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Willa Cather

At the turn of the twentieth century. When their father dies young, exhausted by the failure of his attempts at agriculture, it is left to the visionary Alexandra to guide the family to prosperity and safeguard the fortune of her brothers. Strong-willed and fiercely independent, she succeeds against all odds, but only at the cost of her own fulfilment as a woman. Central to the novel's action is the Nebraskan landscape it describes, by turns unyielding and fruitful, bitter and ecstatic.O Pioneers! joins Cather's My Antonia in Everyman's Library.

O Pioneers!

William Faulkner

Ever since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of this century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, the novel explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centredness. At its heart, this is a novel about lovelessness

The Sound And The Fury

D H Lawrence

The novel is set in post-World War I England and explores themes of love, relationships, sexuality, and gender roles. Ursula and Gudrun are both independent-minded and intelligent women who struggle to find fulfillment in their romantic relationships with Rupert and Gerald, respectively. The men, too, are complex characters who grapple with their own desires and insecurities.As the novel progresses, the characters become embroiled in a web of emotional and sexual tension, leading to tragic consequences. Lawrence's prose is vivid and poetic, and his exploration of human relationships is both profound and thought-provokingThis novel, considered by Lawrence to be his best, centres on the characters of Birkin (a self portrait), Gerald, the son of a colliery owner, and the two women, Gudrun and Ursula

Women In Love

Nella Larsen

Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nell Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belong. Passing is a disturbing story about the unravelling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white racist. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of biracial Helga Crane, who is unable to escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexities and imbued with a vibrant sense of place - be it 1920s Harlem, Chicago, or Copenhagen.

The Complete Fiction

Passing. Quicksand. And the Stories

George MacDonald Fraser

For George MacDonald Fraser the bully Flashman was easily the most interesting character in Tom Brown's Schooldays, and imaginative speculation as to what might have happened to him after his expulsion from Rugby School for drunkenness ended in 12 volumes of memoirs in which Sir Harry Paget Flashman - self-confessed scoundrel, liar, cheat, thief, coward -'and, oh yes, a toady' - romps his way through decades of nineteenth-century history in a swashbuckling and often hilarious series of military and amorous adventures. In Flashman the youthful hero, armed with a commission in the 11th Dragoons, is shipped to India, woos and wins the beautiful Elspeth, and reluctantly takes part in the first Anglo-Afghan War, honing a remarkable talent for self-preservation.Flash for Freedom! finds him crewing on an African slave ship, hiding in a New Orleans whorehouse and fortuitously running into rising young American politician Abraham Lincoln...

Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman in the Great Game

Toni Morrison

The story of Macon 'Milkman' Dead, heir to the richest black family in a midwestern town, as he makes a voyage of rediscovery, travelling southwards geographically and inwards spirituality. Through the enlightenment of one man the novel recapitulates the history of slavery and liberation.

Song of Solomon

Gabriel García Márquez

With the style and eloquent language that earned him the Nobel prize for literature, Marquez weaves a stunning story of glory and despair. Both real history and Marquez' imagination let us enter the world of Simon Bolivar, Liberator of South America, in all his humanity - good and evil. Bolivar drove the Spanish out of South America, dealt with treachery from his own compatriots. Once hailed as a hero, he is now scorned and reviled, and fighting his own demons, he refuses to die quietly. We are given a glimpse of the genius and foibles of the man behind the legend, as we accompany him on his last journey, accompanied only by the loyal remants of his once great army.

The General in his Labyrinth

Langston Hughes

One of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston 
Hughes may be best known as a poet, but he was also a brilliant storyteller, blending 
elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom. 
Perhaps more than any other writer, Langston Hughes made the white America of the 
1920s and 1930s aware of the Black culture thriving in its midst. Hughes's poetry and 
fiction works are messages from that America, sharply etched vignettes of its daily life, 
cruelly accurate portrayals of Black and white collisions. 
 
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, 
with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, 
European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Not Without Laughter, The Ways of White Folks, The Weary Blues

James Joyce

His stories are fillled with the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience. 
 
The stories all centre around the city of Dublin and its inhabitants at the beginning of the twentieth century. They offer a moving portrait of an entire world and era long since disappeared.

Dubliners

R K Narayan

R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) witnessed nearly a century of change in his native India and captured it in fiction of uncommon warmth and vibrancy. Swami and Friends introduces us to Narayan's beloved fictional town of Malgudi, where ten-year-old Swaminathan's excitement about his country's initial stirrings for independence competes with his ardour for cricket and all other things British. The Bachelor of Arts is a poignant coming-of-age novel about a young man flush with first love, but whose freedom to pursue it is hindered by the fixed ideas of his traditional Hindu family. In The Dark Room, Narayan's portrait of aggrieved domesticity, the docile and obedient Savitri, like many Malgudi women, is torn between submitting to her husband's humiliations and trying to escape them. The title character in The English Teacher, Narayan's most autobiographical novel, searches for meaning when the death of his young wife deprives him of his greatest source of happiness.

R K Narayan Omnibus Volume 1

Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher

Ray Bradbury

p-Included here are famous tales like 'Sound of Thunder', in which the carelessness of a group of time-travellers leads to disastrous consequences, and 'The Veldt', in which two seemingly innocent young children transform their nursery into a lethal trap. Here are the Martian stories, tales that vividly animate the red planet with its brittle cities and double-mooned sky. Here are stories which speak of a special nostalgia for Green Town, Illinois, the perfect setting for a seemingly cloudless childhood - except for the unknown terror lurking in the ravine. Here are the Irish stories and the Mexican stories, linked across their separate geographies by Bradbury's astonishing inventiveness. Here, too, are thrilling, terrifying stories such as 'The Fog Horn' - perfect for reading under the covers. 
Read for the first time, these stories are a feast for the imagination; read again - and again - they reveal new, dazzling facets of a master storyteller's extraordinary art.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury

Robert Graves

Robert Graves, aged nineteen, left school within a week of the outbreak of World War I, and immediately volunteered with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His experiences as a junior officer form the heart of this compelling autobiography. Beginning with an ironic overview of his Edwardian childhood, he proceeds to a tongue-in-cheek account of a young poet's life at public school (not helpful to be half-German, but handy to take up boxing), progressing to caricatures of military stereotypes he encounters in training, and the devastating farce of the War itself, the blundering and mismanagement, and the appalling human consequences. Graves's handling of the horrors of war is always deadpan, honest and unadorned. It is wholly in line with his sense of the absurd that his commanding officer should write to inform his parents that he had died of wounds during the battle of the Somme. He soon found that patriotism was meaningless to the men in the trenches; loyalty to comrades alive and dead drove him back to active service though still suffering from shell-shock. 
 Goodbye to All That takes Graves through his convalescence in England, his efforts to protect the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a friend and fellow officer, from the consequences of his public denunciation of the war; marriage to artist and feminist Nancy Nicholson, postwar undergraduate years at Oxford and a decade as a struggling writer with four young children, beset with money problems and neurasthenia. It is written in a spirit of defiance as he prepared to put 'all that' behind him and begin a new life in Majorca with the American poet Laura Riding.

Goodbye to all that

Peter Carey

OSCAR AND LUCINDA is a sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel set in nineteenth-century England and Australia where the two potential lovers lead parallel lives until chance brings them together on board ship. 
A narrative tangle of love, religion, gambling, commerce and colonialism culminates in a nightmare expedition – the result of a wager – to transport a glass church across the Australian wilderness. 
 
 In TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly speaks for himself in a voice that is direct, colloquial, theatrical, and utterly magical. To his pursuers he is nothing but a monstrous criminal, but to his own people he is a hero, defying British imperial authority in support of the poor Irish settlers who are its victims. In a dazzling act of ventriloquism, Carey brings the famous bushranger unforgettably to life.

Oscar and Lucinda

True History of the Kelly Gang

Edward St Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose Novels hilariously dissect the English upper class, conjuring a world of decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty, but never without the possibility of grace. Taken together, they are one of the most thrilling reading experiences in contemporary fiction. 
 
Edward St. Aubyn chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose across five short novels, painting an acrid portrait of a beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. Never Mind unfolds over a day and an evening at the family&rsquo;s chateau in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his rich and unhappy American wife, Eleanor, and their five-year-old son, Patrick. 
Bad News opens as Patrick, now twenty-two years old, sets off to collect his father&rsquo;s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. 
Back in England, Some Hope offers Patrick the possibility of recovery (and the most debauched and riotous dinner party in contemporary fiction). 
The Booker-shortlisted Mother&rsquo;s Milk returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother&rsquo;s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home. 
At Last, set over the single day of a funeral, is the stunning final volume.

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann's first great novel, written at the age of 25, is an epic study of decadence among the merchant families of Hamburg at the end of the nineteenth century. The novel is based on Mann's own experience as the son of a German merchant prince, but it goes far beyond his own experience in its sweep and comprehensiveness. 
 
The novel is an astounding, semi-autobiographical family epic. Mann portrays the transition of genteel Germanic stability and arrogance to a very modern uncertainty and fear.

Buddenbrooks

The Decline of a Family

V S Naipaul

In the comic masterpiece which established him one of the greatest writers in the English language, Naipaul follows the fortunes of Mr Biswas, the outsider who refuses to conform to the customs of his grander in-laws whose house he lives in. Finally finding a house of his own, he triumphs over the smaller minds who would repress him.

A House For Mr Biswas

Vasily Grossman

Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad (1942-3), where the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the Red Army, and around an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, and their many friends and acquaintances, Life and Fate recounts the experience of characters caught up in an immense struggle between opposing armies and ideologies. Nazism and Communism are appallingly similar, 'two poles of one magnet', as a German camp commander tells a shocked old Bolshevik prisoner. At the height of the battle Russian soldiers and citizens alike are at last able to speak out as they choose, and without reprisal - an unexpected and short-lived moment of freedom. Grossman himself was on the front line as a war correspondent at Stalingrad - hence his gripping battle scenes, though these are more than matched by the drama of the individual conscience struggling against massive pressure to submit to the State. He knew all about this from experience too. His central character, Viktor Shtrum, eventually succumbs, but each delay and act of resistance is a moral victory. Though he writes unsparingly of war, terror and totalitarianism, Grossman also tells of the acts of 'senseless kindness' that redeem humanity, and his message remains one of hope. He dedicates his book, the labour of ten years, and which he did not live to see published, to his mother, who, like Viktor Shtrum's, was killed in the holocaust at Berdichev in Ukraine in September 1941.

Life and Fate

Franz Kafka

The story of the mysterious indictment, trial and reckoning forced upon Kafka’s Joseph K. is one of the twentieth century’s master parables which has influenced almost every major writer since. By rendering the absurd and the terrifying with scrupulous factual accuracy and evenness of tone, Kafka presents the world we recognize in a gripping narrative which is also a revelation of its hidden significance.

The Trial

Martin Amis

Everyone is always out there searching for someone and something, usually for a lover, usually for love. And this is a love story. 
 
But the murderee - Nicola Six - is searching for something and someone else: her murderer. She knows the time, she knows the place, she knows the motive, she knows the means. She just doesn't know the man. 
 
London Fields is a brilliant, funny and multi-layered novel. It is a book in which the narrator, Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, a thoroughly undesirable public house, and finds the main players of his drama assembled, just waiting to begin. It's a gift of a story from real life...all Samson has to do is write it as it happens.

London Fields

Patrick White

Voss describes an epic journey, both physical and spiritual. The eponymous hero, Johann Voss, is based on Ludwig Leichhardt, the nineteenth-century German explorer and naturalist who had already conducted several major expeditions into the Australian outback before making an ambitious attempt to cross the entire continent from east to west in 1848. He never returned. 
White re-imagines his story with visionary intensity. Voss’s last journey across the desert and the waterlogged plains of central Australia is a true ‘venture to the interior’. But Voss is also a love story, for the explorer has become inextricably bound up with Laura Trevellyn, whose inner life, like his own, is at odds with the world. In language poetic and passionate, yet at the same time grounded by shrewd, often comic, social observations and naturalistic portrayals of a wide variety of characters – farmers, convicts, aborigines, the colonial middle class and their servants.

Voss

Flann O'Brien

In the five novels by Ireland's greatest comic writer we can explore the full range of his invention, from the multi-layered madness of At Swim-Two-Birds to the piercing realism of The Hard Life and the surreal logic of The Third Policeman. This is a world where bicycles listen to conversations, inventors search formethods of 'diluting' water, and characters play truant while novelists sleep; a world where spiteful fairies wreak havoc and heroes from legend blunder into suburban sitting-rooms. This is recognizably the Ireland of Joyce and Beckett - rowdy, high-spirited, by turns sensual and and cerebral -transformed by O'Brien's unique vision.

Flann O'Brien The Complete Novels

Nadezhda Mandelstam

A harrowing yet uplifting account of Stalin's persecution of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1930s, and of one man - Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), whose poetry, in spite of the unfolding tragedy of his life, preserved its unique creative gaiety. Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam married in 1922. Nadezhda's memoir covers their last four years together. She begins in Moscow in May 1934 with the knock on the door at one o'clock in the morning, and her husband's arrest by the secret police for composing a satire of Stalin. She tells of his imprisonment, interrogation and exile to the Urals, where she accompanied him, and where he wrote his last great poems; his release and return to Moscow, only to be entrapped, rearrested and sentenced to hard labour in Siberia; of her own efforts to secure his release and to save his manuscripts (and to memorize all his poems in case she could not); of her discovery of the truth about his death in a transit camp near Vladivostock. For all its grim subject matter, it is a story of courage in adversity, and even humour finds a place. 
 Nadezhda means 'hope' in Russian, and Hope against Hope is one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. It is also a love story that relates the daily struggle to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances. After years of circulating secretly in the Soviet Union it was published in the West in 1970, and has since achieved the status of a classic.

Hope Against Hope

Raymond Chandler

Creator of the famous Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler elevated the American hard-boiled detective genre to an art form. His last four novels, published here in one volume, offer ample opportunity to savour the unique and compelling fictional world that made his works modern classics. 
 
The Lady in the Lake moves Marlowe out of his usual habitat of city streets and into the mountains outside Los Angeles in his strange search for a missing woman. 
 
The Little Sister takes Marlowe to Hollywood, where he tries to find a sweet young thing’s missing brother, uncovering on the way a little blackmail, a lot of drugs, and more than enough murder. 
 
In The Long Goodbye, a case involving a war-scarred drunk and his nymphomaniac wife has Marlowe constantly on the move: a psychotic gangster’s on his trail, he’s in trouble with the cops, and more and more corpses keep turning up. 
 
Playback features a well-endowed redhead who leads Marlowe to the California coast to solve a tale of big money and, of course, murder. 
 
Throughout these masterpieces, Marlowe’s wry humour and existential sense of his job prove yet again why he has become one of the most recognized and imitated characters in fiction.

The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback

Volume 2

Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals and novelist of post-war France, but her wartime writings were not published in full until after her death. The Wartime Notebooks trace Duras's formative experiences - including her difficult childhood in Indochina and her harrowing wait for her husband's return from Nazi internment - revealing the personal history behind her bestselling novels. The Lover is the best known of these; set in pre-war Indochina, its haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her wealthy Chinese lover is based on her own life. In spare and luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. Practicalities is a collection of small and intensely personal pieces Duras dictated near the end of her life. These deceptively simple meditations on motherhood, domesticity, sex, love, alcohol, writing, and more are witty, earthy, outspoken and surprisingly fresh and relevant to the same issues today.

The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities

Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

In the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor. Then comes Garibaldi's landing in Sicily and the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them. 
 
W. Somerset Maugham is the Introducer to this beautiful Everyman's Library edition.

The Leopard

W. Somerset Maugham

After a lonely boyhood, and the painful ordeal of his schooldays, Philip's yearning for adventure takes him to Germany and later Paris where he tries to make his mark as an artist before returning to London to study medicine. Here, a tortured and one-sided love affair with Mildred, a vulgar yet irresistible waitress, changes the course of his life for ever. 
 
Commenting later on the novel’s autobiographical aspects, Maugham recalled how in writing the book he mingled fact and fiction and 'found myself free from the pains and unhappy recollections that had tormented me'.However, like Dickens’s David Copperfield to which it is often compared, Of Human Bondage goes far beyond autobiography, and is Maugham’s most ambitious and unsparing novel, revealing the author’s undoubted gift for storytelling as he explores the timeless theme of human freedom - freedom to act, to think and to love.

Of Human Bondage

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps-a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an "ordinary young man" who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.

The Magic Mountain

Elizabeth Bowen

A brilliant and much admired novelist, Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) surpassed herself as a writer of short fiction: 'the supreme genius of her time', writes John Banville in his introduction; 'There is not a story in this substantial volume ... that is not brought off beautifully.'  A substantial volume indeed, Including 79 stories written over four decades, ranging in setting from the County Cork of the author's Anglo-Irish childhood to bomb-ravaged London where she coolly sat out the War, evoked with vivid and impeccable artistry. She has a disturbing sense of the uncanny, an acute eye for social comedy and her often emotionally secretive characters are depicted with penetrating psychological insight. She is good at houses, ghosts, children, animals ... 900 pages of sheer delight

Collected Stories

Vladimir Nabokov

An autobiographical volume which recounts the story of Nabokov's first forty years up to his departure from Europe for America at the outset of World War Two. It tells of his emergence as a writer, his early loves and his marriage, and his passions for butterflies and his lost homeland. Written in this writer's characteristically brilliant, mordant style, this book is also a tender record of lost childhood and youth in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

Speak, Memory

Jaroslav Hašek

An attack on war which broadens into a satire on the ANCIEN REGIME of the Austro-Hungarian empire, THE GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK recreates the age-old figure of the simple soldier whose sheer determination to survive brings into question the mighty social and political institutions he confronts. Set in a Central Europe which has long since vanished, Hasek's novel is nevertheless a timeless portrait of the 'little man' doughtily waging his own war against authority

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