Secondhand Penguin Modern Classics Bargain Book Box SP2940

Secondhand Penguin Modern Classics Bargain Book Box SP2940

Twenty-four volumes drawn almost entirely from the Penguin Modern Classics list — the orange-and-white spines that defined serious reading for a generation. Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Mann, three Orwells, four Dostoyevskys, two Steinbecks, Borges, Kesey, Greene, and Süskind. A box for anyone building (or rebuilding) a serious modern fiction shelf.

1. Sons and Lovers — D.H. Lawrence — Lawrence's most autobiographical novel: Paul Morel in a Nottinghamshire mining family, torn between a possessive mother and the women he tries to love. The defining portrait of Lawrence's world.
2. The Man Who Loved Children — Christina Stead — A genuinely disturbing portrait of a brilliant, monstrous patriarch and the family he dominates. Ignored on publication, rediscovered as a masterpiece forty years later.
3. Crome Yellow — Aldous Huxley — Huxley's debut: a house party at a country estate, a young poet who cannot talk to women, and a parade of characters skewering the intellectual fashions of 1921. Wickedly funny.
4. Tender is the Night — F. Scott Fitzgerald — A psychiatrist who married his patient, his slow self-destruction in the social world of the French Riviera, and the question of who saved whom. Fitzgerald's most personal and most complex novel.
5. The Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann — Hans Castorp arrives at a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium for a three-week visit and stays for seven years. Mann's greatest novel and one of the great monuments of European modernism.
6. Down and Out in Paris and London — George Orwell — Orwell's first book: the year he spent broke and hungry, washing dishes in Paris hotel kitchens and tramping between London doss-houses. The best account he ever wrote of what poverty actually feels like.
7. The Road to Wigan Pier — George Orwell — The first half investigates working-class life in the industrial north; the second is a bracing argument with the middle-class left about why socialism persistently fails to persuade the people it claims to champion.
8. Of Mice and Men — John Steinbeck — George and Lennie, two ranch workers with a dream of their own land. One of the most perfectly made short novels in American literature, and one of the most heartbreaking.
9. The Midwich Cuckoos — John Wyndham — Every woman in an English village falls mysteriously pregnant; the golden-eyed children born that year begin to develop powers their parents cannot control. Wyndham's most chilling novel.
10. Animal Farm — George Orwell — The pigs lead the revolution and become the oppressors. The allegory was aimed at Stalinist Russia and outlasted it by several decades.
11. Labyrinths — Jorge Luis Borges — The essential Borges: libraries that contain every book, detectives who solve murders they couldn't have witnessed, gardens of forking paths. The most influential short fiction of the twentieth century.
12. The Beach — Alex Garland — A backpacker discovers a map to a secret beach in Thailand and finds the utopian community already there is considerably more fragile than it looks. The novel that launched Garland's career.
13. Sometimes a Great Notion — Ken Kesey — The Stamper family refuses to join a loggers' strike in Oregon, and Kesey builds his most ambitious novel — twice the length of Cuckoo's Nest — around the collision of family loyalty, class resentment, and sheer stubbornness.
14. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain — Huck and the escaped slave Jim, rafting down the Mississippi away from civilisation. The novel Hemingway said all of American literature came from.
15. The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck — The Joad family's migration from the Dust Bowl to California, in search of work that isn't there. Steinbeck's anger is barely contained by the form.
16. Notes from Underground / White Nights / The Dream of a Ridiculous Man — Dostoyevsky — The Underground Man's furious, contradictory monologue: a man who knows exactly what he should do, does the opposite, and explains at length why this proves he is free. Dostoyevsky's most radical psychological creation.
17. Doctor Faustus — Thomas Mann — A German composer sells his soul to a devil and writes music of transcendent, terrifying genius. Mann's darkest novel, written as Germany collapsed around him.
18. The Devils — Dostoyevsky — Based on a real nihilist murder case: a provincial town invaded by revolutionary conspirators whose ideology is indistinguishable from madness. Dostoyevsky's most politically fierce novel.
19. Master and Man and Other Parables and Tales — Leo Tolstoy — Late Tolstoy in moral-fable mode: "Master and Man" is his most powerful short novel, a snowstorm and a single act of self-sacrifice that redeems a lifetime of selfishness.
20. Brighton Rock — Graham Greene — Pinkie Brown, a seventeen-year-old gang boss with a razor, moves through the Brighton racecourse world of the 1930s. Greene's Catholic thriller: about guilt, grace, and the difference between justice and damnation.
21. The Gambler / Bobok: A Nasty Story — Dostoyevsky — "The Gambler" was dictated in four weeks to pay a publisher's debt and draws on Dostoyevsky's own ruinous addiction to roulette. "Bobok" is darker still — a hallucinatory scene set in a graveyard.
22. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer — Patrick Süskind — Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has no personal scent but the most extraordinary nose in eighteenth-century France, and he will kill for the ingredients of a perfect fragrance. One of the great one-off novels.
23. The Call of the Wild & White Fang — Jack London — Two great survival stories, companion novels: a domestic dog's reversion to wildness in the Yukon, and a wolf-dog's gradual domestication. London at his most elemental.
24. The Idiot — Dostoyevsky — Prince Myshkin — epileptic, Christ-like, and totally unprepared for St Petersburg society — attempts to do good in a world that has no use for goodness. One of the four great novels.