Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2808

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2808

A literary fiction box that earns its shelf space across three rows: Michael Frayn at his comic best, Wu Ming's sweeping postwar epic 54, Nancy Huston's Giller-shortlisted Fault Lines, Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You, and Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills. Benet Brandreth, Maggie Mitchell, Sherman Alexie, Libby Angel, and Gene Brewer's complete K-PAX trilogy round out a box that ranges widely and reads beautifully throughout.

1. Skios — Michael Frayn — A comic novel set at an international science foundation on a Greek island, where a case of mistaken identity spirals into perfect farce; late Frayn at his most elegant and funny.
2. 54 — Wu Ming — Set in 1954 across Europe and America, the Italian collective's second novel weaves together Cary Grant, a Mafia hitman, Italian Communist partisans, and the fading promises of the postwar left; epic and inventive.
3. Green Dragon, White Tiger — Annette Motley — A sweeping historical novel set in Tang Dynasty China, following a young woman's rise and survival in the imperial court; richly imagined and atmospherically told.
4. Fault Lines — Nancy Huston — Moving backwards through four generations of a single family, each section narrated by a different 6-year-old child; a formally daring and emotionally devastating examination of how violence is inherited and transmitted across time. Shortlisted for the Giller Prize.
5. Dunster — John Mortimer — A journalist becomes obsessed with proving that an old acquaintance committed war crimes; a morally complex and typically elegant novel from the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey.
6. My Dream of You — Nuala O'Faolain — A travel writer returns to Ireland after her closest friend's death and becomes absorbed by a 19th-century love affair between an Irish servant and an English landlord; one of the most significant Irish novels of the early 2000s.
7. The Assassin of Verona — Benet Brandreth — Shakespeare and his players arrive in Verona to find themselves entangled in a deadly conspiracy; the second novel in Brandreth's atmospheric Elizabethan thriller series.
8. Pretty Is — Maggie Mitchell — Two women who were kidnapped by the same man as children — one now a novelist, the other an actress — begin circling the defining event of their lives; a literary thriller of exceptional psychological intelligence.
9. The Old House at Mount Munecarthur — Jennifer Genay
10. Ten Days in the Hills — Jane Smiley — In the days following the invasion of Iraq, a group of Californians gather at a Hollywood house and talk, argue, desire, and grieve; Smiley's Decameron-inspired novel of American life at a turning point.
11. The Trapeze Act — Libby Angel — A luminous Australian literary novel about family, performance, and the secrets held between generations; published by Melbourne's Transit Lounge.
12. The Toughest Indian in the World — Sherman Alexie — Stories moving between the reservation and the wider American world, shot through with Alexie's characteristic grief, dark comedy, and fierce intelligence.
13. Secrets of the Trail Cafe — Thomas Fox Averill
14. K-PAX: The Trilogy — Gene Brewer — All three K-PAX novels in one volume: the quietly extraordinary story of a psychiatric patient named Prot who insists he is an alien visitor, and the psychiatrist who cannot entirely dismiss his claims.
15. A Guy, Three Girls and a Jealous Dog — Grant King — A comic novel of romantic entanglements and domestic chaos, with a jealous dog at the centre of the trouble.
16. An Act of Peace — Ann Widdecombe
17. Philosophy Made Simple — Robert Hellenga — A recently widowed avocado farmer sells up and travels to Italy and India with his daughters, reading philosophy as he goes; a warm, unhurried novel about loss, love, and the examined life.
18. Nothing But Blue Sky — Katharine McMahon