Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2874

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2874

Twenty-four literary classics and fiction titles spanning antiquity to the twentieth century — Virgil and Chaucer alongside Dickens, Conrad, Waugh, and Salinger, with Gerald Durrell's comic memoirs and John Betjeman's poetry for good measure. A rich and eclectic reading box.

1. The Pastoral Poems (The Eclogues) — Virgil, trans. E.V. Rieu (Penguin Classics) — Rieu's lucid translation of Virgil's ten eclogues — the poems that established the pastoral mode in Western literature and encode a world on the cusp of change.
2. Troilus and Criseyde — Chaucer (Penguin Classics) — Chaucer's supreme romance, written with a psychological subtlety that anticipates the novel by two centuries.
3. The Confessions — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. J.M. Cohen (Penguin Classics) — The first great autobiography in the modern sense, in which Rousseau tells everything — including things he probably shouldn't have.
4. Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens (Penguin Classics) — The novel that gave English fiction the workhouse, the pickpocket, and the fog-haunted streets of Victorian London.
5. What Maisie Knew — Henry James (Penguin Classics) — A young girl shuttled between warring divorced parents, seeing everything and understanding more than the adults know — James at his most formally precise.
6. Lélia: The Life of George Sand — André Maurois — Maurois's sympathetic biography of the great French novelist and feminist whose life was as extraordinary as anything she wrote.
7. Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories — Chekhov (Penguin Classics) — The title story alone is one of the greatest short stories ever written; the rest sustain the standard.
8. Chance — Joseph Conrad (Penguin Classics) — Conrad's most deliberately intricate novel, narrated through multiple frames of unreliable testimony.
9. Fair Stood the Wind for France — H.E. Bates (Penguin) — A wounded British airman hiding in occupied France falls in love — Bates's most celebrated novel, a war story and a love story of exceptional delicacy.
10. The Republic — Plato (Penguin Classics) — Socrates and his companions construct the ideal city in speech, asking what justice, knowledge, and the good life might mean — the founding text of Western political philosophy.
11. Brideshead Revisited — Evelyn Waugh — Charles Ryder recalls the Flyte family, their crumbling Catholic house, and the various ways grace operates on people who resist it.
12. Aesop's Fables — Aesop (Collins Classics) — The fox and the grapes, the tortoise and the hare — the fables that have structured Western moral imagination for two and a half thousand years.
13. Orlando Furioso 1 — Ariosto (Penguin Classics) — The first volume of Ariosto's great Renaissance epic — knights, sorceresses, and marvels — one of the great pleasures of European literature.
14. Mr Norris Changes Trains — Christopher Isherwood (Penguin Modern Classics) — Berlin in the early 1930s, through the eyes of a naive narrator and his sinister, charming new friend — Isherwood's most perfectly controlled novel.
15. Darkness at Noon — Arthur Koestler (Penguin Modern Classics) — Rubashov awaits trial in a Soviet prison — Koestler's masterpiece of political fiction, written from the inside.
16. An Outcast of the Islands — Joseph Conrad (Penguin Modern Classics) — Conrad's second novel, set in the Malay Archipelago: a man's weakness destroys his only chance of escape from himself.
17. The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger (Penguin) — Holden Caulfield's seventy-two hours of breakdown remain one of the most perfectly pitched first-person voices in American fiction.
18. A Zoo in My Luggage — Gerald Durrell (Penguin) — Durrell goes to the Cameroons to collect animals for his zoo, narrated with the comic precision and affection that made him beloved.
19. The Drunken Forest — Gerald Durrell (Penguin) — Durrell in Argentina and Paraguay, collecting animals in the chaos of the Chaco — as funny and warm as everything he wrote.
20. The House of the Seven Gables — Nathaniel Hawthorne — Hawthorne's Gothic novel of a New England family haunted by an ancestor's crime — oppressive, strange, and beautifully written.

21. A Man and Two Women — Doris Lessing — short stories exploring love and domestic life with Lessing's characteristic psychological acuity.
22. Collected Poems — John Betjeman — the essential collection from Britain's much-loved poet laureate.
23. Father and Son — Edmund Gosse (Penguin Modern Classics) — a candid memoir of religious conflict between a naturalist father and his son in Victorian England.
24. Barchester Towers — Anthony Trollope (Everyman) — the beloved ecclesiastical comedy, one of the great pleasures of Victorian fiction.