What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorA Fairly Honourable Defeat
Iris Murdoch, Peter Reed · 436 pages
"One of Iris Murdoch’s more successful novels, A Fairly Honourable Defeat combines elements of realism and allegory to create a commentary on the moral shortcomings of the individual and society. The book opens as Hilda and Rupert Foster, an ostensibly happily-married couple, anticipate their forthcoming twentieth anniversary party." ([Source][1]) [1]: http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php
A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
Anthony Powell · 746 pages
Howards End
E.M. Forster · 320 pages
Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. A strong-willed and intelligent woman refuses to allow the pretensions of her husband's smug English family to ruin her life. Howards End is considered by some to be Forster's masterpiece
Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence
Virginia Woolf · 70 pages
Quartet in Autumn
Barbara Pym · 218 pages
Shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize This is the story of four people in late middle-age - Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia - whose chief point of contact is that they work in the same office and they suffer the same problem - loneliness. Lovingly, poignantly, satirically and with much humour, Pym conducts us through their small lives and the facade they erect to defend themselves against the outs
Point Counter Point
Aldous Huxley · 446 pages
Aldous Huxley's lifelong concern with the dichotomy between passion and reason finds its fullest expression both thematically and formally in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. By presenting a vision of life in which diverse aspects of experience are observed simultaneously, Huxley characterizes the symptoms of "the disease of modern man" in the manner of a composer - themes and characters are r
Human Voices
Penelope Fitzgerald · 202 pages
In the height of enemy bombing during World War II, a series of human dramas unfolds as the BBC transforms its concert hall into a dormitory for men and women, conflict erupts between two departmental directors, and sixteen-year-old Annie falls hopelessly in love.
Our Spoons Came from Woolworths
Barbara Comyns · 196 pages
"I told Helen my story and she went home and cried" begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns's beguiling novel is far from maudlin, despite the ostensibly harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one when she marries fellow artist Charles, and she seems to have nearly as much affection for her pet newt as she does for her husband. Her housekeeping knowledge is lack
The Dark Flood Rises
Margaret Drabble · 336 pages
Francesca Stubbs has an extremely full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives "restlessly round England," which is "her last love . . . She wants to see it all before she dies." Amid the professional conferences that dominate her schedule, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home cooked dinners to her ailing ex-husband, texts he
Bleak House
Charles Dickens · 815 pages
As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, t
Concrete Island
J.G. Ballard · 176 pages
A 35-year-old architect is driving home from his London office when his car swerves and crashes onto a traffic island lying below three converging motorways. Uninjured, he climbs the embankment to seek help, but no one will stop for him and he is trapped on the island, where he remains.
London Belongs to Me
Norman Collins · 700 pages
The Girls of Slender Means
Muriel Spark · 144 pages
The Girls of Slender Means is Dame Muriel Spark's tragic portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of World War II. Like the May of Teck Club itself - "three times window-shattered since 1940 but never directly hit" - its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal: practicing elocution, and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown.
Theatre
W. Somerset Maugham · 292 pages
Julia Lambert is in her prime, the greatest actress in England. Off stage, however, she is bored with her handsome husband, coquettish and undisciplined. She is at first flattered and amused by the attentions of a shy and eager young fan, but before long Julia is amazed to find herself falling wildly, dangerously, in love.Julia Lambert is in her prime, the greatest actress in England. Off stage, h
The Sweetest Dream
Doris Lessing · 478 pages
PerfectBound e-book extra: "What Has Been, Can Be Again" a speech by the authorIt's the morning of the Sixties and it's suppertime at Freedom Hall, the most welcoming household in North London. Frances Lennox stands at her stove, bringing another feast to readiness before ladling it out to the motley, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table-her two sons and their friends, girlfriends,
The Weather in the Streets
Rosamond Lehmann · 383 pages
Taking up where Invitation to the Waltz left off, The Weather in the Streets shows us Olivia Curtis ten years older, a failed marriage behind her, thinner, sadder, and apparently not much wiser. A chance encounter on a train with a man who enchanted her as a teenager leads to a forbidden love affair and a new world of secret meetings, brief phone calls, and snatched liaisons in anonymous hotel roo
The L-Shaped Room
Lynne Reid Banks · 320 pages
Jane is unmarried and pregnant when she is turned out by her father. She moves into a room at the top of a squalid house. She cares nothing for it, or for her neighbours. But it is these neighbours that draw her back into life - Toby, a Jewish writer, John, a jazz player, and even her landlady. The first book of a trilogy.
The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen · 384 pages
Story about the havoc wrought by inharmonious relationships in a middle-class English family.
The Wedding
Dorothy West · 250 pages
The publication of The Wedding by Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, was not only a landmark literary event, but a commercial success as well. Readers across America responded to West's delicat weaving of North and South, black and white, past and present in this "fascinating and engrossing tale" (People) of race and class set in Martha's Vineyard.In her fi
Alys, Always
Harriet Lane · 213 pages
Comforting a dying car crash victim before being invited to meet the woman's privileged family, Frances is transformed through her friendships with two family members from an unknown editor to a sought-after figure in literary society.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey · 311 pages
An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into
Party Going
Henry Green · 184 pages
Henry Green's darkly comic valediction to what W. H. Auden famously described as the "low dishonest decade" of the 1930s. London is sunk in an impenetrable fog. Traffic has come to a halt. Stranded in the train station and the hotel connected to it are a group of bright young things waiting to catch a train to the Continent, where their enormously rich friend Max is throwing a party. Green's chara