Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> World Literature - England - 20th Century

Union Street, Pat Barker's first novel, concerns seven neighboring women near a factory in northeast England. Life for these women is trying: some of them are married to alcoholics, some are victims of abuse; one is old and near death, another is still a child but has the experience of an adult; all are struggling to survive. First published in 1982, it was made into the film Stanley & Iris by MGM in 1989, starring Robert DeNiro and Jane Fonda

Blow Your House Down, Barker's second novel, also portrays the lives of women in industrial England--but these women are...

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Stella Benson answers a classified ad for an au pair, arriving in a tiny Sussex village that's home to a family that is slightly larger than life. Her hopes for the Maddens may be high, but her station among them is low and remote. It soon becomes clear that Stella falls short of even the meager specifications her new role requires, most visibly in the area of "aptitude for the country life." But what drove her to leave her home, job, and life in London in the first place? Why has she severed all ties with her parents?...

Lying in the sand dunes of Baritone Bay are the bodies of a middle-aged couple. Celice and Joseph, in their mid-50s and married for more than 30 years, are returning to the seacoast where they met as students. Instead, they are battered to death by a thief with a chunk of granite. Their corpses lie undiscovered and rotting for a week, prey to sand crabs, flies, and gulls. Yet there remains something touching about the scene, with Joseph's hand curving lightly around his wife's leg, "quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."

"Their bodies had expired, but...

A reissue of the tour de force by the Nobel laureate that is "a vision of elemental reality so vivid we seem to hallucinate the scenes" (The New York Times Book Review). It opens during the London blitz, when a naked child steps out of an all-consuming fire; that child, Matty, becomes a wanderer and a seeker. Two more lost children await him, twins as exquisite as they are loveless. In a final conflagration, William Golding's book lights up both the inner and outer darknesses of our time.

Zoe Heller's first novel introduces an unforgettable curmudgeon, Willy Muller, an embittered journalist turned celebrity biographer and misanthrope. At the age of fifty, having survived imprisonment for murdering his wife, years of venomous hate mail from the public, and most recently, the suicide of his daughter, Sadie, Willy is about to become an unlikely candidate for redemption. With its scalpel-sharp wit and brilliant dialogue, Everything You Know is "a smashing success. Wickedly funny, lively, and---ultimately---moving" (Newsday).

In this collection of stories, Bill Naughton portrays a selection of characters, including truck drivers, Irish itinerants and lamp lighters, in his inimitable pithy style. While each tale can be enjoyed on its own, together they provide a wonderful picture of post-war and a bygone era. With descriptions so graphic the characters could be based on real people, the lives, loves, hopes and disappointments of Naughton's characters will keep you gripped till the last.