Secondhand Contemporary Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2951

Secondhand Contemporary Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2951

Twenty-two novels and story collections — Doris Lessing (four titles), Fay Weldon (three), Thomas Keneally, Anita Brookner, John Steinbeck, Anne Tyler, John Fowles, Graham Swift, Tim Winton, Ruth Park, Sybille Bedford, Peter Ackroyd, and others. A substantial box of literary fiction from the 1960s through the 1990s.

1. A Power of Roses — Ruth Park — Park's novel of family, community, and the lives of women in an Australian neighbourhood. From the author of The Harp in the South.
2. The Accidental Tourist — Anne Tyler — A travel writer who hates travel returns from a personal tragedy to find his life rebuilt by an unlikely woman. Pulitzer Prize winner.
3. Mantissa — John Fowles — A novelist wakes in a hospital with amnesia; his muse materialises to tell him exactly what she thinks of him. Fowles's most playful and provocative novel.
4. Captains and the Kings — Taylor Caldwell — The rise of an Irish immigrant to the heights of American political power across three generations. A sweeping novel of dynasty and corruption. Adapted for television.
5. The Jacaranda Tree — H.E. Bates — The Japanese invasion of Burma, seen through the lives of a British plantation manager and the small community he leads towards the Indian border.
6. Collected African Stories Vol. 1: This Was the Old Chief's Country — Doris Lessing — The first volume of Lessing's African stories: the farm, the veld, and the world just beyond the edge of white settler understanding.
7. Briefing for a Descent into Hell — Doris Lessing — A man is found wandering in London with no memory of who he is. His inner journey — whether visionary or psychotic — becomes one of Lessing's most radical explorations of consciousness.
8. Female Friends — Fay Weldon — Three women, their friendships and betrayals, their marriages and desires, across twenty years of English life. Weldon at her most astringent.
9. The Habit of Loving — Doris Lessing — Short stories exploring the varieties of love: possessive, selfless, habitual, and deluded.
10. A Family Madness — Thomas Keneally — A Sydney security guard falls in love with a Byelorussian woman whose family carries the weight of wartime collaboration and survival. Keneally's darkest novel.
11. Family and Friends — Anita Brookner — A novel told through a family photograph album: the children of a Jewish widow, the choices they make, and what those choices cost them.
12. East of Eden — John Steinbeck — Steinbeck's most ambitious novel: two California families across several generations, and the retelling of the Cain and Abel story in the Salinas Valley.
13. The Good Terrorist — Doris Lessing — A group of political activists squat in a condemned London house; their revolutionary intentions dissolve into domestic farce, then into something far more dangerous. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
14. Affliction — Fay Weldon — A woman watches her husband fall under the influence of a dangerous therapist. Weldon's novel of domestic manipulation — maddeningly seductive.
15. The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde — Peter Ackroyd — Ackroyd imagines Wilde's final months in Paris as a diary: the wit, the self-mythologising, the genuine suffering, and the undiminished genius.
16. Jigsaw — Sybille Bedford — Bedford's autobiographical novel: a childhood in the south of France with an unreliable, charming, drug-addicted mother. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
17. Memories of the Assassination Attempt and Other Stories — Gerard Windsor — Short stories from the Australian writer: precise, unsettling, and shot through with the strangeness of everyday life.
18. The Sweet-Shop Owner — Graham Swift — Swift's debut novel: a day in the life of a London sweet-shop owner, his dead wife's ultimatum, and the weight of an unlived life.
19. Goldengrove Unleaving — Jill Paton Walsh — A young woman returns to the Cornish house of her childhood summers and the friendship that shaped her. Walsh's most personal novel.
20. Scission: I Did it for Smin — Tim Winton — Winton's debut story collection: the Western Australian landscape, family pressure, and the raw emotional life of people on the edge.
21. Growing Rich — Fay Weldon — Three girls growing up in an English village, and the devil — in the form of a chauffeur — who offers each of them exactly what they want.
22. Beyond the Glass — Antonia White — The final volume of White's autobiographical sequence: Clara's mental breakdown and her long, painful recovery. Virago Modern Classics edition.