Subject: Fiction

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The Dinner Club Sapper

A fascinating collection of tales, including stories related by members of a select club consisting of an actor, a barrister, a doctor, a soldier, a writer and an ordinary man. Each member of this club is obliged to entertain his fellows to dinner from time to time, after which he relates a story connected with hi…Read More »
In Our Time Ernest Hemingway

A strikingly original collection of short stories and accompanying vignettes that marked Ernest Hemingway’s American debut. When published, it was praised by Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and it earned …Read More »
The Red Pony John Steinbeck

Raised on a ranch in northern California, Jody is well-schooled in the hard work and demands of a rancher's life. He is used to the way of horses, too; but nothing has prepared him for the special connection he will forge with Gabilan, a hot-tempered pony his father gives him. With Billy Buck, the hired hand, Jody t…Read More »
Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck

An intimate portrait of two men who cherish the slim bond between them and the dream they share in a world marred by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. Clinging to each other in their loneliness and alienation, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie dream, as drifters will, of a place to…Read More »
Brave New World Revisited Aldous Huxley

When the novel Brave New World first appeared in 1932, its shocking analysis of a scientific dictatorship seemed a projection into the remote future. Here, in one of the most important and fascinating books of his career, Aldous Huxley uses his tremendous know…Read More »
Scoop Evelyn Waugh

Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of the "Daily Beast", has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another. Acting on a dinner-party tip from Mrs Algernon Smith, he feels co…Read More »
Streets of Night John Dos Passos

A novel begun in college and then reworked for seven years, this work mirrors the author’s experience at Harvard and in greater Boston. The novel reflects young Dos Passos’s interests in aestheticism, Greek and Roman culture, and Walt Whitman.
The Torrents of Spring Ernest Hemingway

A hilarious parody of the Chicago school of literature. Poking fun at that "great race" of writers, it depicts a vogue that Hemingway himself refused to follow. In style and substance, it is a burlesque of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter, but in the course of the narrative, other literary tendencies associated w…Read More »
Vile Bodies Evelyn Waugh

The Bright Young Things of 1920s Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade, whether it is promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports cars. A vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling…Read More »
Heaven & Hell Aldous Huxley

In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. Huxley described his experience with breathtaking immediac…Read More »
The Woman Who Rode Away D. H. Lawrence

A dispirited, unnamed woman decides to leave her ordinary and unfulfilling life to ride out into the lands of the Chilchui Indians and get in touch with their spiritual and ancient ways. While her quest brings physical danger, it also becomes a journey of deep self-discovery and self-acceptance. D.H. Lawrence’s writ…Read More »
The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley

'The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out'. Aldous Huxley first took mescalin in 1953 and continued his experiments with hallucinogenic drugs until 1963 when, on his deathbed, he asked for and was given LSD. Huxley explores the effects of the mescalin…Read More »
A Passage to India E. M. Forster

When Adela Quested and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced 'Anglo-Indian' community. Determined to escape the parochial English enclave and explore the 'real India', they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr A…Read More »
Men at Arms Evelyn Waugh

Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade that seriously blots his Halberdier copybook.

_Men…Read More »
Decline and Fall Evelyn Waugh

Expelled from Oxford for indecent behaviour, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly unsurprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at Llanabba Castle. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Th…Read More »
Last Tales Isak Dinesen

Last Tales is a collection of twelve of the last tales that Isak Dinesen wrote before her death in 1962. They include seven tales from Albondocani, a projected novel that was never completed but occupied the author for many years; The Caryatids, an unfinished Gothic tale of a couple bedeviled by an old letter an…Read More »
They Winter Abroad T. H. White

White's exciting and engrossing novel of a glittering resort hotel, where every room was the setting for a private drama, and the most forbidden dreams could come shockingly true.
Soldiers' Pay William Faulkner

A group of soldiers travel by train across the United States in the aftermath of the First World War. One of them is horribly scarred, blind and almost entirely mute. Moved by his condition, a few civilian fellow travellers decided to see him home to Georgia, to a family who believed him dead, and a fiancée who grew…Read More »
The Holy Terror H. G. Wells

Presenting itself as a biography of Rudolf "Rud" Whitlow, who is born with such an aggressive temperament that scarcely is he born but his monthly nurse exclaims: "It's a Holy Terror!" Rud Whitlow goes on to become the founder of the first world state, long a Wellsian dream.

The events take place in the recognizabl…Read More »
Blix Frank Norris

This short romance was based on Norris's courtship of his wife. It features a San Francisco journalist, Condy Rivers, who falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy family that believes him to be very much beneath her. Willa Cather praised the novel as 'all wheat and no chaff'.
Armance Stendhal

Stendhal's first novel is a romance novel set during the Bourbon Restoration and published anonymously in 1827. Octave de Malivert, a taciturn but brilliant young man barely out of the Ecole Polytechnique is attracted to Armance Zohiloff, who shares his feelings. The novel describes how a series of misunderstandings…Read More »
Keep the Aspidistra Flying George Orwell

London, 1936. Gordon Comstock has declared war on the money god; and Gordon is losing the war. Nearly 30 and 'rather moth-eaten already,' a poet whose one small book of verse has fallen 'flatter than any pancake,' Gordon has given up a 'good' job and gone to work in a bookshop at half his former salary. Always…Read More »
Eyeless in Gaza Aldous Huxley

Anthony Beavis is a man inclined to recoil from life. His past is haunted by the death of his best friend Brian and by his entanglement with the cynical and manipulative Mary Amberley. Realising that his determined detachment from the world has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Antho…Read More »
The Fox D. H. Lawrence

Nellie March and Jill Banford manage an ailing Berkshire farm at the time of the First World War, a task which is made all the more complicated by the frequent rampages of a local fox through their chicken coop. When a young soldier turns up and begins to wrest control of the farm by asserting his own ideas for its …Read More »
Tom Brown at Rugby Thomas Hughes

Tom's second year starts at a private school, but due to an epidemic of fever in the area, all the school's boys are sent home, and Tom is transferred mid-term to Rugby School. On his arrival, the eleven-year-old Tom Brown is looked after by a more experienced classmate, Harry 'Scud' East. Tom's nemesis at Rugby is …Read More »
Work of Art Sinclair Lewis

Three generations of the Weagle family grow up in and work for boarding houses, inns and hotels. Focus is on two brothers, Myron and Ora, of the second generation. Poetic, ethereal Ora could not wait to escape hotel drudgery, though never too proud to ask plodding Myron for money.
A Bride from the Bush E. W. Hornung

Today, a family would think nothing of the fact that one of their sons had fallen in love with an Australian woman. In the stodgy nineteenth century, however, the news was taken somewhat differently. Indeed, for the proper British Bligh family in E. W. Hornung's A Bride From the Bush, a dispatch delivering this info…Read More »
The Razor's Edge W. Somerset Maugham

Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brillant characters - his fiancee Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob….Read More »
Rudin Ivan Turgenev

The story of a character typical to Turgenev – a 'superfluous' man, weak of will, brimming with indecisive frustration – and yet tormented by ideals. Rudin is made impotent by the dissonance of honoring the older generations while at the same time embracing the new bold epoch of pre-revolutionary Russia. The the…Read More »
Trustee from the Toolroom Nevil Shute

Keith Stewart is an ordinary man. However, one day he is called upon to undertake an extraordinary task. When his sister's boat is wrecked in the Pacific, he becomes trustee for his little niece. In order to save her from destitution he has to embark on a 2,000 mile voyage in a small yacht in inhospitable waters. Hi…Read More »