Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2727

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box — 21 Books

Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies — winner of the Man Booker Prize — is the most decorated title, and Frank Hardy's Power Without Glory the most historically charged: the 1950 novel that tore Australia apart when Hardy was prosecuted for criminal libel over its portrayal of real figures, and which remains one of the most significant and controversial books in the country's literary history. Isaac Bashevis Singer appears twice — Nobel Prize winner, writing Jewish life in pre-war Poland with an intensity and humanity unmatched in the literature of the period. Elena Ferrante, Alice Walker, Kate Mosse, and Jean-Paul Sartre give the box serious international range alongside an exceptionally strong Australian shelf — Beverley Farmer, Gillian Mears, Jessica Anderson, Blanche d'Alpuget, Kenneth Slessor, and Pip Williams.

1. You Let Me In — Camilla Bruce — A woman disappears, leaving behind a manuscript that tells a story no one is sure whether to believe. The Guardian called it "smart, creepy" — Bruce writes the boundary between folklore and psychological horror with real precision and considerable menace.
2. In Love and Trouble — Alice Walker — Short stories from the author of The Color Purple, written before that novel made her famous — and already showing the moral intelligence, lyrical prose, and unflinching attention to the lives of Black women in the American South that would define her career.
3. The Days of Abandonment — Elena Ferrante — Text Publishing. The New Yorker called this "a deeply observed, excruciatingly blunt novel" — a woman's disintegration after her husband leaves her, written with Ferrante's characteristic refusal to make the experience comfortable or redemptive. One of the most unsettling novels in the Ferrante canon.
4. Milk: Stories — Beverley Farmer — The Age called Farmer "an extraordinarily gifted and original talent," and this story collection — spare, precise, deeply attentive to the textures of ordinary life — is her finest work in the short form. Farmer is one of Australian literature's most underread voices.
5. The Slave — Isaac Bashevis Singer — A blazing, passionate story of a seventeenth-century Polish Jew enslaved after a Cossack massacre, who falls in love with the daughter of his captor. Singer writes temptation, faith, and the body with a frankness and moral seriousness that earned him the Nobel Prize.
6. Enemies: A Love Story — Isaac Bashevis Singer — A Holocaust survivor in postwar New York finds himself entangled with three women simultaneously, each embodying a different aspect of the life he has lost and the life he is trying to build. Funny, devastating, and shot through with Singer's characteristic mixture of the sacred and the profane.
7. Unspoken: A Family, A Decade, A Nation — Gerard Stembridge — An Irish family saga spanning a decade of social transformation in Ireland, praised by Douglas Kennedy as "a great modern novel" and by the Irish Times as "full of human warmth and social detail." Stembridge writes the private and the political as a single story.
8. The Bookbinder of Jericho — Pip Williams — The companion novel to The Dictionary of Lost Words, following a bookbinder at Oxford University Press during the First World War — a woman whose hands assemble other people's words while her own remain unspoken. Williams writes the overlooked women of literary history with warmth and genuine intelligence.
9. The Devil in the Marshalsea — Antonia Hodgson — A historical mystery set in the eighteenth-century London debtors' prison, where a young man imprisoned for debt stumbles into a murder investigation. The Guardian called it "truly spellbinding" and the Daily Mail "a riveting historical novel." A debut of unusual confidence and atmospheric richness.
10. Citadel — Kate Mosse — Anniversary edition. Set in the French Pyrenees in 1942, where a group of women in the Resistance discover a connection to the Cathar past of their land. Mosse weaves history and mystery across centuries with the narrative skill that has made her one of Britain's most commercially successful historical fiction writers.
11. The Mint Lawn — Gillian Mears — Winner of the Australian Vogel Literary Award. Mears is one of Australian fiction's most distinctive and lyrical voices, and this early novel shows her gift for landscape, desire, and the emotional lives of rural women in full force.
12. Song of the Exile — Kiana Davenport — (Author to be confirmed — see note above.) Isabel Allende wrote that "Davenport's prose is deep and daring... her sense of poetry and love of nature permeates each line." A novel of the Pacific war and its aftermath, written with a Hawaiian author's intimate relationship with the geography and human cost of that conflict.
13. Housebreaking — Colleen Hubbard — Praised by Karen Joy Fowler, Judy Blume, and Oprah — a rare combination of literary and popular endorsement. This is a novel about two neighbours in a Connecticut suburb whose unexpected friendship disrupts everything they thought their lives were. Wittily funny and genuinely moving.
14. Selected Poems — Kenneth Slessor — A&R Modern Poets. Slessor is one of the great Australian poets — Five Bells, his elegy for a drowned friend, is among the finest poems written in this country — and this selected edition is the most accessible entry point into his work.
15. Bring Up the Bodies — Hilary Mantel — Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012, the second of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy and the book that confirmed Mantel as the greatest historical novelist working in English. Cromwell and the destruction of Anne Boleyn, written with the compressed intensity and moral complexity of a writer at the absolute peak of her powers.
16. The Age of Reason — Jean-Paul Sartre — Penguin. The first volume of Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy, set in Paris in 1938 — the philosopher as novelist, applying his existentialist thinking to the lives of ordinary people caught between desire, freedom, and responsibility. More readable and more emotionally alive than its philosophical ambitions suggest.
17. Of Human Bondage — W. Somerset Maugham — Penguin. Maugham's semi-autobiographical masterwork, following Philip Carey from a clubfooted, orphaned childhood through medical school and an obsessive love affair that he cannot escape despite knowing it is destroying him. One of the great novels of early twentieth-century British literature.
18. Turtle Beach — Blanche d'Alpuget — A novel set in Malaysia during the Vietnamese boat refugee crisis, following a journalist confronting both the political disaster and her own emotional fractures. D'Alpuget writes the intersection of the personal and the historical with a directness that the subject demands.
19. Tirra Lirra by the River — Jessica Anderson — Winner of the Miles Franklin Award. An elderly woman returns to her Queensland hometown after decades abroad and reconstructs the life she left behind. Anderson writes memory, constraint, and the female imagination with a precision and economy that make this one of the most quietly devastating novels in Australian literature.
20. Tai-Pan — James Clavell — The epic novel of Hong Kong's founding, following the first taipan of the Noble House as he builds a trading empire in nineteenth-century China. Clavell writes the clash of Western ambition and Eastern culture with the sweeping authority that made Shogun a phenomenon.
21. Power Without Glory — Frank Hardy — The book that tore Australia apart. Hardy's 1950 novel — a thinly fictionalised account of a Melbourne gambling and political dynasty — led to his prosecution for criminal libel in one of the most notorious cases in Australian legal and literary history. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what Australian literature can be when it refuses to look away.