Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2768

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Box — 18 Books

⚠ Question before listing: An Item from the Late News by Thea Astley appears to have handwriting on the cover — possibly a signature or inscription. Can you confirm whether this copy is signed?

Secondhand Literary Fiction by Women Bargain Book Box — 21 Books

A collection of rare distinction — four Margaret Atwood novels, four Muriel Spark novels, and three Thea Astley novels, all in vintage editions, sitting alongside Helen Garner's Monkey Grip, Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Shirley Hazzard in two of her finest early works. The Atwood titles here predate The Handmaid's Tale and represent her early literary fiction at its most formally adventurous; the Spark titles span the full range of her compressed, darkly comic genius. Thea Astley — three-time Miles Franklin Award winner and one of the most important voices in Australian literature — appears with three novels including the Age Book of the Year winner A Kindness Cup. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, published in 1794 and the founding text of Gothic fiction in English, makes this the most historically spanning literary fiction box in the current range. An exceptional collection assembled with obvious knowledge and care.

1. Cliffs of Fall — Shirley Hazzard — Early short fiction from the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and later the National Book Award, already displaying the luminous prose and acute psychological intelligence that would make The Transit of Venus one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
2. Bodily Harm — Margaret Atwood — A journalist escapes a relationship and a cancer scare by travelling to the Caribbean and finds herself entangled in a political coup. Atwood examines power, body, and complicity with the cool precision that defines her best early work.
3. Life Before Man — Margaret Atwood — Virago Modern Classics. Three people in a Toronto love triangle navigate emptiness, infidelity, and the slow erosion of feeling across a single year. One of Atwood's most formally controlled and emotionally honest novels.
4. Picnic at Hanging Rock — Joan Lindsay — One of the most haunting novels in Australian literature — a group of schoolgirls vanishes on St Valentine's Day 1900 and the mystery is never resolved. Lindsay's genius was to refuse explanation. The basis for Peter Weir's iconic film.
5. Surfacing — Margaret Atwood — Virago Modern Classics. A woman returns to the Quebec wilderness to search for her missing father and undergoes a psychological disintegration that becomes a fierce, unsettling meditation on identity, nature, and the violence of civilisation.
6. Monkey Grip — Helen Garner — One of the most important Australian novels of the 1970s, following a woman's obsessive love affair with a heroin addict in Melbourne's share-house subculture. Garner writes with the rawness and honesty of a diary — the New Yorker called it "vagrant and wry."
7. The Edible Woman — Margaret Atwood — Atwood's debut novel, in which a young woman begins to feel a disturbing identification with the food she can no longer eat. A dark comedy of female self-erasure that announced one of the twentieth century's most important literary voices.
8. The Mysteries of Udolpho — Ann Radcliffe — Published in 1794 and the most influential Gothic novel ever written, inspiring Jane Austen's parody in Northanger Abbey and defining the genre for generations. A young woman imprisoned in a sinister Italian castle by a villainous guardian — the original template for Gothic fiction in English.
9. A Boat Load of Home Folk — Thea Astley — A group of tourists is stranded on a Pacific island as a hurricane approaches, and Astley uses the forced intimacy to expose the deepest currents of their ordinary lives. Characteristically sharp and unsentimental.
10. A Kindness Cup — Thea Astley — Winner of the Age Book of the Year Award. A Queensland town reunion forces its citizens to confront their complicity in a colonial massacre twenty years earlier. Astley at her most politically and morally charged — one of her finest novels.
11. An Item from the Late News — Thea Astley — (See note above regarding possible signature.) A small Queensland town and the outsider who becomes its scapegoat — Astley's characteristic territory of provincial cruelty and moral cowardice, rendered with the bitter precision that made her one of Australia's most necessary literary voices.
12. Woman in a Lampshade — Elizabeth Jolley — King Penguin. Short stories from one of Australia's most darkly comic and formally inventive writers — "humorous, ironic and tender," the cover promises, and all three qualities are present, often in the same sentence.
13. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie — Muriel Spark — The novel that made Spark famous worldwide — the Edinburgh schoolteacher who moulds her favourite girls in her own romantic and dangerous image. One of the most perfectly constructed short novels in English fiction. Maggie Smith won an Oscar for the film.
14. Palomino — Elizabeth Jolley — UQP. A doctor retreats to a remote farm and finds unexpected connection with a young woman who arrives seeking help. Jolley writes about desire, isolation, and the interior life with an honesty that was genuinely radical in Australian fiction.
15. The Ballad of Peckham Rye — Muriel Spark — A mysterious young Scotsman arrives in a South London suburb and leaves chaos in his wake. One of Spark's most wickedly comic novels — compact, subversive, and suffused with the supernatural.
16. The Evening of the Holiday — Shirley Hazzard — A novella of an Italian love affair — brief, precise, and written with a beauty that makes the loss it describes genuinely painful. Hazzard writes English prose with the care of someone who knows exactly how much it can bear.
17. Not to Disturb — Muriel Spark — A curiously disturbing novel in which the servants of a Swiss château arrange the aftermath of their employers' deaths before the deaths have actually occurred. Spark's narrative games are at their most unsettling and formally brilliant here.
18. The Sidmouth Letters — Jane Gardam — Abacus. Short stories by one of Britain's most elegant and criminally underrated writers, praised by the Guardian as "deliciously barbed, perceptive, entertaining." Gardam writes the English middle class with the precision of a lepidopterist pinning specimens.
19. The Public Image — Muriel Spark — A film actress's carefully constructed public persona begins to collapse after her husband's suicide. Spark dissects celebrity, image, and selfhood with the economy of a surgeon — one of her leanest and most devastating novels.
20. The Day the Swallows Spoke — Dalene Matthee — Abacus. Matthee is the South African author of Fiela's Child, and this novel follows a woman caught in the currents of apartheid-era South Africa who seizes her chance to live freely. Richly atmospheric and morally serious.
21. God on the Rocks — Jane Gardam — Abacus. A child's-eye view of a summer in 1930s Yorkshire, where the adult world of religious mania, class tension, and sexual longing is glimpsed in fragments. The Daily Telegraph called it "tantalising, funny, sharp" — Gardam at her most quietly devastating.