Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2621

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2621

Twenty books weighted beautifully toward three of the twentieth century's most compulsively readable writers: six Graham Greenes taking in the best of his moral thrillers and entertainments, four Isaac Bashevis Singers ranging from seventeenth-century Poland to postwar New York, and four Somerset Maughams spanning colonial adventure to refined short fiction. The rest of the box — du Maurier, Lawrence, Hemingway, Chaim Potok, Jane Gardam, Beverley Farmer — is hardly filler. A box for the reader who knows exactly what they like and wants considerably more of it.

1. The Painted Veil — W. Somerset Maugham — Maugham's novel about an unfaithful wife whose life is transformed when her husband takes her to a cholera epidemic in colonial China — sharp, sad, and morally unsparing in the way that only Maugham can be.
2. The Slave — Isaac Bashevis Singer — Singer's passionate and brutal novel about a seventeenth-century Polish Jew taken into slavery who falls in love with the daughter of his captor — a story about faith, desire, and the impossible position of Jewish life in Europe, told with mythic force.
3. Monsignor Quixote — Graham Greene — Greene's late novel about an accidental Spanish priest and his communist mayor friend driving through Spain in a battered Seat, debating faith, doubt, and politics — funny, tender, and deeply felt, one of his most personal books.
4. The Magician — W. Somerset Maugham — A young writer becomes entangled with a terrifying occultist in Edwardian Paris, in a novel loosely based on Aleister Crowley that blends Gothic atmosphere with Maugham's characteristic psychological acuity.
5. Jamaica Inn — Daphne du Maurier — Du Maurier's atmospheric thriller about a young woman who arrives at a remote Cornish inn and discovers her uncle is at the centre of a violent smuggling ring — as gripping now as when it was published in 1936.
6. Enemies: A Love Story — Isaac Bashevis Singer — A Holocaust survivor in New York finds himself entangled with three women simultaneously, in a novel that is at once a fable, a dark comedy of manners, and a meditation on how to live after catastrophe.
7. Shosha — Isaac Bashevis Singer — Set in the final years of Jewish Warsaw before the Nazi invasion, this novel follows a writer torn between ambition and his childhood sweetheart — Singer at his most lyrical and elegiac, suffused with the atmosphere of a world about to be destroyed.
8. The Honorary Consul — Graham Greene — A British consul in northern Argentina is accidentally kidnapped by revolutionaries who meant to take someone else, in a novel that turns the mistaken hostage into a profound exploration of idealism, failure, and grace.
9. The Power and the Glory — Graham Greene — One of the finest English novels of the twentieth century: a "whisky priest" — flawed, frightened, but still faithful — hunted across Mexico by a relentless lieutenant, a novel about what it means to persist in being good.
10. It's a Battlefield — Graham Greene — An early Greene novel about the campaign to save a bus driver from execution, exploring the randomness of justice and the gap between political principle and actual human life with the moral intelligence that would become his signature.
11. Twenty-One Stories — Graham Greene — A Penguin collection demonstrating the full range of Greene's gifts across twenty-one stories: moral complexity, dark comedy, colonial observation, and the particular kind of spiritual crisis that is his great subject.
12. Travels with My Aunt — Graham Greene — A retired bank manager's comfortable life is upended by the arrival of his magnificent and disreputable aunt, who drags him across Europe and South America in one of Greene's most openly joyful and comic novels.
13. My Name is Asher Lev — Chaim Potok — A boy growing up in a Brooklyn Hasidic community discovers he has an extraordinary gift for painting and must choose between his art and his people — a powerful novel about creativity, tradition, and the cost of being different.
14. The Family Moskat — Isaac Bashevis Singer — Singer's sprawling epic of Polish Jewish family life between the World Wars, tracing the Moskat family across decades of political upheaval, religious transformation, and looming catastrophe — one of the great novels of twentieth-century Jewish experience.
15. A Long Way from Verona — Jane Gardam — Gardam's first novel, in which a thirteen-year-old girl growing up in wartime northern England discovers she is a writer — funny, sharp, and astonishingly confident for a debut, a book that announced a major talent.
16. Collected Short Stories: Volume Three — W. Somerset Maugham — The third Penguin volume of Maugham's collected short fiction, gathering more of the stories that established him as one of the great practitioners of the form, with his characteristic combination of wit, observation, and cool moral intelligence.
17. The Woman Who Rode Away — D.H. Lawrence — The lead story, in which a restless American woman rides into the mountains of Mexico and offers herself to an ancient Indian tribe, is one of Lawrence's most disturbing and powerful fictions — a collection that showcases him at his most uncompromising.
18. The Narrow Corner — W. Somerset Maugham — A yacht voyage through the Dutch East Indies becomes the setting for murder, idealism, and corruption in this gripping Maugham novel, written with the economy and moral clarity of his best late work.
19. The Snows of Kilimanjaro — Ernest Hemingway — The title story, in which a writer dying on an African plain looks back on all the work he never did, is one of Hemingway's finest — a collection that showcases his prose at its most stripped and precise.
20. Milk — Beverley Farmer — An important collection of stories from one of Australia's most accomplished writers, in which Australian and Greek characters navigate displacement, desire, and cultural distance with the intimacy and directness that made Farmer's reputation.