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Author
Formats
Description
'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' Haunting, moving, evocative, The Go-Between is L.P. Hartley's heartbreaking novel about social constraints and childhood innocence. During the long hot summer of 1900, young Leo Colston is invited to stay for a month at a lordly, aristocratic manor in Norfolk. There he falls in love with his friend's older sister, who commissions him to ferry secret messages to the local farmer, her...
Author
Pub. Date
c1955
Description
Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate 'originals' - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize. Contemporary life collapses the distinction...
Author
Series
Description
"On a rainy Sunday afternoon in January the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey moves to the Claremont Hotel in South Kensington. "If it's not nice, I needn't stay," she promises herself, as she settles into this haven for the genteel and the decayed. "Three elderly widows and one old man who seemed to dislike female company and seldom got any other kind" serve for her fellow residents, and there is the staff, too, and they are one and all lonely. What...
6) Augustus
Author
Pub. Date
[2014]
Description
"Winner of the 1973 National Book Award In Augustus, the third of his great novels, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a historical novel set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire, whose greatness was matched by his brutality. To tell the story, Williams also turned to a genre, the epistolary novel, that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher's Crossing...
Author
Formats
Description
An elderly artist and her six-year-old granddaughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. Gradually, the two learn to adjust to each other's fears, whims and yearnings for independence, and a fierce yet understated love emerges - one that encompasses not only the summer inhabitants but the island itself.
Author
Formats
Description
An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel.
Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with...
Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with...
Author
Pub. Date
c1979
Description
In 1925, Harold Ross hired Katharine Sergeant Angell as a manuscript reader for The New Yorker. Within months she became the magazine’s first fiction editor, discovering and championing the work of Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, James Thurber, Marianne Moore, and her husband-to-be, E. B. White, among others. After years of cultivating fiction, she set her sights on a new genre: garden writing. On March 1, 1958, The New Yorker ran a column entitled...
Author
Pub. Date
2000.
Description
"Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summers, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter's extraordinary depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to...
Author
Description
"The Farm in the Green Mountains is the story of a family finding home--halfway across the world from their homeland. Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her husband, the playwright Carl Zuckmayer, lived at the heart of intellectual life in Weimar Germany, counting among their circle Stefan Zweig, Alma Mahler, and Bertolt Brecht. After Carl's work fell afoul of the Nazis, however, the couple and their two daughters were forced to flee Europe. Los Angeles didn't...
Author
Formats
Description
"Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Children is a masterpiece not only of the nineteenth century but of the whole of Russian literature, a book full to bursting with life. It is a novel about the relations between the young and the old, about love, families, politics, religion, about strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death. It is about the clash between liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries. At the time of its publication...
15) Lucky Jim
Author
Formats
Description
A hilarious satire about college life and high class manners, this is a classic of postwar English literature.
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most...
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most...
17) Good behaviour
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2001, c1981
Description
"I do know how to behave - believe me, because I know. I have always known...' Behind the gates of Temple Alice the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family...
18) Sleepless nights
Author
Description
Sleepless Nights is a scrapbook of memories: the first pangs of sexual longing, Billie Holiday holding forth in a cheap hotel, and the swagger and heartbreak of New York City.
19) Troubles
Author
Series
Formats
Description
"1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiance;e is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games...
20) Stoner
Author
Formats
Description
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life. As the years pass, Stoner encounters a series of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of...
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