Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2869

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2869

Twenty-one literary fiction titles spanning Booker winners, Nobel laureates, and some of the finest writing in English from the 1960s to the 1990s — Byatt, Barnes, Murdoch, Tyler, Winterson, Carey, Brink, and more. A box with serious literary pedigree.

1. Female Friends — Fay Weldon — Three women, three lives, and the complicated loyalties between them — Weldon's early voice at its sharpest and most unsentimental.
2. A New Life — Bernard Malamud (Penguin) — A New York English lecturer reinvents himself in the Pacific Northwest with typically Malamudian results — comic, rueful, and warm.
3. Possession: A Romance — A.S. Byatt (1990 Booker Prize winner) — Two modern scholars uncover a Victorian love affair — Byatt's masterpiece, rich in poetry, letters, and literary ventriloquism.
4. The Manor — Isaac Bashevis Singer (Penguin) — Singer's great saga of Jewish life in nineteenth-century Poland, as the old world meets modernity and the costs become clear.
5. Under the Net — Iris Murdoch (Penguin) — Murdoch's first novel: Jake Donaghue drifts through London and Paris pursuing truth and avoiding commitment — picaresque, funny, and philosophically charged.
6. Saint Maybe — Anne Tyler — Tyler's most religious novel, in which a young man's impulsive act destroys his family and he spends decades trying to atone — patient, moving, and exact.
7. I for Isobel — Amy Witting — The quietly devastating story of Isobel Callaghan's emergence from a loveless childhood into a tentative adulthood — one of Australian fiction's most underrated novels.
8. Flaubert's Parrot — Julian Barnes (Picador) — Geoffrey Braithwaite's obsessive pursuit of which parrot Flaubert used on his desk — a novel about literature, loss, and the impossibility of biography.
9. Bliss — Peter Carey (Picador) — Harry Joy dies on the operating table, comes back, and finds himself in what might be hell — Carey's debut novel, wild and visionary and darkly funny.
10. Exile and the Kingdom — Albert Camus (Penguin) — Camus's only short story collection: six tales exploring isolation, rebellion, and the human need for connection — spare and permanent.
11. An Instant in the Wind — André Brink (Fontana) — A Boer woman and a runaway slave cross eighteenth-century South Africa together — Brink's most compressed and powerful historical novel.
12. Ladder of Years — Anne Tyler — Delia Grinstead walks away from her family on a beach holiday and starts over in a small town — Tyler's most oblique and quietly radical novel.
13. The Bell — Iris Murdoch (Penguin) — A lay community beside an abbey, a bell retrieved from a lake, and a tangle of repressed desires — one of Murdoch's most perfectly structured novels.
14. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine — Iris Murdoch (Penguin) — A man's two lives — respectable wife, secret mistress — begin to collide — Murdoch's Whitbread Prize winner.
15. The Transit of Venus — Shirley Hazzard (King Penguin) — Two Australian sisters in postwar Europe, and the men whose lives intersect theirs — one of the great overlooked novels in English.
16. Picture This — Joseph Heller (Picador) — Rembrandt painting Aristotle contemplating Homer — Heller's most formally ambitious novel, thinking about time, money, and the uses of art.
17. The Pangs of Love and Other Stories — Jane Gardam (Abacus) — Gardam's precise, funny, and surprising short fiction — the title story a radical reimagining of The Little Mermaid.
18. The Sidmouth Letters — Jane Gardam (Abacus) — Gardam's second story collection, moving between eras and settings with characteristic ease and a mordant humour all her own.
19. The Queen of the Tambourine — Jane Gardam (1991 Whitbread Best Novel of the Year Award winner) — Eliza Peabody writes letters to an absent neighbour and slowly reveals everything she has tried to keep hidden — extraordinary.
20. The Tiger in the Tiger Pit — Janette Turner Hospital — Hospital's second novel examining the fault lines in an elderly marriage through the return of adult children — quietly devastating.
21. The Passion — Jeanette Winterson — Napoleon's cook falls in love with a Venetian woman — Winterson's most intoxicating novel, magical and precise in equal measure.