Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2888

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2888

Winterson twice, Graham Greene three times, and both Malraux novels — with Byatt, Bowen, Gardam, and Mary McCarthy completing a box of serious literary ambition. Twenty-one novels that deserve to be read slowly.

1. Sybil — Benjamin Disraeli (Penguin English Library) — Disraeli's great Victorian social novel of "the two nations" — the rich and the destitute — told with surprising passion.
2. March to Caobaland — B. Traven (Penguin) — Traven's account of a Mexican mahogany expedition, vivid and politically charged.
3. Boating for Beginners — Jeanette Winterson (Minerva) — Winterson's comic retelling of the Noah story, anarchic and brilliantly irreverent.
4. Morocco — David Flusfeder — a sharp, unsettling novel described as "an extraordinary and disguising achievement."
5. The Virgin in the Garden — A.S. Byatt (King Penguin) — the first volume of Byatt's Frederica quartet, rich with ideas, desire, and Elizabeth I's England as stage backdrop.
6. Hemlock and After — Angus Wilson (Penguin) — Wilson's debut novel of a celebrated novelist facing the moral contradictions of his public idealism and private life.
7. The Unicorn — Iris Murdoch — a terrifying Murdoch masterpiece of isolation, obsession, and a woman imprisoned in a remote house.
8. The Cruel Sea — Nicholas Monsarrat (Penguin) — the defining British naval novel of the Second World War, relentless and utterly gripping.
9. Crusoe's Daughter — Jane Gardam — a remarkable novel of a woman who reads Robinson Crusoe all her life while the twentieth century crashes around her.
10. Written on the Body — Jeanette Winterson (Abacus) — Winterson's most formally daring novel, narrated by a lover whose gender is never disclosed.
11. To the North — Elizabeth Bowen (Penguin Modern Classics) — Bowen's novel of two women in London, and the doomed, accelerating love affair that destroys them.
12. The Jungle — Upton Sinclair (Penguin Modern Classics) — the muckraking novel of Chicago's meatpacking industry that shocked the world and changed food safety law.
13. Take a Girl Like You — Kingsley Amis — Amis's most underrated novel, a comedy of pursuit set in late-1950s England.
14. The Company She Keeps — Mary McCarthy (Penguin) — McCarthy's sharp, semi-autobiographical debut, a portrait of an intellectual woman finding herself in New York.
15. The Essential James Joyce — ed. Harry Levin (Penguin) — a generous introduction to Joyce including Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, selected poems, and extracts from Ulysses.
16. Our Man in Havana — Graham Greene (Penguin) — Greene's comic masterpiece of Cold War espionage, vacuum cleaners, and the lies that take on a life of their own.
17. The Confidential Agent — Graham Greene — a gripping political thriller of a desperate man carrying secret documents through a hostile England.
18. The Heart of the Matter — Graham Greene (Penguin) — Greene's most Catholic and most heartbreaking novel, set in wartime West Africa.
19. Days of Hope — André Malraux (Penguin) — Malraux's novel of the Spanish Civil War, urgent and cinematically vivid.
20. Man's Estate — André Malraux (Penguin) — the Prix Goncourt-winning novel of the Shanghai communist uprising, one of the great political novels of the century.
21. The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. — Jack London (Penguin) — the unfinished thriller, completed posthumously, of a hired killer who accepts a contract on his own life.