{"product_id":"secondhand-literary-fiction-bargain-book-box-sp2619","title":"Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2619","description":"\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSecondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2619\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eTwenty books for the serious literary fiction reader — three of Lawrence Durrell's four Alexandria Quartet novels to start, and from there a beautifully assembled mix spanning le Carré at his most cerebral, the warmth of Nancy Mitford, both Miles Franklin novels together, and a strong thread of Australian women's writing from Tasma in the 1880s through Helen Hodgman in the 1970s. Jane Eyre, The Chosen, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and At Lady Molly's give it breadth; the Durrell trio gives it depth. Not many boxes arrive with this much coherent literary ambition across a single collection.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003col class=\"[li_\u0026amp;]:mb-0 [li_\u0026amp;]:mt-1 [li_\u0026amp;]:gap-1 [\u0026amp;:not(:last-child)_ul]:pb-1 [\u0026amp;:not(:last-child)_ol]:pb-1 list-decimal flex flex-col gap-1 pl-8 mb-3\"\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eJustine — Lawrence Durrell — The first and most dazzling of the Alexandria Quartet novels, in which Durrell's narrator falls in love with the dark and destructive Justine against the backdrop of pre-war Alexandria — a city rendered as nowhere else in English fiction, layered, sensuous, and unforgettable.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eBalthazar — Lawrence Durrell — The second Quartet novel, in which the same events of Justine are re-examined through a different perspective, revealing that nothing in Durrell's Alexandria is quite what it seemed — a radical experiment in novelistic form that still feels startlingly modern.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eClea — Lawrence Durrell — The fourth and final Quartet novel, in which the narrator returns to Alexandria after the war and must reckon with love, loss, and the question of what art and memory can actually preserve — a moving conclusion to one of the great literary achievements in English.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eBlue Skies and Jack and Jill — Helen Hodgman — A Virago Modern Classics double volume collecting Hodgman's two Tasmanian novellas — sharp, dark, brilliantly observed accounts of isolation and suburban life that were well ahead of their time when published in the 1970s.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe Skating Party — Marina Warner — A collection of stories from Marina Warner, better known for her cultural history and mythology, that demonstrates her fiction's trademark combination of historical depth, feminist intelligence, and quietly unsettling atmosphere.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eA Legacy — Sybille Bedford — Bedford's celebrated first novel, drawn from the history of her own cosmopolitan German family in the years before the First World War — elegant, witty, and deeply strange, a portrait of a vanished European world written with the cool authority of someone who remembers it.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eKidnapped — Robert Louis Stevenson — Stevenson's thrilling adventure novel in which David Balfour is kidnapped, shipped from Scotland, and escapes into the Highlands with the dashing Jacobite Alan Breck — a flight across the landscape that has never lost its power to compel.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eJane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë — One of the great novels in the English language, in which an orphaned governess navigates class, passion, and the mysterious madwoman in the attic with a moral directness that feels as revolutionary now as it did in 1847.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eCollected Short Stories: Volume One — W. Somerset Maugham — The first Penguin volume of Maugham's collected short fiction, gathering the stories that established him as one of the great practitioners of the form — witty, precise, and informed by decades of observation in every corner of the world.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe Land God Gave to Cain — Hammond Innes — A young man sets out to prove that his father's dying radio message about a crashed aircraft in the Labrador wilderness was real, in one of Hammond Innes's finest adventures — gripping, atmospheric, and impossible to put down.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eTinker Tailor Soldier Spy — John le Carré — Le Carré's masterpiece of Cold War espionage, in which retired spymaster George Smiley is brought back to uncover a Soviet mole at the top of British intelligence — the novel that redefined what a spy thriller could be.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe Chosen — Chaim Potok — Potok's breakthrough novel about two Jewish boys in Brooklyn — one Hasidic, one Orthodox — whose unexpected friendship forces both to examine the world their fathers made for them, and the world they must make for themselves.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eAt Lady Molly's — Anthony Powell — The fourth novel in Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence, in which the social world of narrator Nick Jenkins begins to crystallize around marriages, ambitions, and the particular comedy of people becoming exactly who they were always going to be.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eLove in a Cold Climate — Nancy Mitford — Mitford's most exuberantly funny novel, in which the eccentric Radletts and their neighbour Lady Montdore provide a portrait of English upper-class life between the wars that is simultaneously a love letter and a demolition job.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eMy Career Goes Bung — Miles Franklin — Written as the sequel to My Brilliant Career but suppressed for decades, this wickedly funny novel sends Sybylla Melvyn to Sydney as a literary celebrity and skewers the social world that awaits her with a satirical sharpness Franklin rarely matched.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eMy Brilliant Career — Miles Franklin — Franklin's extraordinary debut novel, in which Sybylla Melvyn refuses every expectation placed on a young Australian woman and insists on her ambition to write — published in 1901, it reads as radically as if written yesterday.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe Basic Kafka — Franz Kafka — A curated anthology of Kafka's essential work, gathering the short fiction, parables, and extracts from the major novels that together give the clearest picture of what makes his imagination so unique and so persistently disturbing.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eCollected Short Stories: Volume Two — W. Somerset Maugham — The second Penguin volume of Maugham's collected short fiction, continuing the survey of a writer who could conjure character, atmosphere, and moral complexity in the space of a dozen pages with seemingly effortless skill.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eChase the Wind — E.V. Thompson — Thompson's first and most acclaimed novel, set in the Cornish tin-mining community of the mid-nineteenth century, in which a young miner's love for a mine-owner's daughter sets off a chain of passion, injustice, and violence against the landscape of the moors.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eUncle Piper of Piper's Hill — Tasma — The most celebrated novel of Tasma (Jessie Couvreur), published in 1889, a sharp and socially perceptive portrait of colonial Melbourne life that makes her one of the most important women writers in Australian colonial fiction.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ol\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48857150914779,"sku":"SP2619","price":110.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/sp2619.jpg?v=1781061246","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/secondhand-literary-fiction-bargain-book-box-sp2619","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}