Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2711

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box — 18 Books

A genuinely international collection of literary fiction at its most varied and rewarding. Maryse Condé — winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize — sits alongside Jonathan Coe's Booker-era British comedy, Graeme Macrae Burnet's Booker-shortlisted psychological brilliance, Walter Kempowski's devastating German masterpiece, and Roddy Doyle at his most irresistibly funny. Two Rodney Hall titles bring Miles Franklin Award-winning Australian depth, while Valerie Martin's Women's Prize-winning Mrs Gulliver and Ursula Hegi's celebrated Stones from the River complete a box that spans half the literary world.

1. The Black Brook — Tom Drury. The New York Times Book Review called Drury "a major figure in American literature" — and this quiet, haunted novel of small-town Midwestern life is exactly why. Drury writes the American heartland with the precision of Carver and the moral seriousness of McCarthy, but in a register entirely his own.
2. Ghost Children — Sue Townsend. Best known for Adrian Mole, Townsend here moves into darker territory — a novel about grief, loss, and the children that might have been, written with the unflinching emotional intelligence that her comedy sometimes obscured. A significant and underrated work from one of Britain's most beloved writers.
3. Selected Verse of C.J. Dennis (Australian Literary Heritage Series). Dennis is the poet of the Australian larrikin — The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke made him a national phenomenon, and this heritage series selection gathers the verse that made him the most widely read poet in Australian history. Essential for any collection of Australian literature.
4. The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana — Maryse Condé. Condé received the Alternative Nobel Prize in 2018 — awarded by the New Academy when the Swedish Academy suspended its own prize — in recognition of a lifetime of writing that confronted colonialism, slavery, and identity with extraordinary power and complexity. This late novel follows twins from Guadeloupe whose paths diverge into tragedy. A major writer at full stretch.
5. The Breaker — Kit Denton (Australian Classics). The definitive account of Breaker Morant — Harry "Breaker" Harbord Morant, the bushman poet and horseman executed by the British during the Boer War in circumstances that have fuelled controversy ever since. Denton's book sparked the famous film and remains essential reading on one of Australia's most contested historical stories.
6. Mrs Gulliver — Valerie Martin. Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction. Francesca Segal called it "pure elegance, subtlety and wit" — Martin reimagines Swift's world from the perspective of Mrs Gulliver, left behind as her husband voyages to impossible places. Formally playful, psychologically acute, and deeply funny about marriage, ambition, and the women history has edited out.
7. Bournville — Jonathan Coe. From the prizewinning author of Middle England — Satnam Sanghera called it "beautiful, very funny and truly moving," and Rachel Joyce found it "wickedly funny, clever, tender and lyrical." Following a Birmingham family across the decades of the chocolate factory town, it is Coe at his most expansive and his most human — a novel about England that somehow manages to be neither cynical nor sentimental.
8. Loveland — Robert Lukins. Emily Maguire called it "gripping, delightful and absolutely moving" and Stephanie Bishop — author of The Other Side of the World — found it "a book of such tenderness and precision it is radiant." Lukins is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Australian fiction, and Loveland confirms the promise of his debut The Everlasting Sunday.
9. The Accident on the A35 — Graeme Macrae Burnet. From the author of the Man Booker Prize shortlisted His Bloody Project — Burnet returns to his policier territory with a French provincial detective investigating a road accident that turns out to be something else entirely. Meticulously plotted, quietly unsettling, and written with the deadpan literary intelligence that made His Bloody Project such a sensation.
10. The Mathematics of Love — Emma Darwin. A dual-narrative novel moving between the Crimean War and the 1970s, held together by a mystery, a photograph, and the mathematics of how love survives across time. Darwin writes with considerable historical assurance and emotional depth — a confident, beautifully constructed debut.
11. Silence — Rodney Hall (fictions). Twice winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Hall is one of Australia's most intellectually demanding and rewarding novelists — the Sunday Times called him "a stimulating writer of great originality." Silence demonstrates the experimental and philosophical range that has kept his fiction perpetually surprising across a long career.
12. Live; Live; Live — Jonathan Buckley. The Sunday Times called Buckley "a quietly brilliant writer, almost eccentric in his craftsmanship" — and this novel, following a friendship formed in the shadow of death and obsession, is characteristic of his refined, demanding, utterly distinctive work. Buckley is among the most underrated literary novelists in Britain.
13. The Best Picture — Barry Hill. "A novel of ideas, distinctive, powerful, original and satisfying" — Hill is one of Australia's finest essayists and poets as well as a novelist, and this book brings that philosophical seriousness to fiction. Essential reading for those interested in the more intellectually ambitious reaches of Australian writing.
14. All for Nothing — Walter Kempowski. The Times called it "heartbreaking and illuminating," the Daily Telegraph "an astonishing literary achievement," and the Guardian "beautiful and compassionate." Set during the final days of the Third Reich as refugees flood west ahead of the Soviet advance, Kempowski's late masterpiece is one of the most important European novels of the twenty-first century — a panoramic, morally devastating account of ordinary complicity and ordinary courage.
15. Stones from the River — Ursula Hegi. Michael Dorris in the Los Angeles Times called it "a great novel — daring, intelligent, the product of a reckoning and scrupulous imagination." Set in a small German town across the years of the Third Reich, following a dwarf woman who hides Jews and watches her community's slow surrender to Nazism, it is one of the most accomplished American novels about Germany. A word-of-mouth classic.
16. The Snapper — Roddy Doyle. The second volume of Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy — following the Rabbitte family as daughter Sharon's unexpected pregnancy upends the household. Doyle's ear for working-class Dublin dialogue is unmatched, and the novel moves from comedy to something more tender and surprising with deceptive ease. Adapted into an acclaimed BBC film.
17. Renato's Luck — Jeff Shapiro. A warmly observed novel of Italian village life — Renato, the local waterworks manager, becomes an unlikely catalyst for the changes sweeping through his community. Shapiro writes with affectionate precision about Italian culture and the human need for small rituals of connection.
18. The Uncoupling — Meg Wolitzer. David Rakoff called it "delightful and heartwarming" — Wolitzer, one of America's sharpest observers of women's lives and marriages, takes the premise of Aristophanes' Lysistrata and applies it to a contemporary New Jersey suburb. Witty, intelligent, and very funny about desire, power, and what happens when women choose differently.