Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2748

A broad and characterful literary fiction box with strong Southern Hemisphere and international representation. Ali Shaw’s magical debut The Girl with Glass Feet, Kapka Kassabova’s atmospheric South American novel Villa Pacifica, and Sam Hanna Bell’s Northern Irish classic December Bride are the standouts, alongside Australian voices from Laurie Clancy, Nicholas Hasluck, Sean Condon, and Sally Morrison, Tim Parks’s sharpest essays, Anita Shreve, Erick Setiawan’s magical realist breakthrough, and Jeffrey Archer’s collected stories. A Sherlock Holmes and a Beethoven biography round out the box.

1. The Beautiful Bureaucrat — Helen Phillips — A surreal, darkly comic debut novel; a young woman takes a mysterious clerical job in a windowless office, and gradually realises the work she is processing may connect to something vast and terrible.
2. City to City — Laurie Clancy — Australian literary fiction from one of the country’s most accomplished short story writers; a restless, observant novel about movement, displacement, and the lives people construct between places.
3. The Blosseville File — Nicholas Hasluck — An Australian legal and literary thriller from one of the country’s most distinctive crime writers; a lawyer investigates a long-buried mystery connected to a 19th-century Arctic expedition.
4. The Girl with Glass Feet — Ali Shaw — A young woman visiting a remote island discovers her feet are slowly turning to glass; a tender, strange, and beautifully written debut novel of magical realism and love.
5. Portrait of the Artist’s Wife — Barbara Anderson — Quietly devastating New Zealand literary fiction; a painter’s wife reflects on art, marriage, and the costs of living in the shadow of a more celebrated talent.
6. Passarola Rising — Azhar Abidi — A magical realist novel by the Pakistani-Australian author inspired by the true story of Bartolomeu de Gusmão, an 18th-century Portuguese priest who built an airship and dreamed of flight; lyrical, inventive, and quietly subversive.
7. The Sign of the Four — Arthur Conan Doyle — The second Sherlock Holmes novel; a mystery involving a stolen treasure, a peg-legged villain, and a chase down the Thames that remains one of the most propulsive in the canon.
8. Film — Sean Condon — A novel from the Australian author known for his travel writing; a wry and observant story set against the world of cinema.
9. Villa Pacifica — Kapka Kassabova — The Bulgarian-British author’s debut novel; a couple arrives at a remote eco-lodge on the Ecuadorian coast and finds themselves entangled in the obsessions and secrets of the other guests.
10. Adultery & Other Diversions — Tim Parks — Sharp, witty essays from the British author and Italy-based translator; Parks dissects modern relationships, infidelity, habit, and what we tell ourselves about how we live.
11. Hannah’s List — Debbie Macomber — A moving romantic novel; a widower receives a list from his late wife naming three women she hopes he will consider for love after she is gone.
12. December Bride — Sam Hanna Bell — A Northern Irish classic; a servant woman on a remote Ulster farm refuses to marry either of the brothers she lives with, choosing instead an unconventional life that scandalises her community.
13. Body Surfing — Anita Shreve — A quietly charged novel from the American author; a young tutor spending the summer with a coastal family finds herself caught between the competing desires of two brothers.
14. Mad Meg — Sally Morrison — Australian literary fiction; the cover references Bruegel’s Dulle Griet, and the novel is similarly wild and defiant — a vivid, inventive story of women and fury.
15. Of Bees and Mist — Erick Setiawan — Lush magical realist fiction from the Malaysian-American author; three generations of women in an unnamed city navigate curses, bees, and the intricate cruelties families practice on each other.
16. Fresh — Mark McNay — A raw and visceral Scottish debut novel set over a single day in a chicken processing factory; McNay puts working-class labour and its degradations at the centre with unflinching honesty.
17. The Collected Short Stories — Jeffrey Archer — A substantial omnibus of Archer’s short fiction across his career; compulsively readable, twist-laden tales of ambition, fate, and ironic justice.
18. The Last Master — John Suchet — A narrative biography of Ludwig van Beethoven subtitled Passion and Anger; Suchet draws on decades of personal obsession with the composer to produce a vivid and accessible account of his life and genius.