Secondhand Classic Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2946

Secondhand Classic Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2946

Twenty-three books that together represent a remarkable gathering of canonical classics — four Jane Austens, García Márquez's great love story, du Maurier's Rebecca, Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, both Brontë sisters, two Muriel Sparks, and Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock. A box built for the reader who reads everything.

1. Persuasion — Jane Austen — Austen's last completed novel and her most emotionally direct: Anne Elliot, who was persuaded to reject the man she loved eight years ago, and what happens when he comes back with a naval career and a fortune.
2. Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen — Catherine Morland arrives at Bath having read too many Gothic novels and begins applying their conventions to real life — with Austen enjoying every irony. The earliest of the six novels, and the most playful.
3. Shadows on the Rock — Willa Cather (Virago Modern Classics) — A year in the life of a Quebec apothecary and his daughter in the 1690s: the small rituals and quiet dramas of a French-Canadian settlement at the edge of the known world.
4. Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel García Márquez — Florentino Ariza waits fifty-one years, nine months, and four days to renew his declaration of love. García Márquez's most romantic novel, and his warmest.
5. Devoted Ladies — M.J. Farrell (Molly Keane) (Virago Modern Classics) — Two women, a troubled friendship, and an Irish house party: Keane's comic wickedness at full strength, the class warfare conducted in perfect sentences.
6. Hard Times — Charles Dickens — Set in a northern industrial town ruled entirely by facts and statistics, this is Dickens's most compressed novel and his most direct attack on utilitarian thinking.
7. Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson — Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver, the map, and the island. The pirate adventure against which all pirate adventures since have been measured.
8. Gone with the Wind — Margaret Mitchell — Scarlett O'Hara survives the Civil War, the burning of Atlanta, and Reconstruction through sheer force of will. One of the most argued-over novels ever published, and one of the most compulsively readable.
9. Concluding — Henry Green — A single day at a girls' school in which an elderly scientist lives. Green's most enigmatic novel: almost nothing is explained, the atmosphere is total, and the unease doesn't resolve.
10. Rebecca — Daphne du Maurier — The unnamed narrator marries a widower and goes to live at Manderley, where the first wife Rebecca is more present than the living. The psychological suspense novel against which all others are measured.
11. Picnic at Hanging Rock — Joan Lindsay — A group of schoolgirls climb a volcanic rock in the Victorian countryside on Valentine's Day 1900 and some of them never come back. The novel that blurs the line between mystery and myth so completely that readers still argue about what it means.
12. The Girls of Slender Means — Muriel Spark — London in 1945: young women sharing a bomb-damaged hostel, making do with almost nothing. Spark's most elegiac novel, where the lightness of touch cuts the deepest.
13. Emma — Jane Austen — Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with plenty of leisure to manage everyone else's love affairs — until Austen dismantles her certainties, one revelation at a time. The most perfectly constructed of the six novels.
14. Aspects of Love — David Garnett — A young man falls for a French actress; his uncle falls for her too; the entanglements of desire and family unfold across two decades. The basis for the Lloyd Webber musical, and considerably more interesting than that implies.
15. Memento Mori — Muriel Spark — Someone is telephoning London's elderly, one by one, to remind them that they must die. Spark's comedy of death: cold, precise, and unexpectedly moving.
16. The Wind in the Willows — Kenneth Grahame — Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad of Toad Hall: the riverside picnic, the Wild Wood, the road, and the chapter called "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" that lifts the whole book into something stranger and more beautiful than a children's story needs to be.
17. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen — Elinor and Marianne Dashwood face the same reversal of fortune and respond in entirely opposite ways: one suppresses everything, one feels everything. Austen's first published novel and her most rigorous.
18. The Mandarins — Simone de Beauvoir — Paris intellectuals in the years after the Liberation: the personal and political entanglements of a circle modelled unmistakably on Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir herself, and Nelson Algren. Winner of the Prix Goncourt, 1954.
19. Little Women — Louisa May Alcott — The four March sisters growing up in New England during the Civil War. One of the foundational novels of American girlhood and, in Jo March, one of its most enduring portraits of a woman who wants to write.
20. The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett — Mary Lennox discovers a locked garden and, through it, herself. Remarkable for how seriously it takes the inner life of children, and still one of the most quietly powerful novels about recovery.
21. Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë — Heathcliff and Catherine, the moors, and a love so extreme it becomes indistinguishable from obsession. The most formally strange of the Victorian novels, and the one that keeps readers most unsettled about where their sympathies should lie.
22. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë — Jane, penniless and plain, will not compromise her moral self for love or money. The novel that first made the word "governess" carry the weight of a complete social and romantic drama.
23. Ripening Seed — Colette — A sixteen-year-old boy and an older woman spend a summer holiday together: Colette's meditation on first desire and the education that experience, not innocence, provides.