Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2789

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2789

Twenty vintage paperbacks with an Australian spine: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, Patrick White’s Burnt Ones, Keneally’s Three Cheers for the Paraclete, Hal Porter, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Gillian Mears, Tony Maniaty; plus two Graham Greenes, two Roald Dahls, Hemingway, Colette, du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, Joyce’s Dubliners, Henry James, Mary Stewart and T.H. White. Penguin orange to Virago green.

1. Men Without Women — Ernest Hemingway — The Killers, Hills Like White Elephants, Fifty Grand, In Another Country. The 1927 stories, and the best collection he published. Orange Penguin, 4/6.
2. The Captive — Colette — An older woman and a younger man in a Riviera villa, and the odd honesty of the arrangement. Penguin.
3. The Burnt Ones — Patrick White — Eleven stories, Greek and Australian, including Down at the Dump and Clay. White’s first collection. Penguin.
4. The Honorary Consul — Graham Greene — A kidnapping gone wrong in Argentina: the guerrillas take the wrong man, a drunk British consul, and a doctor has to decide whether to save him. Greene’s own favourite of his novels. Penguin.
5. Monkey Grip — Helen Garner — Nora, her daughter, a share house in Fitzroy, and Javo, the junkie she can’t give up. The 1977 novel that changed Australian fiction, and the Noni Hazlehurst film cover. Elegant and wry, says the New Yorker.
6. Someone Like You — Roald Dahl — Lamb to the Slaughter, Man from the South, Taste, Skin. Stories for those with broad minds and nerves of steel, says the cover, and it’s right. Penguin.
7. Don’t Look Now — Daphne du Maurier — A couple in Venice after their daughter’s death, two sisters, and a small figure in a red coat. The title story alone is worth the book; the Nicolas Roeg film came from it. Penguin.
8. The Hound of the Baskervilles — Arthur Conan Doyle — Murder, mystery, walkies: the Pulp! The Classics edition with the joke cover and the real text.
9. The Maharajah and Other Stories — T.H. White — Uncollected stories from the Once and Future King author, including the title tale of an Indian prince in England. Futura.
10. The Quiet American — Graham Greene — Saigon, 1952: Fowler, the cynical correspondent, and Pyle, the American who means well and gets people killed. The novel that predicted Vietnam. Penguin.
11. The Hollow Hills — Mary Stewart — Merlin raises the boy Arthur in secret and finds the sword in the stone. The second Merlin book. Coronet.
12. Dubliners — James Joyce — Araby, Eveline, The Dead. Fifteen stories of Dublin life, Joyce’s first book, and the one to read before Ulysses. Orange Penguin, 4/-.
13. Three Cheers for the Paraclete — Thomas Keneally — A young priest at a Sydney seminary falls foul of the hierarchy. Won the Miles Franklin 1968; Keneally’s own seminary years. Penguin.
14. The Tilted Cross — Hal Porter — Hobart in the 1840s, a convict artist and a doomed love. Porter’s best novel; Seal Australian Fiction edition.
15. Collected Stories — Gillian Mears — Ride a Cock Horse, Fineflour and the uncollected stories, by the New South Wales writer who died at fifty-one. The moths cover. UQP.
16. The Children Must Dance — Tony Maniaty — Chile in the 1970s and an Australian journalist caught in the coup. Penguin.
17. Tales of the Unexpected — Roald Dahl — Lamb to the Slaughter, The Landlady, Royal Jelly, and the rest of the stories the Anglia TV series used. Penguin TV tie-in.
18. The Bostonians — Henry James — Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom fight over Verena Tarrant and the women’s movement in 1870s Boston. James’s most political novel. Penguin Modern Classics.
19. Winged Seeds — Katharine Susannah Prichard — The third of the goldfields trilogy: Kalgoorlie in the Depression and the war. Virago Modern Classics.