{"product_id":"secondhand-literary-fiction-bargain-book-box-sp2677","title":"Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2677","description":"\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSecondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Box — 18 Book\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eNineteen novels, stories, poems, and essays of genuine literary ambition. Jonathan Franzen at full stretch, Colleen McCullough doing something you won't expect, Tim Powers reimagining the Pre-Raphaelites as a vampire story, David Guterson following up \u003cem\u003eSnow Falling on Cedars\u003c\/em\u003e, David Mamet turning his dramatic intelligence to prose fiction, and Morris West asking what a Pope might think if he came back from open-heart surgery with a changed soul. There's a novel about the only woman to ascend the Dragon Throne of China, a Hollywood blacklist story, and Tony Harrison turning the medieval mystery plays into something urgently contemporary. One of the richest boxes in this collection.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003chr class=\"border-border-200 border-t-0.5 my-3 mx-1.5\"\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e1. Purity — Jonathan Franzen\u003c\/strong\u003e A young woman called Pip Tyler searches for her absent father and falls into the orbit of a Julian Assange-like figure running a radical transparency organisation. Franzen weaves Cold War East Germany, internet-age idealism, and several decades of American family dysfunction into one of his most ambitious novels. Unmissable for readers who take contemporary fiction seriously.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e2. The Expectant Mariner — Shirley Deane\u003c\/strong\u003e A quietly compelling novel of waiting, longing, and the particular emotional landscape of those left behind when someone goes to sea — Deane writes about absence and anticipation with real literary sensitivity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e3. Green Dragon, White Tiger — Annette Motley\u003c\/strong\u003e The only woman ever to ascend the Dragon Throne of China — Wu Zetian, concubine turned Empress, one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. Motley brings her to life with sweep and sensory richness in a novel that does justice to one of history's most remarkable stories.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e4. The Truth About Her — Jacqueline Maley\u003c\/strong\u003e Australian journalist and author Maley's novel about a journalist who writes an obituary — and discovers that the act of defining someone else's life has consequences she never anticipated. Sharp, contemporary, and quietly devastating.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e5. China Saga — C.Y. Lee\u003c\/strong\u003e A sweeping multi-generational saga of China across its most turbulent century — from the author of \u003cem\u003eThe Flower Drum Song\u003c\/em\u003e, writing about his homeland with the intimacy and sweep of someone who carries its history in his bones.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e6. On, Off — Colleen McCullough\u003c\/strong\u003e \"The chilling new novel from Australia's greatest storyteller\" — McCullough turns her formidable gifts to crime fiction with the same authority she brought to ancient Rome and colonial Australia. Darker and more unsettling than anything her fans might expect, and all the more gripping for it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e7. Night for Day — Patrick Flanery\u003c\/strong\u003e Hollywood in the blacklist era — an ageing screenwriter confronting what was lost when fear drove the industry to eat itself. Flanery writes about America's capacity for self-betrayal with the perspective of an outsider who sees it clearly.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e8. All the Beggars Riding — Lucy Caldwell\u003c\/strong\u003e A BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime — a woman whose father has died discovers he had a secret second family in London, and must reconstruct a life she thought she knew. Caldwell is one of the finest Northern Irish writers of her generation, and this novel is a model of emotional precision.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e9. Hide Me Among the Graves — Tim Powers\u003c\/strong\u003e The Pre-Raphaelites and vampires in Victorian London — Powers takes the biographical facts of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and constructs a supernatural thriller of extraordinary ingenuity around them. Peter Straub counted Powers among the writers he re-read obsessively, and this novel explains why.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e10. Candor \u0026amp; Perversion — Roger Shattuck\u003c\/strong\u003e The author of \u003cem\u003eForbidden Knowledge\u003c\/em\u003e on literature, education, and the arts — Shattuck is one of the great American critics, and these essays are as rigorous and readable as criticism gets. Essential for anyone interested in what literature is for and what it costs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e11. Woman Enters Left — Jessica Brockmole\u003c\/strong\u003e Hollywood's Golden Age — a screenwriter, an actress, and the stories that shape and misshape both of them. \"Witty, poignant and historically vivid\" — Brockmole writes the era with real glamour and real intelligence about what the dream factory actually did to the people inside it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e12. Lazarus — Morris West\u003c\/strong\u003e A Pope undergoes open-heart surgery and returns from the operating table changed — with a vision of the Church that the Church itself will not accept. West (\u003cem\u003eThe Shoes of the Fisherman\u003c\/em\u003e) writes about faith, power, and institutional resistance with the authority of a lifelong Catholic and a novelist's understanding of human nature.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e13. The Truest Pleasure — Robert Morgan\u003c\/strong\u003e From the author of \u003cem\u003eGap Creek\u003c\/em\u003e — an Appalachian marriage, a wife's religious devotion, and a husband who cannot share it. Morgan writes about the American mountain South with documentary precision and real emotional depth. The \u003cem\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/em\u003e called it \"marvellously vivid.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e14. The Trilogy of Two — Juman Malouf\u003c\/strong\u003e Twin girls in a magical circus at the edge of the world, and a mystery that reaches further than either of them knows. Philip Pullman called it \"vivid and attractive\" — a children's fantasy with the assurance of an author who knows exactly what she's doing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e15. The Mysteries — Tony Harrison\u003c\/strong\u003e The great poet dramatist's version of the medieval mystery plays — Harrison brings the York, Wakefield, and Chester cycles into the present with the same formal brilliance and working-class energy that defines all his best work. One of the most important British theatrical texts of the twentieth century.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e16. A Commonplace Killing — Siân Busby\u003c\/strong\u003e Post-war London, 1946 — a woman's body is found and a detective investigates in a city still living in the wreckage. The \u003cem\u003eSunday Times\u003c\/em\u003e called it \"brilliantly evoked.\" Busby died before this novel found its readers; it deserves all of them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e17. The Village — David Mamet\u003c\/strong\u003e The playwright and filmmaker's novel about a rural New England community — Mamet brings his ear for the unspoken, his eye for power, and his instinct for the dramatic to prose fiction with results the \u003cem\u003eDaily Telegraph\u003c\/em\u003e called \"highly accomplished.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e18. Truce — Joanna Murray-Smith\u003c\/strong\u003e \"A sensual lyric about family life and sexual love set in the brooding experience of war and exile\" — Murray-Smith is one of Australia's finest playwrights, and this novel carries the same compressed emotional intensity and ear for language that makes her stage work so powerful.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e19. The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind — David Guterson\u003c\/strong\u003e Short stories from the author of \u003cem\u003eSnow Falling on Cedars\u003c\/em\u003e — Guterson's lesser-known collection, written before his debut made him famous, showing the same extraordinary feel for landscape, silence, and the things people don't say to each other. A quiet masterpiece.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48751318991067,"sku":"SP2677","price":110.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/IMG_0633.jpg?v=1778119371","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/secondhand-literary-fiction-bargain-book-box-sp2677","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}