Anita Desai

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J G Farrell

Inspired by the Indian Mutiny of 1857, The Siege of Krishnapur is set in the fictional town of that name where a British garrison withstands a four-month siege by mutineers. Eventually rescued after undergoing terrible privations, the leading characters all find their ideals tested and their smug assumptions of military and moral superiority severely shaken. 
In Troubles Major Brendan Archer travels to Ireland in the aftermath of World War I in order to meet his fiancée Angela in a remote seaside hotel owned by her father. Angela dies unexpectedly, but Archer remains in Kilnalough, captivated by the Majestic and its inhabitants, and seemingly unaware of the approaching political storm as Ireland dissolves into revolt and civil war. 
Both novels combine high comedy with vivid realism and reveal Farrell as 'one of the finest post-colonial novelists' - John Sutherland.

Troubles

The Siege of Krishnapur

Virginia Woolf

The beautiful Everyman gift edition in hardback. 
 
The Lord Orlando's country seat has 365 rooms. An exquisitely beautiful youth, he is a favourite of the ageing Queen Elizabeth and enjoys all that Court and tavern have to offer. He falls passionately in love with the intriguing Sasha, an androgynous Russian princess, who jilts him. Stricken, he takes up Literature, penning huge quantities of poems and plays, 'all romantic, and all long'. A few decades later a still youthful Orlando is appointed ambassador to Constantinople by Charles II. Here he wakes up one day and finds he has the body of a woman. "Different sex, same person", she observes, unphased. 
In London, it is the eighteenth century, and she can hobnob with "men of genius" Pope and Swift, Johnson and Boswell. She has affairs with both women and men, but before long it is the nineteenth century, oppressively gloomy and moral and probably time to find a husband. Fortunately, in a Brontësque moment on a moor, the gender- nonconforming Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, newly back from Cape Horn, gallops past and scoops her up into bliss. 
 
Woolf's most unusual and joyous novel was inspired by her affair with the dashing author and aristocrat, Vita Sackville West.

Orlando

George MacDonald Fraser

For George MacDonald Fraser the bully Flashman was easily the most interesting character in Tom Brown's Schooldays, and imaginative speculation as to what might have happened to him after his expulsion from Rugby School for drunkenness ended in 12 volumes of memoirs in which Sir Harry Paget Flashman - self-confessed scoundrel, liar, cheat, thief, coward -'and, oh yes, a toady' - romps his way through decades of nineteenth-century history in a swashbuckling and often hilarious series of military and amorous adventures. In Flashman the youthful hero, armed with a commission in the 11th Dragoons, is shipped to India, woos and wins the beautiful Elspeth, and reluctantly takes part in the first Anglo-Afghan War, honing a remarkable talent for self-preservation.Flash for Freedom! finds him crewing on an African slave ship, hiding in a New Orleans whorehouse and fortuitously running into rising young American politician Abraham Lincoln...

Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman in the Great Game

Ha Jin

The demands of human longing contend with the weight of centuries of custom in 
acclaimed author Ha Jin’s Waiting, a novel of unexpected richness and universal resonance. Every summer Lin Kong, a doctor in the Chinese Army, returns to his village to end his loveless arranged marriage with the humble and touchingly loyal Shuyu. Each time, Lin must return to the city to tell Manna Wu, the educated, modern nurse he loves, that they will have to postpone their engagement once again. Caught between the conflicting claims of these two very different women and trapped by a culture in which adultery can ruin lives and careers, Lin has been waiting for eighteen years. This year, he promises will be different

Waiting

Peter Carey

OSCAR AND LUCINDA is a sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel set in nineteenth-century England and Australia where the two potential lovers lead parallel lives until chance brings them together on board ship. 
A narrative tangle of love, religion, gambling, commerce and colonialism culminates in a nightmare expedition – the result of a wager – to transport a glass church across the Australian wilderness. 
 
 In TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly speaks for himself in a voice that is direct, colloquial, theatrical, and utterly magical. To his pursuers he is nothing but a monstrous criminal, but to his own people he is a hero, defying British imperial authority in support of the poor Irish settlers who are its victims. In a dazzling act of ventriloquism, Carey brings the famous bushranger unforgettably to life.

Oscar and Lucinda

True History of the Kelly Gang

Giorgio Bassini

It is the autobiography of Giorgio Bassani, told in a time span of around 15 years, a time where the ambiguous and mysterious female figure of Micol was a central part of his life. They live in a time where racial laws are being passed by fascist Italy and as a result Micol and her family open the gates of their huge mansion and even bigger garden to a handful of jeweish friends that have been banned from any recreational activity. In this garden Micol guides the narrating "I" figure through the interior journey in search of his identity and maturity. Unfortunately this journey of truth can only end but in the sourest way; the rejection of a deep love felt by the author for Micol, his spiritual guide.

The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis

Naguib Mahfouz

The books' titles are taken from actual streets in Cairo, the city of Mahfouz's childhood and youth. 
The trilogy follows the life of the Cairene patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his family across three generations, from World War I to the overthrow of King Farouk in 1952.

Mahfouz Trilogy Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

Toni Morrison

It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halle and Paul D. are to be destroyed in a cataclysm of torment and agony. The world of Sethe, however, is to turn from one of love to one of violence and death - the death of Sethe's baby daughter Beloved, whose name is the single word on the tombstone, who died at her mother's hands, and who will return to claim retribution.

Beloved

Halldór Laxness

Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, Independent People is a masterly realist novel evoking in rich detail a family and a rural community struggling to survive in the starkest of landscapes. At the same time it is infused with an intense awareness of Iceland's saga tradition and folklore. Bjartur of Summerhouses is a hard and sometimes cruel man, but his flinty determination to achieve independence is both genuinely heroic and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude before managing to purchase an isolated piece of land rumoured to be cursed, Bjartur wants nothing more than to tend his flocks unbeholden to any man. But his daughter wants to live unbeholden to him, and what ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. 
An utterly compelling read.

Independent People

Vasily Grossman

Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad (1942-3), where the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the Red Army, and around an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, and their many friends and acquaintances, Life and Fate recounts the experience of characters caught up in an immense struggle between opposing armies and ideologies. Nazism and Communism are appallingly similar, 'two poles of one magnet', as a German camp commander tells a shocked old Bolshevik prisoner. At the height of the battle Russian soldiers and citizens alike are at last able to speak out as they choose, and without reprisal - an unexpected and short-lived moment of freedom. Grossman himself was on the front line as a war correspondent at Stalingrad - hence his gripping battle scenes, though these are more than matched by the drama of the individual conscience struggling against massive pressure to submit to the State. He knew all about this from experience too. His central character, Viktor Shtrum, eventually succumbs, but each delay and act of resistance is a moral victory. Though he writes unsparingly of war, terror and totalitarianism, Grossman also tells of the acts of 'senseless kindness' that redeem humanity, and his message remains one of hope. He dedicates his book, the labour of ten years, and which he did not live to see published, to his mother, who, like Viktor Shtrum's, was killed in the holocaust at Berdichev in Ukraine in September 1941.

Life and Fate

Joseph Roth

THE RADETSKY MARCH is subtle and touching study of family life at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Writing in the traditional form of the family saga, Roth nevertheless manages to bring to his story a completely individual manner which gives at the same time the detailed and intimate portrait of a life and the wider panorama of a failing dynasty. Not yet well known in English-speaking countries, Joseph Roth is one of the most distinguished Austrian writers of our century, worthy to be bracketed with Musil and Kraus.

The Radetzky March

Ian McEwan

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone. 
 
"From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.”

Atonement

Fred Uhlman

The romantic forested landscape of southwest Germany is the setting for the birth of a friendship that will haunt sixteen-year-old Hans Schwarz for the rest of his life. Hans is Jewish, the son of a doctor who is confident that the rise of the Nazis is only 'a temporary illness' afflicting his beloved country. Hans's new classmate, Konradin von Hohenfels, is a dazzling young aristocrat whose mother keeps a portrait of Hitler on her dressing-table. Hans is immediately drawn to Konradin, and thrilled when a close bond forms between them, forged by common interests that set them apart from the other boys. But their loyalties are soon tested in ways they could not have imagined. Three decades later, from the vantage point of New York City, Hans once again confronts this life-shaping episode from his youth, through a stunning revelation that he stumbles upon by chance. In its story of friendship undone by History, Reunion combines the explosive compression of a fable with the emotional depth of an epic novel many times its length.

Reunion

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

With effortless grace, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates in her second novel a 
seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to 
establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. 
We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: 
Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor 
full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has 
abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm, and Richard, a 
shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s wilful twin sister Kainene. These 
characters are pulled apart and thrown together in ways none of them imagined 
possible. Half of a Yellow Sun is an electrifying modern masterpiece about the ways in 
which love complicates everything.

Half of a Yellow Sun

Gabriel García Márquez

With the style and eloquent language that earned him the Nobel prize for literature, Marquez weaves a stunning story of glory and despair. Both real history and Marquez' imagination let us enter the world of Simon Bolivar, Liberator of South America, in all his humanity - good and evil. Bolivar drove the Spanish out of South America, dealt with treachery from his own compatriots. Once hailed as a hero, he is now scorned and reviled, and fighting his own demons, he refuses to die quietly. We are given a glimpse of the genius and foibles of the man behind the legend, as we accompany him on his last journey, accompanied only by the loyal remants of his once great army.

The General in his Labyrinth

Mary Renault

In two remarkable historical novels, Mary Renault fashions from the myth of Theseus a convincingly flawed hero and weaves a thrillingly plausible account of the Labyrinth and the infamous Minotaur. 
The King Must Die follows the young Theseus as he discovers that his true father is the King of Athens, and volunteers to join the annual tribute of Athenian girls and youths sacrificed to a bull-worshipping cult on the island of Crete. Trapped in the labyrinthine palace of King Minos, Theseus enlists the help of high priestess Ariadne in a daring plan to free his people. 
The Bull From the Sea begins after Theseus's triumphal return to Athens. He is now king, but his confidence will be shaken by a life-changing encounter with the queen of the Amazons, the birth of a son who will insist on choosing his own path, and the tragic results of his wife's treachery. 
Renault's deep knowledge of the Greek world, her sure grasp of psychology and genius for inspired speculation bring the distant world of the legendary past enthrallingly to life.

The King Must Die / The Bull from the Sea

James Ellroy

American Tabloid gives us John F. Kennedy's rise and fall from an insider's perspective. We're there for the rigged 1960 election and for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. We're the eyes and ears and souls of three rogue cops who've signed on for the ride and come to see Jack as their betrayer. And we're there in Dallas in 1963 where it all comes to a brutal end. 
The Cold Six Thousand the cover-up for the Kennedy assassination begins. This time the ride takes us from Dallas to Vietnam to Las Vegas to Memphis to Cuba to the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. We're rubbing shoulders Klansmen and mafiosi, killers, hoods and provocateurs. WIth Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And of course a lot of corrupt policemen. 
Blood's a Rover takes us into the 70s. RFK and MLK are dead. A kid private eye clashes with a mob goon and an enforcer for FBI director Edgar Hoover in L.A. There's an armoured-car heist and a cache of missing emeralds. Revolution brews in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Amidst all this, all three anti-heros fall for Red revolutionary Joan Rosen Klein. Each will pay 'a dear and savage price to live History'. 
The American dream as Nightmare.

American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand

Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy Vol.1

Willa Cather

When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, he finds a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indigenous in custom and belief. Over the next four decades, Latour works gently and tirelessly to spread his faith and to build a soaring cathedral out of the local golden rock–while contending with unforgiving terrain, derelict and sometimes rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. 
 
Death Comes for the Archbishop shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape and those who are drawn to it suggest why Cather is acknowledged without question as the most poetically exact chronicler of the American frontier.

Death Comes For The Archbishop

Robert Graves

A grandson of Mark Antony, young Claudius is mistaken for a weakling and an idiot because of his stutter and his physical infirmities and grows up learning to use his reputation for harmlessness as a shield. Dismissed as insignificant by his powerful relatives as they compete with each other for power, he spends his time writing a secret history of the first three emperors of Rome as observed from his remarkable ringside vantage point—a dramatic tale that makes up the pages of I, Claudius. 
 
Claudius’s impersonation of a fool enables him to escape the intrigues and poisonings that mark his predecessors’ reigns, including the machinations of his murderous grandmother Livia and his dangerously mad nephew, Caligula. After assassinating Caligula, the Praetorian Guard declare Claudius the next 
emperor—over his protests. He accepts only to avoid civil war, and Claudius the God traces his attempts to strengthen Rome and restore the Republic. But his efforts are undermined by his corrupt wife, Messalina, and the ambitions of his own son, Britannicus, and he is unable to prevent the doom he foresees for Rome when his great-nephew Nero succeeds him as emperor.

I, Claudius, Claudius the God

James Weldon Johnson

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards - and double consciousness - experienced by Black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man became a pioneering document of African-American culture and an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. 
 
Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to 'pass' for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of Black society at the turn of the century - from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of Ragtime. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a complex and moving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what it meant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing but colour.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Ivo Andric

The town of Visegrad was long caught between the warring Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but its sixteenth-century bridge survived unscathed--until 1914 when tensions in the Balkans triggered the first World War. Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, The Bridge on the Drina brilliantly illuminates a succession of lives that swirl around the majestic stone arches. Among them is that of the bridge's builder, a Serb kidnapped as a boy by the Ottomans; years later, as the empire's Grand Vezir, he decides to construct a bridge at the spot where he was parted from his mother. A workman named Radisav tries to hinder the construction, with horrific consequences. Later, the beautiful young Fata climbs the bridge's parapet to escape an arranged marriage, and, later still, an inveterate gambler named Milan risks everything on it in one final game with the devil. With humor and compassion, Ivo Andric chronicles the ordinary Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians whose lives are connected by the bridge, in a land that has itself been a bridge between East and West for centuries.

The Bridge on the Drina

Umberto Eco

Who is killing monks in a great medieval abbey famed for its library - and why? Brother William of Baskerville is sent to find out, taking with him the assistant who later tells the tale of his investigations. Eco's celebrated story combines elements of detective fiction, metaphysical thriller, post-modernist puzzle and historical novel in one of the few twentieth-century books which can be described as genuinely unique. 
The Name of the Rose was made into a film in 1986, starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud.

The Name of the Rose

Erich Maria Remarque

In 1914 Paul Bäumer and his classmates are marched to the local recruiting office by a sentimentally patriotic form-master. On a calm October day in 1918, only a few weeks before the Armistice, Paul will be the last of them to be killed. In All Quiet on the Western Front he tells their story. 
 A few years after it was published in 1929 the Nazis would denounce and publicly burn Remarque's novel for insulting the heroic German army - in other words, for 'telling it like it was' for the common soldier on the front line where any notions of glory and national destiny were soon blasted away by the dehumanizing horror of modern warfare. 
 Remarque has an extraordinary power of describing fear: the appalling tension of being holed up in a dugout under heavy bombardment; the animal instinct to kill or be killed which takes over during hand-to-hand combat. He also has an eye for the grimly comic: the consignment of coffins Paul and his friends pass as they make their way up the line for a new offensive; the young soldiers joyfully tucking into double rations when half their company are unexpectedly wiped out. 
 Remarque's elegy for a sacrificed generation is all the more devastating for the laconic prose in which his teenaged veteran narrates shocking experiences which for him have become the stuff of daily life. Paul cannot imagine a life after the war and can no longer relate to his family when he returns home on leave. Only the camaraderie of his diminishing circle of friends has any meaning for him. He comes especially to depend on an older comrade, Stanislaus Katczinsky, and one of the most poignant moments in the book is when he carries the wounded Kat on his back under fire to the field dressing station, with starkly tragic outcome. 
 The saddest and most compelling war story ever written.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Blood's a Rover takes us into the 70s. RFK and MLK are dead. A kid private eye clashes with a mob goon and an enforcer for FBI director Edgar Hoover in L.A. There's an armoured-car heist and a cache of missing emeralds. Revolution brews in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Amidst all this, all three anti-heros fall for Red revolutionary Joan Rosen Klein. Each will pay 'a dear and savage price to live History'.

Blood's a Rover

Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy Vol. 2

Joseph Heller

A burlesque epic in the tradition of THE GOOD SOLDIER SCHWEIK, CATCH-22 exposes the absurdity of war by applying its own demented logic to America's involvement in Korea. The 'catch' is that soldiers have to claim to be mad in order to get out of fighting - but being capable of making such a claim automatically proves them sane. With a cast of magnificently larger-than-life characters who are rushed along at a breathless pace, for once this really is a novel it's hard to put down. CATCH-22 was made into a film.

Catch 22

Jaroslav Hašek

An attack on war which broadens into a satire on the ANCIEN REGIME of the Austro-Hungarian empire, THE GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK recreates the age-old figure of the simple soldier whose sheer determination to survive brings into question the mighty social and political institutions he confronts. Set in a Central Europe which has long since vanished, Hasek's novel is nevertheless a timeless portrait of the 'little man' doughtily waging his own war against authority

The Good Soldier Svejk

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