LITERARY BENT – Writing at its best

Sixteen year old Vladimir Petrovich has a new neighbour at his parents’ country estate – the beautiful and alluring Zinaida. With hormones racing what’s a boy to do but fall hopelessly in love? Love and passion is a tricky and complex business, though, and Vladimir must undergo some character development before he comes to grips with […]

Meet school headmaster Mr. Thomas Gradgrind in his grim Northern mill town, Coketown (based on Preston). His mantra is strictly Utilitarian -‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’ Gradgrind approves of nothing but what is ‘severely workful’. Predictably, this approach to life does not enrich or develop the lives of his daughter

This masterpiece of introspection was published by Bellow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bellow) in 1964. The reader is given epistolary revelations in unsent letters from Moses E. Herzog whose life is a failure and whose wife has left him, but who remains defiant and wryly perceptive about the world around him. 368 pages in Penguin Modern Classics edition. ISBN 978-0141184876

Huckleberry ‘Huck’ Finn escapes the guardianship of Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson who are trying to ‘civilize’ him, and also subsequently abuse from his alcoholic father ‘Pap’. Setting off down the Mississippi on a raft he teams up with escapee slave Jim. And so the adventures begin. Brought to the screen in 1960

Mathematician Ulrich has no qualities in the sense that his self-awareness is completely divorced from his abilities. Real life is an inconvenience. He dwells in the realm of ideas. His ambivalence towards morality and the world around him stem from the essential hollowness of his nature. He is therefore an unlikely candidate to be drawn into a

Dame Lettie Colston, 79 and pioneer penal reformer, has much in common with the elderly residents of the Maud Long Medical Ward. All are united by scorn, resentment, boredom – and the humour that masks the awareness of impending death. Then the insidious telephone calls begin. Retired Chief Inspector Henry Mortimer posits the theory that

My Antonia (1918) is the wistful tale of an immigrant girl from Bohemia, who has settled on the virgin prairies of Nebraska in order to farm. Narrated by Antonia’s childhood friend Jim Burden, the novel draws heavily upon Willa Cather’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willa_Cather) own formative years, as well as, through the persona of Jim, Cather’s experience of New York, where

Ann Radcliffe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Radcliffe) published this very early horror/thriller in 1794, establishing the popularity of the Gothic. Beautiful young heiress Emily St. Aubert is frightened when she finds herself orphaned and in the hands of her cold and distant aunt, Madame Cheron. But her fear turns to terror when Madame Cheron agrees to marry the haughty and

This 1956 Arabic work from Naguib Mahfouz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahfouz,_Naguib) is the first volume of his masterful Cairo Trilogy. It was translated into English in 1990. A national best-seller in both hardcover and paperback, Palace Walk introduces the engrossing saga of the Muslim al-Jawad family in Cairo during Egypt’s occupation by British forces during, and just after, the First World War. The modern day reader (I write