went to primary school at four and a half, into Mrs. Whitcombe's class. Everything was miniature, including Mrs. Whitcombe who was a little person. We sat on our little chairs at our little desks and got out our little books. Janet and John. It was quite glorious except that I had read the whole year's...

Author	May Sinclair
ISBN	0860682439

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...

Author	Henry Handel Richardson
ISBN	0848259637

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,...

Author	Frederick Marryat
ISBN	1853261106

It is strange when there is a connection found between dissimilar things in our everyday life. While I was reading this book by Frederick Marryat, I read on a plaque on my nightly rounds at the museum that the artist Thomas Chambers used Marryat's naval writings as an inspiration for some of his seascapes....

Author	George Meredith
ISBN	0140434836

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...

Author

J.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...

Author	Ron Butlin
ISBN	0862411262

Morris Magellan has a house in the suburbs, nice wife and kids. But Morris is also a chronic alcoholic, heading fast towards self-destruction. Morris is not hoping to meet Ms. Right and acquire the two kids that will straighten everything out. He already has all this and it hasn't kept him off the bottle....

Author	Nicholson Baker
ISBN	1862070997

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...

Author	Gerard Woodward
ISBN	0393328007

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...

Author	Piers Paul Read
ISBN	0380551039

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...

Author	C. Day-Lewis
ISBN	0435120018

“This is a really super story—I shold know, I wrote it. My name is George, and I’m Ted’s second-in-command: Ted is is centre-forward of the Junior XI at King’s School in Otterbury and a first class chap. He’s the leader of our company, and the story began with our battle against Toppy’s...

Author	G.A. Henty
ISBN	1406813168

Just because something was written over a century ago, that does not mean it was written well. That has been hammered home in ‘With Clive in India’.

It is one of the books freely available on ManyBooks.net, though I picked my copy up a few years ago in Poundland. Three nineteenth-century...

Author	L.P. Hartley
ISBN	0571203825

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...

Author	Cora Sandel
ISBN	0821407562

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...

Author	Paul Hornschemeier
ISBN	1560976535

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...

Author	Anthony Hope
ISBN	1406944556

2.5 – 3 stars
Rupert of Hentzau is an enjoyable swashbuckler, though I remember The Prisoner of Zenda being better. We rejoin the major players remaining from the first novel three years later when a new crisis threatens the queen’s honour (she’s not very bright, alas) and the dastardly rogue...

Author	W.E. Johns
ISBN	0099283212

What in the world went wrong here!!?? Biggles all of a sudden is a swearing, hard-core fellow with no emotions. I totally did not like him in this one. Technically, W.E. Johns wrote this book first of any other Biggles stories (it is the third one that I've read). So I've imagined a scenario for why his first...

Author	Robert Louis Stevenson
ISBN	0192817264

Kidnapped and Catriona

Published in the magazine Young Folks in 1886, Kidnapped was intended as a novel for boys treating the youth and adolescence of the Scottish lad David Balfour, but is in fact much more than that because of the vivid descriptions of the Scottish highlands and the fine fathoming...

Author	Jane Carruth
ISBN	0861630688

My copy is a dog-eared, mass-media, three-and-a-half inch thick copy that I've read at least three times.

I love the story. I love Dumas's writing. How can you not love the ever-arrogant D'Artagnan who shows up to the big city in a second-hand suit on an ugly mare and almost immediately racks...

Author	H.G. Wells
ISBN	0141441100

Orphaned at an early age, raised by his aunt and uncle, and apprenticed for seven years to a draper, Artie Kipps is stunned to discover upon reading a newspaper advertisement that he is the grandson of a wealthy gentleman - and the inheritor of his fortune. Thrown dramatically into the upper classes,...