LITERARY BENT – Writing at its best

Originally published as Le Noeud de Vipiers in 1932. A rich but wretchedly unhappy miser approaches the end of his life, and tries in a series of reflections to figure out how it has all gone wrong. Suffocating in his own avarice and bitterness, is there anything that can be done to save this lost […]

A nameless, burned man (the ‘English’ patient) lies in an upstairs room in an Italian villa towards the end of the Second World War. He is tended by a Canadian nurse, Hana. Through his flashback memories we learn of a passionate love affair, betrayal and tragedy in North Africa as the gigantic forces of conflict intersect with

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with

This novel tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, the Cornish son of a Plymouth Brethren minister who becomes an Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory. They meet on the ship over to Australia, and discover that they are both gamblers, one obsessive the other compulsive. Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot

A soldier wounded in the Civil War, Inman turns his back on the carnage of the battlefield and begins the treacherous odyssey home to Cold Mountain, and to Ada, the woman he loved before the war began. As he attempts to make his way across the mountains, through the devastated landscape of a soon-to-be-defeated South, Ada struggles

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. Briony badly misconstrues this and another

An ingenious parody of all those dreary best-sellers one buys at the airport. The narrative is about a reader trying to read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveler. Every odd-numbered chapter is in the second person, and tells the reader what he is doing in preparation for reading the next chapter. The

Over a hundred years before Martin Amis published Money (1984), Anthony Trollope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Trollope) published The Way We Live Now (1875) This is a biting satire and social commentary on the greed, dishonesty and corruption of Trollope’s day. The vices are personified in financier Augustus Melmotte. In view of our knowledge of the naked greed that